Featured Festival Pilot · 03

Clark Lupton

Most festival pilots are filming for later. Clark is usually going out live — and when he isn't, he's building a drone nobody has built before.

LIVEhis specialism is real-time broadcast, not post
50Kfollowing Air Views Media
2camera operators flying one FPV drone
1984the Polaroid he got airborne, 40 years on

There is a difference between filming a festival and broadcasting one, and it is the difference between a shot you can go back for and a shot going to a screen the size of a building while eighty thousand people watch it happen.

Live is a different job

Air Views Media does drone cinematography, FPV and live aerial broadcast for brands, events and productions — FAA-certified pilots, cinema-grade kit, run out of Augusta, Georgia and Lynchburg, Virginia. The live half is the hard half. A film shoot can reset. A broadcast cannot: the feed is going out as you fly it, the director is in your ear, and the move has to be right the first time, on the beat, with no second take and no crash budget.

His own summary of the festival work is characteristically flat about it — a reel from “several years of working the live stream and aerial content teams at music festivals.” That is a lot of shows described very quietly.

The credits

Live broadcast work for Sabrina Carpenter, and for Major League Baseball and FIFA during its run in the United States. Festival flying at Outside Lands, EDC and Warped Tour, among others. His Instagram highlights are organised the way a working operator thinks: Live, Big Brands, EDC, Custom, Film Aircraft.

He builds things nobody asked for

This is the part that makes other pilots grin. Clark strapped a 1984 Polaroid Sun600 to an FPV drone and wired the shutter to a servo on a switch, so he could take actual Polaroids from the air. His own caption: “airborne for the first time in 40 years.” Instant film, shot at altitude, developing on the way down.

The other one is more serious than it sounds. He built a dual-operator FPV drone — a small festival-legal airframe carrying a second camera on its own controls, so a second operator can frame and move independently of the pilot. One aircraft, two people shooting. It solves a real problem: the pilot is busy flying, and the best framing rarely points where the drone is going.

He flies the SnapRing too

At festivals Clark flies the SnapRing 2.5″ by Chris Teal's Drone Co Productions — the same airframe the cinewhoop in this simulator is modelled on. Which is a small, neat illustration of how tight this corner of the industry actually is.

Watch

Music Festival ReelSeveral years of live stream and aerial content teams at music festivals, cut down to a minute.
EDC Las Vegas 2025 — Kinetic MetropolisFPV around one of the largest electronic music events in the world.
A 1984 Polaroid, airborne“Time to get some iconic polaroid aerials.” The shutter runs off a servo on a switch.

Find him

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