Manchester City recently topped rival Manchester United to take the Premier League title and to celebrate the internal content team has published this 3-minute and 40-second single-shot first-person-view (FPV) drone video that tours the entire Etihad Stadium.
Single-take drone videos are starting to balloon in popularity thanks to the smash success of first-person drone pilot Jay Christiensen. Christiensen stunned the cinematography community with his viral video sensation of a single-take bowling alley video in early March. Since then, he and his team have produced two more videos, one featuring the iconic Los Angeles diner Mel’s Drive-In and the other sponsored by the Mall of America that pays homage to The Mighty Ducks.
“This footage is 100% genuine, no camera tricks, no hidden edits, no CGI – a single take drone shot!” the club writes in a description of the video.
Manchester City’s single-take FPV drone video is pretty close to the level of Christensen’s work and is incredibly impressive in its own right given the amount of space the drone covers and how well it deftly moves through both wide open and tight spaces. The drone covers a huge amount of space both inside and out, which likely pushed the signal strength of the controller and drone to their limits. Similar to Christiensen’s video, the Manchester City content team dubbed audio over the original footage to give viewers something to listen to other than the loud whir of the drone’s propellers, though no people are visible anywhere, which is something that again separates this particular video from the ones that likely inspired it.
Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium was first opened to the public in July of 2002 as the home of the Commonwealth Games before it was converted into Manchester City’s home stadium in 2003. The stadium cost £112 million to build and seats over 55,000 fans.
Manchester City took the Premier League title in 2021 for the fifth time in nine years after rivals Manchester United lost to Leicester City earlier this week. Manchester City’s rise from forgettable outsider to one of the world’s most elite teams over the course of the last 20-plus years is one of the more impressive turnaround examples in the sport.
Digital Trends notes that the soccer club has not yet disclosed the identity of the drone pilot who captured the impressive celebratory footage, though it apparently has promised to post a behind-the-scenes video revealing as much and more in the coming days.
