Marshall received a public reprimand from the Sun Belt Conference after drone footage from the Virginia Tech football game on Sept. 23 was posted online.
The drone footage, which captured players and fans throughout the stadium from above, received over three million views online, but it broke a SBC rule that requires drone footage to conclude one hour before kickoff and resume one hour after the game’s conclusion.
“We hired a drone company out of Minnesota to do a campus tour, and so there’s a bunch of different scenes,” said Dave Traube, the chief marketing officer at Marshall. “But the original plan from the start—and it’s more of an academic than an athletic video, in general, I will say. So, the ultimate plan, it’s just kind of a cool, different version of a campus tour. You can think of it that way.”
The company, Sky Candy Studios, planned to conclude this campus tour with content from the Virginia Tech football game.
Traube said that the filmmakers thought they had everything taken care of as far as drone regulations were concerned. Unaware that they would be violating the one-hour time limit before kickoff, the drone footage was taken during the pregame.
“There’s FAA regulations when you’re going to fly a drone over people and stuff like that–this company meets all those regulations. They are a professional company that does this kind of thing all the time,” Traube said.
“Obviously, you’re not going to have a drone during a game. I mean, it could die, it could fall out of the sky, it could land on the field while the guys are playing, so there’s safety concerns there. But I would assume the hour before is just them being overly cautious with the safety of the people who attend the game,” Traube said.
The University received a public reprimand, and the matter was considered settled, Traube said. They were not required to remove the footage from any of the University’s social media platforms. The final video of the campus tour, Traube said, can be expected in a couple of weeks.
