Stars Align
The official video for L4TE’s Stars Align, shot on two evenings around Landshut with a drone and one camera. My first music video, and the first project where concept, script, camera, drone, edit and grade all came from one person.
Idea
One performer, one landscape, and a track that builds.
L4TE is Tobi’s second alias, an Afro House project that runs separately from his main one. For the release of Stars Align in 2025 we decided to make a video, and I took it on from the first idea to the last export. The concept was simple enough to hold across two shoot days: Tobi in the landscape, and the landscape from above. On the ground the camera stays with him, walking, sitting, and in a car on the gravel road between the fields; the drone carries the wide views, and the two alternate as the track builds.
Preparation
A script, a shot list and a look at the airspace.
Before the first shoot day I wrote a short script and drew the sequence as a storyboard, then broke it into a shot list that follows the structure of the track: what the intro needs, what the build needs, where the drop lands. I scouted locations around Landshut for open fields, a small brook and free-standing trees that read well from the air, and checked the drone rules for those spots before flying. The plan needed two shoot days, and it took two.
Shoot
Two evenings, a drone and a long lens.
Both days were shot around Landshut in Lower Bavaria, in the hour before sunset. The aerials come from a DJI Mini 4 Pro that I flew myself. The ground shots come from a Lumix GX80 with a 50 to 200 millimeter zoom: the long end compresses the fields behind Tobi and separates him from the background, which is the one look the drone cannot give. Fields, meadows, the brook, single trees and a gravel road are the whole set. There is no forest and no city in the video.
Edit
Cut in CapCut, along the shot list.
The edit was made in CapCut, which was still my editor in 2025 before I moved to DaVinci Resolve. Because the shot list already followed the track, the cut was mostly a matter of choosing takes and placing the changes between drone and camera where the music changes. The finished video runs three minutes and seven seconds.
Grade
One LUT for two cameras.
The drone and the GX80 render color differently, so the grade starts with one look LUT on both sources and continues with corrections per shot to match the two. The evening light set the palette; the grade matches the two cameras to it rather than adding a look of its own.
Result
On YouTube, and the first of its kind for me.
Stars Align is on YouTube and was not cut down for other platforms. It was my first music video, and the first project where everything from the script to the grade came from one person. That is also why it is on this site.
