Drone-piloting Beijing videomakers earn their pie in the sky
Business for a Beijing aerial film crew took off after their images of a rooftop folly went viral
The business model is simple enough - take something interesting but out of reach. Give people a bird's eye view of it, literally. And fame and fortune follow.
That, in brief, is the remarkable story of Beijing FlyCam Culture and Media, an aerial photography firm that struck it rich thanks to the determination of a couple of Beijingers to turn their hobby of flying model aircraft into a money spinner.
Beijing FlyCam's owes its big break in no small part to Zhang Biqing, a doctor of Chinese traditional medicine who built an illegal rooftop structure so audacious that it captured the world's attention.
The bizarre villa covered the entire roof of a 26-storey building in the upscale Park View residential compound in Beijing. It featured fake rocks and real grass and trees - all arranged to look like a mountain in the style of a classical Chinese painting.
"It was absolutely the right time," Feng recalled. "My business partner [Li Changchun] and I happened to be at the bottom of Zhang's building. Li said: 'Why not fly our camera up to have a look?'"