Rock Climber Scales Church To Retrieve Stuck Camera Drone

While in Macedonia shooting video and stills for the company Petzl, photographer Keith Ladzinski was capturing aerial footage in the village of Prilep with a DJI Phantom II. The unexpected happened and the quadcopter got stuck on a church steeple in the middle of a shot. How they got the Phantom back was even more of a spectacle. Check out the first few minutes of this video to see footage of both the crash and the climb to get it back.

Come for the drone crash, but stay for the well shot and edited bouldering footage that makes up the rest of the video.

Keith told me in a brief conversation:

The Macedonian people in Prilep were incredibly cool about the entire incident, laughed about it and let us in the tower where Dani climbed out from and into the roof.

Glad to hear that everyone in the area was OK with what happened. So many times we get stories about people flying drones in the US and someone has a problem with it. Some of you might remember this article where the FAA wanted to issue a $10,000 fine for flying a drone. If you're flying a drone, be careful out there! Or, maybe just bring a professional rock climber with you ;-)

Mike Wilkinson's picture

Mike Wilkinson is an award-winning video director with his company Wilkinson Visual, currently based out of Lexington, Kentucky. Mike has been working in production for over 10 years as a shooter, editor, and producer. His passion lies in outdoor adventures, documentary filmmaking, photography, and locally-sourced food and beer.

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7 Comments

Nice video. I'd like to know what they shot the rest of the footage with. Some cool slo-mo shots in there.

Beautiful footage. Excellent work in this video. Thanks for sharing it.

As a climber, I would love to climb something like that. This is good footage by climbing standards.

Here you can find some cool slo-mo shots from my city Prilep. https://vimeo.com/89960768

One of the best videos I've seen. Excellent! Congrats.

Great video!!! Thank you Petzl for choosing my town (no vilage ;) ) Prilep for this party. Quadcopter was stuck on a cros on the top of the very old clock tower (not Church steeple :) )

Thanks for checking out the post and video, and I appreciate the correction on the building!