PowerVision releases the new PowerEye collapsable professional drone, with an MFT interchangeable lens mount and the option of heat sensitive Thermal Vision.
With all the attention generated by the GoPro Karma and the DJI Mavic, collapsible portable drones are a hot consumer product this fall, but there is still a big universe of prosumer and professional needs for drones capable of more sophisticated camera moves, with better lenses and sensors, longer flight times and faster air speeds. The PowerEye from PowerVision has several features that could make upgrading to this more sophisticated drone worth considering, and it still folds up into a compact case for easy transport like the Karma and the Mavic.
PowerEye In CaseCredit: PowerVision
One of the key features is a well-designed, interchangeable lens system, which has an integrated adjustable weight built into the back of the camera for adjusting the counterbalance to ensure proper stabilization for different lens weights and sizes. The lens mount is MFT, and the default lens that the PowerEye Professional kit comes with is a Panasonic Lumix G 14mm F2.5 ASPH prime. There is an optional 14-42mm MFT zoom that has functional zoom control, and most small MFT lenses should work, though the counterbalance isn't dynamic and you'll want to work with zooms that don't dramatically change their balance point through their zoom range.
PowerEye mounted with 12mm Olympus prime and adjustable counter-balance viewable at rear of camera.Credit: PowerVision
The drone also features a dedicated First Person View (FPV) system, which includes a camera mounted on the body of the drone for detecting elements in close proximity to the drone body, especially helpful when the Subject Matter View (SMV) camera is pointed away from the direction of travel. With Dual Viewing enabled on the remote, the operator can simultaneously view the image captured with the main drone camera, and a camera view from the front of the drone that can help tremendously with navigating around nearby objects. This function also works with dual operator mode, with the flying operator seeing the FPV and the camera operator seeing the SMV. The drone also has object detection technology to help with indoor flying, using an array of integrated sensors to detect flight path obstacles and sound an alert within 10 meters.
In addition to the standard camera body, you can upgrade the camera module to thermal vision. This official upgrade offered from PowerVision is switchable between normal imagery and thermal imagery, which displays different temperature elements as different colors. The feature is familiar to many filmmakers as Predator Vision from the seminal 1980s action film Predator. While this has obvious industrial applications (inspecting powerlines for overheating transformers or buildings for HVAC leaks), there are filmmaking applications as well, for instance helping nature documentarians find animal subjects in dense situations. Or, of course, Predator Vision. While they haven't released images yet from their thermal sensor, they have released images of what the camera body itself looks like. With a dual lens setup on the camera body and an integrated main lens, it looks like you have to give up interchangeable lenses in order to add heat vision.
PowerVision Thermal CameraCredit: PowerVision
Available now for pre-order for $3998, including a PowerEye aircraft with a full set of propellers, 14mm camera lens, rolling carrying case, one remote control, an extra pair of propellers, base station, battery, and battery charger.
Tech Specs:
PowerVision Object Detection Technology
340 x 285 x 296 mm folded size for transport
513 mm x 513 mm x 310 mm flight size
40mph maximum flight speed
Micro Four Thirds (MFT) lens mount
4/3″ CMOS sensor
Panasonic Lumix G 14mm F2.5 ASPH default kit lens
30-minute maximum flight time
3.1 miles (5 kilometers) control range with full HD video
8.7 lb (3,950 g) with battery and propellers
6.6lbs maximum payload
ISO 100 – 3,200
4K: 4,096 x 2,160 @24p; UHD: 3,840 x 2,160 @24 fps / 25 fps / 30fps,
I read somewhere that there are only two best-case scenarios for a great screenplay—either it meets the expectations of the audience or it doesn’t. Either they sigh in relief or gasp out loud in shock.
Giving your audience what they want shouldn’t be difficult for a practiced writer. A character has a desire, and they achieve it at the end of the story. Boom! Expectations met!
But there’s something oddly satisfying about not meeting those expectations in a screenplay, leaving the audience shaken in disbelief.
Many compelling screenplays use something called misdirection—it's sneaky, it's intelligent, and it takes viewers somewhere unexpected. It's all about planting subtle clues that seem insignificant until a revelation forces us to reconsider everything.
Let’s examine how this narrative tool, when used thoughtfully, can transform straightforward storytelling into something more complex and satisfying.
What is Misdirection?
Misdirection is distracting the audience to mislead them, preventing them from getting on to your scheme of actions, until you finally reveal the truth. In essence, it is a style of storytelling, where the “audience proposes, filmmaker disposes.”
In misdirection, a filmmaker manipulates information, character(s), and their timing in the narrative while building the conflict, until everything falls into place to reveal an unexpected resolution that does not match the audience’s expectations.
Many times, the audience is also purposefully misdirected by exploiting their biases, prejudices, and gullibility.
Why Would Any Filmmaker Misdirect Their Audience?
A story is as interesting as its narration. Be it a bedtime story or Nolan’s Inception, if the narrative is linear and flat, it may be less engaging to your audience.
Misdirection is one of the finest tools that acts like a hook to your story. Misdirecting elements are thought-provoking, working with the audience’s psychology to throw them off guard.
Fiction gives you the freedom to alter realities, but even while misdirecting, it is important that the dots connect effectively by the end of the story. Information shouldn’t be irrelevant and without context.
How Do You Misdirect Your Audience?
You can use any story element to misdirect the audience, but the most commonly used are characters, sound, props, plot points, strategic information reveal, and the time of the incident of any event.
Examples of Misdirection in Great Films
Gone Girl by David Fincher
Misdirection by unreliable narrator
This is one of those stories that is completely narrated in misdirection.
The film opens through husband Nick’s (Ben Affleck) perspective, who becomes the prime suspect in the disappearance of his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), on their fifth marriage anniversary. As the investigation and media frenzy take over, we are let into the lives of our two main characters and led to believe that Amy might actually be dead.
We learn about their failing marriage and Nick’s extramarital affair. Thus, when Nick lies through his teeth about his loving relationship with Amy to the police, he instantly becomes an unreliable narrator in the story.
Thus, even though his alibis are believable, you cannot trust him and can’t take his word. Rather, you, with the police, start suspecting him.
This automatically shifts all your trust to Amy instead, even though you know even less about her than Nick. Wonderfully, you have begun rooting for her now.
What you might not realize is that you have been misdirected to dislike Nick as a character, so that you automatically take Amy’s side right from the beginning, until it is revealed that Amy is alive and purposefully in hiding.
This is one of the many misdirections in the film.
By regulating how the audience judges the characters, their morality, and their intentions, a filmmaker often shatters the expectations of the audience with misdirection to give them a more surprising resolution than expected.
The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan
Misdirection by character
Just by establishing a character in a certain way and revealing information about them strategically, a filmmaker can determine the character’s impression on the audience.
This is what M. Night Shyamalan does in The Sixth Sense. The magician of misdirection keeps both the characters and the audience engaged, looking for the ghost, all the while narrating the events through the ghost’s perspective!
The beauty of a nuanced misdirection lies in the clues left throughout a film’s events, leaving you both frustrated and delighted at the same time that you didn’t pick up on them!
Money Heist by Álex Pina
Misdirection by sound
In the Spanish drama series, Money Heist, the makers use a powerful misdirection but with a genius twist. This misdirection is not only for the audience per se, but for the main character—the Professor (Álvaro Morte), too.
In the Season 2 finale of the drama series, the Professor and Raquel (Itziar Ituño), the love of his life and newly minted partner-in-crime known as “Lisbon,” are sprinting through a dense, shadowy forest. The air crackles with urgency as police hounds close in, their shouts breaking the eerie silence of the forest.
Eventually, they are forced to separate, with a radio as their only mode of communication. Raquel ends up taking refuge in a barn, but not for too long. The police arrive, and she is completely surrounded. A gun to her head, she is ordered to compromise the Professor, but she’s steel-willed and denies the police any information.
All the while, the Professor is on the radio with her, frightened and worried, begging her to tell them everything in exchange for her life. The Professor frantically runs through the forest to reach Raquel, when… bang! A gunshot rips through the radio.
The Professor stops dead, the forest swallowing his anguished cry. But as the episode races to its close, the fog clears. The shot? A cruel ruse. She’s alive and in police custody. The Professor’s despair was their bait, and he bit—hard.
What I love about this particular sequence is that the filmmakers don’t use misdirection as a generalized cliff-hanger of “what happens next.”
Instead of revealing that Raquel is alive in an upcoming episode of the next season, they make a choice to reveal it at the tail end of the same episode.
Raquel is a crucial character in the series at this point, so to lose her in the narrative would have been a huge plot twist. At times, thrillers do go for the cheap surprise, whether it makes sense or not. But in Money Heist, the reveal elevates the value of the misdirection because now the audience knows things are going to change forever—for better or worse.
Final Destination 5 by Steven Quale
Misdirection by props
The sequence leading up to Candice’s fall in Final Destination 5 is a series of brilliantly crafted misdirections that keep us on the edge of our seats until the mishap finally happens.
The misdirections also seem to be symbolic, as the death of poor Candice (Ellen Wroe) is a sharp irony. Throughout the scene, we keep worrying about the loose screw in her gymnastic apparatus but how she is killed by it in the end is absolutely unexpected—just how a nuanced misdirection should be.
Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock
Misdirection by casting
Killing the heroine halfway through the film was a risky but brilliantly used misdirection by Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho, especially considering the film dates back to the ‘60s.
An actor’s face value is as important as their acting skills. Big actors usually have strong plot armor and are expected to survive the story.
In Psycho, when a star like Janet Leigh is killed off midway through the movie, the audience is thrown off guard and does not know what to assume, whose story to follow, or what to expect next. This amplifies the shock factor of the plot twist.
Misdirection can turn your story into a fun experience with plenty of unexpected twists and turns. When done well, a reveal should prompt viewers to think, "Of course! How did I miss that?" rather than, "That came out of nowhere!"
The audience hates being deceived. So, not meeting audience expectations doesn’t mean you lie and fill the screenplay with deceiving information, revealed in an untimely way, aiming for a plot twist in the climax that feels isolated and seemingly unmotivated.
Also, be careful not to clutter your narrative with forced misdirections.
For a better understanding, check out the examples in the article—how each misdirection is a strategic literary device, not just a stylized form of storytelling.
PowerEye In CaseCredit: PowerVision
PowerEye mounted with 12mm Olympus prime and adjustable counter-balance viewable at rear of camera.Credit: PowerVision
PowerVision Thermal CameraCredit: PowerVision
