Bring in archive material
Lest we forget over summer footage is a postcard: there is nothing to forget if you only see the present. Four stills from 1944, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Case / Video
One drone shot, accidentally in slow motion
Mike flew over Pegasus Bridge in Normandy and came home with 171 seconds of footage. No shot list, no script, and the camera had been set to slow motion without him knowing. What came out is a 78-second film about D-Day, edited with mAIxs videogen.
171 → 78
seconds of source into film
1
continuous flight, no shots
4
archive stills from 1944
The film opens in 1944 with an archive photo of the bridge, after which colour returns over three seconds into today’s footage. Text cards tell what happened here on the night of 5 to 6 June 1944. Nobody speaks; the film carries music and on-screen text. The cards are in Dutch.
The brief
Two sentences and one file
“I have a drone shot (accidentally in slow motion?) and I want a great edit of it on the theme Lest we forget, explaining this monument in text and audio, matching the footage and D-Day.”
“Before you start editing: there are a few errors of mine as a pilot in there that should not come back. And I want a nostalgic effect as well as beautiful summer footage of today. So find free photos of Pegasus Bridge too.”
That was all. No length, no style, no shot list. Unpacked, the brief asks for six things at once, and two of them contradict each other.
- /A film that carries Lest we forget
- /Text explaining what this place is
- /Music that suits D-Day
- /Three flying errors that have to go
- /Nostalgia, so the past
- /Bright summer footage of today, so the present
Those last two are the crux. Nostalgia and bright summer footage do not fit in one shot; a sepia filter over the bridge does not make the image old, only dirty. They do fit in one film, if you alternate between them. That fixed the shape before a single cut was made.
Approach
Look, verify, and only then edit
- 01
Look first, cut later
Twelve frames spread across the clip show what is actually there: a white bascule bridge, a row of Allied flags, a stone column with poppies. This is Pegasus Bridge near Bénouville, which makes it a memorial rather than a drone clip.
- 02
Then check the facts
Six engineless gliders, the first touching down at 00:16 on the night of 5 to 6 June 1944. Over 180 men under Major John Howard, the bridge taken within ten minutes, two dead. Those facts become text cards, so they have to be right before any footage is touched.
- 03
Only then the footage
The recording turned out to be one continuous three-minute flight. There are no shots. Everything the film later calls shot 5 had to be cut out of that single movement first.
The decisions
Nine decisions that shaped the film
Every decision is written down with its reason. That turns feedback into changing one line rather than re-editing the whole thing.
Open in 1944, not in colour
One archive photo shows the bridge from almost the same angle the drone was hovering at. That became the opening image, and the transition from that photo into today's footage, where colour returns over three seconds, became the heart of the film.
Nostalgia in the transition, not in a filter
The archive material gets grain, sepia and lifted blacks. Today's footage stays warm and summery. The contrast between the two does the work, not a haze over everything.
Use the slow motion instead of removing it
Sped up four times is real time. But at the two moments where the film has to fall still, the column with the poppies and the closing pass over the canal, the slow motion is left untouched. The mistake is the best thing in the film there.
Measure the flying errors instead of hunting for them
Reviewing three minutes by hand costs half an afternoon and still misses a yaw of one and a half seconds. Instead, the change in the image was measured every 0.2 seconds. Steady footage scores 0.001, the three errors score 0.02 to 0.043. No judgement call needed.
Score the music from scratch
There is no music library in this project, and licensed music causes trouble when publishing. So it was synthesised on the spot: strings, a low drone, harp and a distant horn in D minor, scaled to the second to the length of the edit.
Historic time only on historic footage
The card reading 6 June 1944, 00:16 first sat over bright summer footage. It moved to the archive photo. The first shot of the present got no text at all, just the bridge.
Measure the vertical crop
Vertical keeps only 28 percent of the width, so the crop decides what the viewer sees. Estimating it first put the café, the bridge and the flags all outside the frame. After that the subject position was measured per shot.
Leave the monument unnamed
The bridge is well documented. No source states unambiguously what the stone column with the poppies is, so the film says nothing about it. Better a gap than an assumption that looks certain.
Second version
The same film, vertical for social
Vertical keeps 28 percent of the width. An automatic crop puts the subject in the middle, and in this film that is exactly where nothing is: the café, the bridge and the flags all fell outside the frame. So the subject position was measured per shot and the crop was set to it.
Two formats, one edit, the same 78 seconds.
Result
From 171 seconds of source to a 78-second film
The first 28 seconds were a wind test. With the three flying errors cut out, 107 seconds of usable footage remained, enough for a 78-second film in two formats: 1920 by 1080 in 2.39:1 and 1080 by 1920 vertical.
What this shows: the work is not in the cutting. It is in knowing what is on your footage, checking the facts before making a text card, and being willing to write down what you do not know.
Pegasus Bridge, Bénouville, Normandy. Aerial footage 27 July 2026. Archive material Imperial War Museums, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Edited with mAIxs videogen.
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