YouTube, the Alps and Songs of Praise: How a Yorkshire businessman turned flying drones into a thriving business

But at the start of this year, at the age of 26, Hill decided it was time to switch up his business plan. Coinciding with the launch of a new office and studio space in Harrogate, Skyward Media Productions is now set to specialise in brand image, using its core elements of film, photo and design to help other businesses tell their stories.

Hill now hopes that this is just the start for the company, and that over the next five years he will be able to lay the foundations to set up other regional hubs, mirroring Skyward Media’s success in North Yorkshire.

“Things really started around the back end of 2017,” says Hill, speaking from Skyward Media’s new studio.

“I had always had remote control helicopters as a kid, and then I was just doing some YouTube surfing and saw this guy in Norway who had strapped an old school camera to the bottom of a petrol remote control helicopter. That really intrigued me.

“I started looking into drones, and this was around the time that the first non build-it-yourself drones with cameras were coming out.

“I had just left working in retail and gone to work for a fire protection company – I managed to save up some money and thought: ‘I’ll give it a bash and see what I can do.’”

After spending around £3,500 on his first drone and licence, Hill would get his first paid job creating video content for a golf course.

His business would grow from there, soon securing work with Volvo for its factory in Sweden, as well as filming for Malta’s Tourism board, ski ware brands in the Alps, and Fountains Abbey, in Yorkshire.

The business has also developed from providing drone footage to wider visual storytelling and branding.

Hill now works with a team of around 11 freelancers, and hopes to employ a team of around six core staff in the next 18 months.

“Our main root in the ground is still video and visual content, but the approach has changed,” says Hill.

“Instead of just saying we will create some visuals and you can put it out, it's about developing the meaning for the brand; why they're doing what they're doing and why people should connect with it.”

It was during the pandemic that Hill would take his first small office space, which has now grown into the Harrogate studio.

“This whole building used to be a rehearsal space. I had a desk in the corner upstairs, which I took up during the pandemic when I struggled to work from home and needed somewhere to call work,” Hill Says.

“I got a desk here, then slowly ended up taking over the whole of the upstairs, and then the same approach happened for the whole building.

“A music company moved out from downstairs, so that was sat empty, and I thought that I could make cool things happen with those spaces.”

Almost entirely hand-built by Hill, the Skyward studio now features advanced editing suites, a fully equipped podcast studio, an infinity curve used for fashion shoots and music videos, as well as meeting rooms.

The studio also marks what Hill hopes will be the first in a string of locations.

“It sort of feels like I’m in this new chapter of business now, changing the outlook and what we want to deliver for clients,” he says.

“There are big changes that need to happen on our end of things over the next few years, in terms of how we deliver projects, so it would be slightly naive to say I want to build another studio in the next two years.

“But in five years I want to be working with bigger international brands, and then we can start to look at regional hubs, copying and pasting what we have here.”

Hill has also built his company without the backing of a degree or marketing experience.

More of a fan of actively doing than academic learning, he briefly studied public services at college after completing his GCSE’s, but left as soon as he turned 18, deciding to forge his own career path.

“I knew I wanted to explore marketing, but I tried a load of interviews with brands and no one would take me without four years experience or a degree. I had neither,” he says.

“I’ve always been of the mind that I need to experience something to be able to do it – if I sat there just learning about marketing, it would never sink in, I need to apply it to learn it.

“That experience has paid off, because I’ve then been able to show my results to clients.”

Back when he first began Skyward Media Productions, however, Hill had no end goal in mind.

“I just wanted to kind of experience the journey and see where it would take me,” he says, reflecting on the past six years.

“When I started, it was almost the beginning times for all the people who are now big YouTubers. I suppose it was just seeing what those people were doing in terms of getting to travel and make cool stuff, and having fun whilst doing it, that was the big picture to me.

“I think though, it often takes a lot, when you’ve built something yourself, to recognise what you’ve achieved and what you’ve actually done. And it was maybe only two weeks ago that I actually sat and thought, looking back, ‘yes, I have done some very cool stuff’”.