Behind The FPV Goggles: FlyLife

Martin Novak is the 27 year old Colorado native behind the FlyLife Company. Pilot and producer by day, he’s small business owner and chef by night with a passion for storytelling through FPV flight. “I would say my flight style is very smooth, floaty and flowy. I’ll always, before the song drops, try to edit in something that shows where we are, what we’re doing, what the feel of it is. I never thought of it as a wordless story until GAPiT did a video spotlight on one of my videos on his podcast. He said, ‘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 giving you a feel of a place without telling you about it.” “I 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 knows now that this is my project and I do most of the flying, but I kind of want to go through this process 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 different input. Everybody has different input, like ‘Hey Mike, what do you think of the flip cut on this edit?’ Or, ‘Hey Brandi, do you think this is a good sticker idea?’ It’s nice to have people around you that you trust creatively that you can bounce ideas off of.” “I always do all of the editing. I really enjoy editing videos, so I always do that. The flying kind of comes and goes. I fly the most, but then depending on what’s going on in everyone’s life, we’ll go out and make a FlyLife edit. So, we’ll go out to a location, focus on different shots, and make it a collective edit.” One of those locations was Red Cliff Bridge edit. Both he and Mike – 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. “We found this bridge last year in the winter on Google Earth and thought, ‘let’s go his this in the summer.’ We go there and fly it, and it’s in the middle of nowhere, out by the woods. We take the video home, watch it, then out of nowhere three people just walk out of the woods twenty feet behind us while we’re flying. 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. They looked almost as freaked out as we did. I think they came out of the woods and were like, ‘what is going on?’ If you haven’t seen an FPV quad, it’s a really violent experience.” 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 is tweeted and blogged. But, like many pilots, he doesn’t only find inspiration through music. “In terms of pilots, the big ones I’m inspired by are GAPiT. 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 there is. I see FPV as flying how you imagine it as a kid. You don’t think, ‘I’m going to go around this tree and put in three stick inputs,’ you imagine one perfect, swooping turn. He inspires me a lot that way, because he’s very calculated. It looks like the quad is doing exactly what he wants. Johnny FPV is up there too, I think he’s the only one that can combine the most insane tricks and somehow frame something interesting in the middle of the shot.” “I think that’s a sign of a really good pilot. Anybody on any day 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, just go straight through it? That to me is awesome.” “Outside of FPV I am inspired by anything. I watch a lot of extreme sports movies, so Redbull, GoPro, and stuff. Those guys are just masterful video editors, so I try and learn from them. The moment I’m in always influence the edit. I try and think about how I feel when I’m in that spot, remember it, then try and recreate it on the screen, so I’m kind of inspired by where I am too. I always saw FPV as a very cinematic avenue and I think it’s starting to go that route. People are starting to get bored of watching people fly at parks or just gate racing. DRL does a great job of it, but just watching somebody’s FPV footage of it is not – you can watch a race or two, but then it’s kind of static. I think the long-range thing has captured a bird’s eye perspective of the world not just the idea of flight.” “Everybody is trying to go out and fly further and bigger lines. I think Colorado is a big part of pushing that.” Hear about some of Martin’s favorite videos, Lamborghini Sunrise and Ghost Hill, on Behind the Goggles Extra, only on AirVuz.com.