Filming The Empire State Building's Annual Holiday Light Show 2020!

Once again the Empire State building turned to us to capture their annual Holiday Music - to - Light show in New York City!

The 2020 show hears Carrie Underwood and John Legend joining for a duet of “Hallelujah.”  See the show here: 

As usual, we shot the show with our ShotOver F1 gyro-stabilized gimbal mounted on our venerable AStar B3 helicopter.  However, in years past, we used the Canon C500 paired with the Angenieux 25-250DP lens to capture the show, this year we decided to go with our new Sony Venice camera and Fujinon Primista 28-100mm lens.  This camera/lens combination gave the Empire State Building ultra-high dynamic range and a much more wide-angle perspective that they had not seen before.  Improvements like this are one of the reasons the good people at the Empire State Building keep coming back to ask us to film their light show every year. They were thrilled!

In order to film the 3+ minute song from different angles, the ESB coordinated with us to shoot the light show sequence 4 times… Static, clockwise, counter-clockwise, and dynamic with one minute of black between the sequences.  As this year marks the 5th time Jose (on the ShotOver) and Tim (flying) have shot this event, they have it pretty well dialed in despite the challenging nature of filming this show. You can check out our Behind the scenes video from the shoot here:

Although we cannot hear the holiday music combined with the light show while filming, it does not take away from the awesome sight of the ESB in all its glory lit in beautiful Christmas colors and majesty of the experience of New York City during the holidays.

It’s always our pleasure to be able to deliver spectacular aerial footage for this event.  We are already looking forward to next year’s show. Happy holidays from all of us at Gotham Films!!!