 So you wanna make a drone video and not just any drone video. You wanna make an FPV freestyle drone video. That's the best type of drone videos. That's what we here at Rotor Riot live for. But what exactly should you do? What should that look like? Should you do a little bit of pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft. Maybe it should be a little more like pfft pfft pfft pfft. Maybe you really wanna wow people with some pfft pfft pfft pfft. Guys, I'm Lidrib from Rotor Riot And today we are talking about five types of FPV freestyle. What's the right style? What's the wrong style? What's the best style? Well, I'm here to tell you there is no such thing. That's the best part about FPV freestyle. It's called free style. You're free to do whatever style you want. And there are great many different styles that you can fly. That's why FPV drone freestyle is so cool because it is expressive. It's about your individual way of doing tricks and maneuvers and putting it together in a really amazing video. Now, there are certainly more than just five types of FPV freestyle. In fact, I believe every pilot flies a little bit different and has their own individual style. So it's essentially infinite. But these five types are the most common types of FPV freestyle. Now, before we actually get into the list, I want to remind you guys to check out Rotorite.com for the best deals on ready to fly FPV freestyle drones. We are frequently running sales. And if you want to be the first to know about a sale, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. In fact, right now we are currently running a 20% off sale on all of our pre-built FPV drones and DIY build-it-yourself kits. That sale's going on to the end of the month. So if you're seeing this video before the end of, what is it, September, make sure to go on there and get yourself a new build. And if you miss out on this sale, don't worry. Like I said, make sure to subscribe to the newsletter so that you can be one of the first to know about our future sales. We do them a lot. Are that's gonna do it for the plug for this video? Let's get to the list. The best place to start this list is what I like to call Acro Freestyle. This is where FPV freestyle really began. As quadcopters began to get smaller and more nimble and started to be able to do high speed flips, that's what really defined freestyle in the early stages. Having a small quadcopter that could rotate quickly, do those acrobatic movements, that's really what freestyle was. That's really all that was possible at that time. At the time when it was created back in 2014, 15, 16 era, it was just as much about piloting skill as it was about drone setup. To be able to get drones to do these fast flips, you had to be really good at tuning them and squeezing all the performance that you could out of an open pilot CC3D. Man, that's an ancient board. Back then, just the idea of a drone doing a was mind blowing. And now since then, drone performance has gotten much more accessible. Flight controller technology has come a long way. Motors are more robust, frames are more durable, and it is much easier to fly hard and push yourself in freestyle. And since then, a lot more freestyle styles have kind of come out of the mix, but that is not to say that acroflying is the easiest or that it's gotten left behind. No, not at all. Much to the spirit of acroflying, which was all about refining your tuning and refining your flying and being able to pull off these flips in the first place back in the day, acroflying has kept up with that ethos and it is all about continuing to refine and polish your skills and your tune. You'll find that acro pilots are obsessive about stopping the Rubik's Cube with their horizon perfectly level or just keep tweaking and playing with their tune so that there's no bounce back. Acro pilots tend to want everything to be very crisp, very refined, very reliable. As far as the drone setup goes, acro pilots tend to prefer top-mount battery drone frames with a center chassis. As far as camera angle goes, you can tend to see 20 to maybe as high as 40 degrees because acro pilots do wanna be flying at a greater speed, not necessarily like all-out race speeds, but they do seem to wanna fly a little bit faster so that those very rapid flips and tricks kind of go with the speed that they're already traveling at. One of the first names that comes to mind when you think of this acro style has to be Mr. Steel. He was kind of one of the first to really push this type of high-speed, highly refined, crisp flying and he's still pushing that today. More recently, we've seen pilots like Vic Lanning come onto the scene and make a name for themselves with their very sharp and refined maneuvers. Acro flying continues to be a very popular style and I think what's really cool about it is that it appeals to newcomers because the first time you see a freestyle video and you see a drone that's capable of those very fast maneuvers, it is so different from the type of drone footage that you may have already seen from Mavic's or in Hollywood movies, right? To be doing these rapid flips is such a departure from what you see in kind of more mainstream drone use. I think it really hooks people and gets them excited about FPV freestyle. Moving on from the acro style, let's go to a complete opposite end of this spectrum. Let's talk about the flow style. This is the style that I most personally gravitate towards. The flow style is more about the overall movement of the drone in a location using that spot and doing maneuvers that almost make you feel like you're on a roller coaster ride. As you climb up to split us over a tree, hold that hang time, pull out with some speed, maybe throwing a flip here and there, but overall just you wanna see things linked together and just kind of flow, right? Flow pilots also tend to use top mount batteries with a center body. Flow pilots do seem to be a little more concerned about having props in view versus maybe some acro pilots. So it'll be even more common to have a squished X configuration to bring those props more out of view. Camera angle tends to be a little bit lower. So now we're talking more like between five and 15 degrees. So the overall speed of flying is going to be a little bit slower. You usually see flow pilots try to like build up their momentum coming out of dives and carry that. And it's all really about more momentum based speed rather than power based speed. When I think of flow pilots, of course I think of Schizo FPV who I think really is the godfather of the flow. He was the first pilot that I ever saw were less about the tricks and more about just flowing through the trees. Nowadays we see pilots like Bubby FPV coming onto the scene throwing down some really long flowy lines as well as Farouk. I really like Farouk's style. He definitely has some flow but also brings in a little bit of that crisp and also some juice. We'll get to the juicy style later. But for now, the third type of FPV freestyle that I want to get into is the Maddie style or the mind bending style. For this one, I'm actually going to start with the drone setup. What you really tend to see with the Maddie mind bending style is very high up tilt. We're talking 60, maybe even 70 degrees of camera up tilt. These drones are going to be flying at a very steep angle of attack. And because of these two things, you tend to see a very different type of drone build. Pilots flying this mind bending style actually tend to use auto mount battery drones with TrueX. Props being in view is not going to be a concern at all when your camera's looking way up away from ever seeing them. The bottom mount frame construction also allows the drone to be more compact in the center. And pilots claim that that would have less aerodynamic drag. Again, it's flying at such a steep angle of attack. You might not want that center body creating resistance as you try to cut through the air. So ultimately, what does all this get you? Why are you building this bottom mount high up tilt drone? What is the mind bending style? Well, the mind bending style are tricks like Maddie flips and trippy spins where you are essentially flying backwards but your camera is looking so far upward that it looks like you're flying upside down. This allows for some crazy maneuvers. We're talking about things like flying under bridges where you're able to just trace the roof of the bridge just for what seems like forever or being able to do figure eights around treetops looking up at them. Of course, the iconic Maddie flip, essentially a reverse power loop. These mind bending flights are always so impressive and they're known as Maddie style flights because they were pioneered by a pilot called Maddie Stunts. Maddie basically invented this style of flying and was doing so many things that people couldn't believe. He was the first one to do the reverse power loop which the community came to call the Maddie flip. Nowadays, we see pilots like Florent Roke and Blue Owl holding down that Maddie mind bending style and it is always impressive. In fact, both those pilots Florent and Blue Owl have one online freestyle contest with these impressive mind bending maneuvers. I got the juice. I got the juicy style FPV. Juicy style, it's a little bit hard to describe. It's all about kind of like freaking the quad. Let me explain what I'm talking about. Something you see a lot of juicy style pilots do is tilt their quad forward and apply a lot of thrust to get themselves going and then snap to even out and then let their momentum carry them. Juicy pilots tend to use drones like the Acro or the Flow Style pilots with the center body and the top mount battery but their camera angle tends to be very, very low, maybe even flat. So we're talking between zero and 10 degrees and that's really where that mix of thrust and momentum based speed comes from. With such a low camera angle, you're gonna need to like juicy flicker. And really all the juicy style maneuvers are built around this concept. Something else you tend to see juicy pilots do is this kind of like bunny hop maneuver where rather than just flying in a straight line, they're kind of flicking themselves back and forth. I believe this serves two purposes. One, it helps them keep their speed up despite their low camera angle and two, it helps them avoid the dreaded mid throttle oscillation. So if you're just cruising at a constant speed across a field, there's a good chance that your motors could settle into some harmonic that create a lot of vibrations in your videos and you get that horrible jello effect by constantly going, you avoid your motors ever settling into one of those kind of vibey harmonics. Overall, what I'm saying is juicy style flying is a lot of throttle blips and momentum carries. The actual trick called the juicy flick is a big throttle push forward to flip forward and then a slow roll out of it and then carrying your momentum backwards off camera. That's the, that's the juke. When it comes to the music and juicy FPV videos, it's definitely gonna be a little more house, electro, dance, EDM sort of thing. A lot of the times there's gonna be long drawn out female vocals. Can't you just, you can just see it the van over played this song so many times on repeat while he was editing one of his videos. I, huh, huh, stop, stop playing. When you think of juicy pilots, you think of Johnny FPV. We're kind of old school Johnny FPV. Johnny's older freestyle videos definitely kind of invented a lot of these juicy maneuvers. Wild Willy was always right there with Johnny doing a lot of the same things. I think that the two of them really kind of made the juicy style a thing. But we're still seeing a lot of pilots doing juicy things. Like, van over definitely throws a lot of juicy tricks in the mix. I don't know if I see too many like strictly juicy pilots like you did back when Johnny was doing that sort of thing. But of course I'm not familiar with every freestyle pilot out there so I'm sure I'm missing something. Drop a comment down below with your favorite juicy style pilot. Who is really hitting the juice hard? Now the last type of FPV freestyle we're gonna talk about is cinematic. Look at the flight. Now this one, I've kind of been questioning if it's a freestyle type at all or if it's really its own genre. When I think of FPV drones, I think you got racing, you got freestyle and you've got cinematic. Cinematic being very purposeful flying where the purpose isn't the flight itself. It's about tracking a subject or showing a landscape. It's shots that you might actually see in a movie or in a TV commercial or something like that. But even though cinematic is a genre of FPV drones itself, it still remains as a type of FPV freestyle. What I mean is you're kind of blending the idea of the focus being the subject you're chasing or the landscape you're flying and the focus being look at these tricks I'm doing as a pilot. I mentioned Johnny FPV doesn't do so much of that juicy style flying anymore. Well he's really gone into the cinematic universe and he works on a lot of big productions doing the cinematic flying for those productions. But the videos that you'll find on his channel are what I think are the perfect example of cinematic freestyle. Where they are cinematic shots but there's still a big focus on the drone maneuver as he whips over the top of a dome or races up a staircase or gets deep in the clouds of a smoky drift car. When it comes to a cinematic drone setup, getting the props out of view is an absolute must. With cinematic being something that might require you chasing different subjects, you'll see cinematic pilots use everything from zero to 30 degrees of camera tilt. What I appreciate most about cinematic style flying is that I think it does a great job of exposing more people to FPV and getting them into this awesome hobby. Like I mentioned with Acro flying, people that are already hooked or interested in the idea of FPV drones and are kind of new to it are very fascinated by the capability of these fast flips and want to start learning how to do these different tricks. I think cinematic style is something that really hooks people in in the first place. It's something that they're more likely to come across because they're looking for a cool video of a motorcycle doing a backflip and then you see this crazy clip where the camera swoops around the guys, he's doing the aerial and you're like, how did you even get that? Oh, it's an FPV drone. I got to get myself to rotariot.com and get one of these. You thought we were only going to have one plug. All right guys, that is going to do it for today's list but I'm sure I missed something. I'm sure new styles are being developed as techniques and tricks from the styles we mentioned are being mixed and matched and blended together. I can't wait to see what future generations of pilots bring to the idea of freestyle and what ways of flying these drones, they're going to think of that. We haven't even dreamt up yet. Leave a comment down below with, what's your favorite type of FPV freestyle? Are you more into that groovy flow, that snappy acro, the what the heck matty? Do you want that juice? What are you into? There's no right or wrong answers. It's called free style because you're free to do whatever style you want with these drones. There's no rules, there's no boundaries. The only limit is what you can come up with and how you can push the limits of these drones. Guys, thank you for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, make sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any of our future videos. Hit the bell so you can be notified. I'm Ledrubb and I'll see you next time on, I'm Ledrubb and I'll see you next time on Rotorize.