Last week, everyone was obsessed with the drone video “Right Up Our Alley”, which left us nostalgic for bowling alleys. On Friday night, a vice president of the drone company DJI tweeted this video of a drone flight through an almost empty cinema in Minnesota, and I don’t know about you, but I really miss going to the cinema. This video makes that nostalgia about 100 times worse.
According to its YouTube page, the video is from SkyCandy, and is a scenic flight from the Plymouth Grand of the Mann cinemas in Plymouth, Minnesota. It was filmed using a DJI Air Unit and Rotor Riot Cinewhoop.
The video takes just over a minute, but the drone takes us through the lobby – after being greeted by the front door by a masked theater official – where people are deciding what to see and buying tickets “for the 7:30 am show, ”According to the audio. There is a very familiar background music playing in the part of the lobby that I couldn’t identify, but it felt exactly right.
Then, we flew to the concession stand where a couple takes a bucket of that expensive movie popcorn, then we pass the bar where we can hear the bartender saying to his client, “you choose, I saw”, before going down a long corridor in one of the royal theaters.
There are so many empty seats in that theater that it even seemed a little sad – but then we briefly heard a familiar pre-movie sound: someone forgot to silence the iPhone. Rude! But funny. We ended up looking and flying “to” the cinema screen, where you can guess what is going on (I thought for a second that it could be Principle, but not): The beginning of the video we are watching. Wild!
For those of us who haven’t been to the cinema since social detachment began last year, this video is a welcome and nostalgic reminder of the joys of watching a movie on the big screen. One more thing to put in the “things I will do when everything goes back to normal”, which I hope will be sooner or later.