If you’ve been on Facebook lately, you might have been one of the tens of thousands of people to like a film of aerial footage showing Chico in all its fall glory. The film’s creator, Stephen Chollet, is a freelance filmmaker based out of Chico, who’s won two Emmy’s for past work, but with this film he said he was just having some fun.
If you haven’t had a chance to see the “Fall Colors” video yet here’s a quick synopsis. You get a birds-eye-view of downtown Chico. You hover over city icons like Collier Hardware, the Bidwell Presbyterian Church and the Bidwell Mansion. Then you look down upon the Esplanade, moving in unison with the traffic below you, as tiny headlights of the cars dodge in and out from beneath vibrant red tree tops.
Chollet shot the two-minute film with a camera on a drone. He said he was just killing some time downtown late Monday afternoon when he put the drone in flight to get a quick clip of Bidwell Presbyterian Church.
“I had maybe 50 seconds left on the card that was in the camera,” Chollet said. “So I took off, got my shot and then was like ‘Well, I’ve got plenty of battery left, I’ll just fly around for a few minutes and see what I see.”
What he saw was Chico’s beautiful fall colors.
Chollet said he flew around for a max of 10 minutes. Later, that evening he took about an hour to put the short film together.
“And then I put it on the Internet,” he said.
And then people went crazy for it. As of this afternoon – which is not even three full days online – the video has had 88,000 views.
Chollet said he’s also received an overwhelming amount of comments and messages from folks – many he said from people who don’t live in Chico now, but who used to.
As a filmmaker that’s been awarded for his excellence in the industry, Chollet said the fact that this film is so popular is kind of ironic.
“I do commercial work, documentary work all this filmmaking and you spend all this time and energy trying to make something that people are going to like, and maybe a few people watch it, and people care about it, and like it, and then you spend 10 minutes doing something and everybody likes it. And it’s like you cannot plan for it.”
To see more of Chollet’s work, visit his website.