The top of Fortress Mountain Ski Resort. Inside Edmonton’s Rogers Place and Commonwealth Stadium. Oh, the places you’ll go as a drone pilot.
Yellowhouse Aerial, based in Calgary, Alberta, focuses on commercial and film aerial cinematography, working in Calgary and the surrounding area. The team is lead by Arden Shibley, co-owner and lead pilot, and René Michaud, co-owner and director.
Founded in 2016, Yellowhouse Aerial caters to two types of clients: businesses that need to create videos in order to showcase a project or to advertise their business, and film crews looking to add aerial shots to their productions.
René and Arden started working together in 2011. Both having a photography background, they quickly realized they had a great partnership and that they wanted to explore the business opportunity of using drones to capture images and footage of the local landscapes.
Focused on growing the business, Arden used his existing connections in the film industry to identify leads of companies looking for talent to shoot aerial shots.
Being a Calgary-based business means having the appropriate certification and knowledge of the good local areas to film.
As the business plan was being solidified, Arden created the website and used the domain name yellowhouseaerial.ca, showing off the Canadian pride of the business with an exclusively Canadian domain name. Knowing the value of building a domain name portfolio, he also registered the .com (which redirects to the .CA).
The company’s website features what services they have to offer, examples of their previous work, contact information and references – important on any website but especially as your building credibility and brand recognition as a grassroots business.
Something their clients look for when searching online for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is a portfolio of previous work. Yellowhouse Aerial uses their site to show off their impressive footage (including the reel below) to give potential new clients a glimpse of what they can do.
How else did Arden and René get the word out as they grew their business? They started vlogging regularly, and engaging on Facebook and Twitter with a basic message: to get people thinking of what problems they could solve by including top-notch aerials in their advertising or production. They launched their website in March 2017 and by November 2017 visits to the site quadrupled. They built up a portfolio which now includes a wide variety of subjects: from footage for Black Summer, an upcoming Netflix show, to the local Enbridge Ride to Conquer Cancer, to providing aerial shots in the movie Dead Again in Tombstone, featuring Danny Trejo, well-known for his role as ‘Machete’.
