BTG Extra: FlyLife

FPV with supercars in Florida. Flying at abandoned chemical spill sites that could double as apocalypse zones. These are a few of Martin Novak's wildest flight memories since he founded FlyLife Company, an FPV pilot collective out of Longmont, Colorado. In this Behind the Goggles Extra, AirVūz gets the inside scoop on how Martin got the OK to fly his FPV quad with a Lamborghini in Lamborghini Sunrise, a buzzing, looping, up-close look at the supercar in Florida. Then, it's time to learn the background on FlyLife's flight at Ghost Hill, a former chemical spill site surrounded in a multitude of mystery and crawling with creepy circumstances. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Kendall (Host): Drone racing and FPV freestyle are some of the fastest growing sports in the world. Meet the men and women behind the goggles, who are changing the way we see our planet. Martin Novak is the 27-year-old Colorado native behind the FlyLife company. Pilot and producer by day, he's a chef and small business owner by night, with a passion for storytelling through FPV flight. Martin: I would say my flight style is very smooth, [00:00:30] floaty, and flowy. I'll always, before the song drops, try to edit in an intro that shows where we are, what we're doing, what the feel of it is. And, I never thought of it as a wordless story until GAPiT did a video spotlight on one of my videos on his podcast. He was like, "This guy tells a story without words," and I was like, "That's it, that's what I've been striving for and have never put into words." So, after that, I've really tried to focus on trying to give [00:01:00] you a feel of a place without telling you about it. Alright, so we made it out to this school. We got myself. We got Brandi. Brandi: Hi! Martin: And we got Mike. Mike: Hello! Martin: I kind of always had a vision of what I wanted to do when I started this, and I never saw it as a sole operation. I think everybody now knows that this is my project, and I do most of the flying, but I kind of want to go through this process [00:01:30] with people and share my experience. It's interesting, because I love flying by myself, but doing this social stuff, I really like doing with other people and getting input. Everybody has got different input. I'll be like "Hey Mike, what do you think about this flip cut on this edit?" or "Hey Brandi, do you think this is a good sticker idea?" And it's kind of nice to just have people around you that you trust creatively, that you can bounce ideas around on. I always do all of the editing. I really enjoy editing videos, so I always do that. The flying kind [00:02:00] of comes and goes. I can kind of work around it. So, I fly the most, but then depending on what's going on in everybody's life, we'll go out and make a FlyLife edit. We'll go out to this location, focus on different shots, and make it a collective edit. Kendall (Host): One of those locations was Red Cliff Bridge. Both he and Mike, aka Hershel FPV, flew what he called the very intimidating area. If they crashed, their quads were done. He was thankful he had a friend around for another reason, once he got home and looked at the footage. Martin: [00:02:30] We found this bridge on Google Earth last year, and it was in the winter, and we were like, "Okay, let's go hit this in the summer." We go there, fly it, and it's in the middle of nowhere, out by the woods. And then we come home, we watch the footage, and on the [inaudible 00:02:43] at one point, three people just walk out of the woods, twenty feet behind us, while we're flying. And we had no idea, but the Inspire caught it all. I think it was just a bunch of teenagers doing non-extracurricular activities in the woods, and they looked almost as [00:03:00] freaked out as we did. I think they came out of the woods and were like, "What is that sound? What is going on?" If you haven't seen an FPV quad, it's a really violent experience. Kendall (Host): Martin says he'll spend hours finding the right song for his edits. His trick of the trade? The app "Hypem" or "Hype Machine", which he says organizes music based on how much it's tweeted and blogged. But, like many pilots, he doesn't only find inspiration through [00:03:30] music. Martin: In terms of pilots, the big ones would be GAPiT. The things I love about his ... What inspires me is not only his editing, but how deliberate his flying is. The one thing I look for when I'm trying to enjoy flight footage is the amount of corrections. Because I see FPV as flying, like how you imagine it as a kid. And when you imagine flying [inaudible 00:03:55], you don't think about "I'm going to go around this tree and do three stick inputs." [00:04:00] You imagine one swooping, perfect turn. SO, he inspires me a lot like that. He's just very calculated. It looks like the quad is just doing exactly what he wants. Johnny is up there too. I think he's the only one that can combine the most insane tricks and still somehow frame something interesting in the middle of the shot. I think that's a sign of a really good pilot, because anybody on any given day [00:04:30] can do the craziest dive through the smallest hole. It's just a luck game. The person that can do it, line up twenty feet away, and never correct, and just go straight through it? That to me is awesome. Outside of FPV, I can get inspired by anything. I watch a lot of extreme sports movies, like GoPro, Red Bull, that kind of stuff. And those guys are just masterful video editors, and I always try to learn from them. [00:05:00] The moment I'm in always influences the edit. I always try to think about how I feel when I'm in that spot, and remember it, and then try to recreate it on the screen. So, I kind of get inspired by where I am too. I always saw FPV as a very cinematic avenue, and I think it's really starting to go that route, because people are starting to get bored of watching people fly at parks, or just gate racing. DRL does a great job [00:05:30] of it, but watching somebody's FPV footage of it is not ... You can watch a race or two, but then it's kind of static. So, I think the long-range thing has really captured a bird's-eye perspective of the world, not just the idea of flight. And, everybody is trying to go out and fly further and bigger lines, and I think Colorado is a big part of pushing that. Kendall (Host): Hear about [00:06:00] some of Martin's favorite videos, Lamborghini Sunrise and Ghost Hill, on Behind the Goggles Extra, only on AirVuz.com.