Why Drones Will Never Be As Good As Birds

The invention of drones opened up a million possibilities for the world of film. Actually, maybe even more than a million. With drones, you can get shots from angles that weren't possible before. You can follow things that weren't possible to follow before. You can even use drones to attract people to you by impressing them and you can actually make friendships with those people which might lead to connections in the industry.

There is however one thing that drones fail to do, and that is match the skill of a bird. Drones are limited by the motors and batteries that power them whereas birds can fly free with literally no limitations.

Watch this video that a bird took with a GoPro camera:

You might notice two things. 

First of all, you might have noticed that this bird has the ability to grab and drop the camera. This opens up the doors for amazing shots such as one where the camera is going and then it drops and is caught and keeps going. You can use your imagination to picture more shots like this. 

Secondly, you might have noticed how fast this bird flies with the camera. Accounting for the adrenaline that the bird had from the rush of thievery and running away from a predator, which may have affected its speed by up to 15%, it still flew faster than a drone ever could.

For these reasons, drones will always be a little worse than birds.

Birdwatching in Film

Birdwatchers, or as they call themselves, "birders", have never been properly depicted in film. To common folk, past movies about birdwatchers have been accurate enough, but to hardcore "birders", Hollywood is laughing stock because when it comes to accurate portrayal of birds in their movies, they miss the mark every time, apparently.

Nicholas Lund of Slate Magazine points out that after many big Hollywood blockbusters about specific subjects (such as Karate Kid with karate, or Top Gun with airplane flying) there is often a national excitement about the subject but that has yet to occur with "birding".

Two movies came out in 2014 about "birding":

A Birder's Guide to Everything (2014)

The Birder (2014)

But by far the biggest movie about "birders" was the 2011 blockbuster starring Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson, The Big Year (2011):

The Big Year (2011)

The issue is that none of these movies have brought "birding" to the attention of the masses and none of them have done an adequate job of presenting "birding" in an accurate fashion. 

The burden is on the young ambitious filmmakers of the world to make a captivating and accurate movie about "birding" that will make it the next worldwide craze.