Ambulance|Grand Avenue, Bunker Hill — The Drone Dive Down the Canyon

Look straight up on South Grand Avenue between 3rd and 5th and you are standing at the bottom of a slot. Two California Plaza at 350 South Grand goes up 751 feet on one side. Wells Fargo Center, the Gas Company Tower, the Bunker Hill towers close in on the rest. Sunlight reaches the pavement for about two hours a day.

This is the shape Michael Bay wanted. Ambulance was shot largely with FPV racing drones — small, fast, hand-flown machines that go where a helicopter or a crane cannot. On Grand Avenue the drone team launched from a rooftop, dropped the full height of the building in a single unbroken fall, levelled out at street height and chased a motorcycle through an opening in the ground between the towers. No cut. One take, one continuous plunge. Pilot Alex Vanover and the crew were running these machines at sixty and seventy miles an hour through gaps a few feet wide.

The result is the film's signature move: the camera behaves like something falling rather than something filming.

Grand Avenue is an ordinary public street and free to walk. Start at the Bunker Hill Steps behind the Central Library, climb to Fifth, then head north past the plazas. Stop in the middle of the block, tilt your head back, and imagine something the size of a dinner plate coming down at you out of that strip of sky.

Photo: "Two California Plaza — 350 South Grand Avenue — Los Angeles" by Dale Cruse, CC BY 4.0 via Flickr.