Case Study
Making the Future Look Inevitable, Doroni Aerospace
A brand film for a flying-car startup, built to make an emerging industry feel inevitable rather than impossible.
- Client
- Doroni Aerospace
- Industry
- Brand Film & Commercial
- Year
- 2025
When Doroni Aerospace set out to show the world what they're building, the challenge wasn't the technology. It was belief. How do you make a personal aircraft feel less like science fiction and more like the future arriving on schedule? Director Joseph Abehsera brought me on to film and produce the commercial. I worked alongside an editor with a background in DJI's own productions, the kind of collaborator who makes the whole thing sharper.
The brief
The challenge
Make it look futuristic, modern, and real. Doroni's technology is genuinely impressive up close. The challenge was translating that to film in a way that honored the engineering and told the story behind it. A company like this lives on whether people believe in the vision. The film had to make them believe.
How I shot it
The approach
I shot in the hangar, surrounded by the actual technology. I got to see the machine up close, hear the story firsthand, and build the film around both. Working closely with the director and editor, I framed the aircraft inside the bigger story: the startups, the shift in transportation, an industry being born. I leaned into the design, the sleek lines and the modern engineering, and let the storyline carry the emotion.
The outcome
The result
A commercial that positions Doroni where they belong, at the front of an emerging industry. A film built to make the future feel inevitable.
Watch the film
Chapter 04
The second visit
Doroni has since moved into a new facility, and by the time I came back the full-scale H1-X was standing in it. Photographs undersell it. Up close it reads as a finished aircraft rather than a concept: the ducted fans, the canopy, the scale of the wing against a person standing beside it.
We spent the day shooting it close, with Joseph directing again, working through the details that carry the argument: the rotors, the cockpit, the flight display, the parts you can only sell by showing. That is a different job to the first film. The first one had to make people believe the aircraft was coming. This one gets to show them the aircraft.
The wider picture has moved too. Certification pathways for small aircraft are widening and the sector has been getting real federal attention, which means a company like this is building into an opening rather than arguing against one. It is a genuine pleasure to work on.
The company
About Doroni
Doroni Aerospace was founded in 2021 by Doron Merdinger. The company builds a personal electric aircraft that takes off vertically and is designed to fit in a home garage: the goal is private flight for ordinary people, not an air-taxi fleet. They are targeting deliveries to neighborhoods by 2028. The aircraft is the H1-X: two seats, eight vertical ducted fans and two horizontal ones, a ballistic parachute as the backstop. Their published figures put it at 120 mph, roughly 100 miles of range, and a 25-minute charge. By the time they unveiled the full-scale model in March 2026 they had five patents granted, an FAA special airworthiness certificate for prototype testing, more than seventy test flights behind them and over six hundred pre-orders. FAA certification is the 2027 target. That is what made the film worth making. An emerging industry does not get to assume anyone believes in it yet. Every company in this category is arguing the same case at the same time: that this is a real product, not a concept render. A brand film in that position is not decoration. It is the argument.
Keep watching
Follow the journey
Doroni is raising publicly, and it is worth being precise about what that means: it is an equity offering, not a donation drive. Investors receive shares in the company rather than backing a cause. You can follow the build or look at the offering itself at invest.doroni.io. The company itself lives at doroni.io, and they post test flights and build progress as they happen, follow them on Instagram. Linked for interest only. This is not investment advice, and I have no stake in the offering. Investing carries risk; read their disclosures and decide for yourself.
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