Behind the Lens: How Adarsha Flew an FPV Drone Under a Moving Car for Bato — Road to Death
When director Madan Thapa needed a chase sequence that would make audiences feel like they were inches from the tarmac, GarudX founder Adarsha Raj Bhusal had one answer: fly under the car. This is the story of that shot.
There are shots in film that exist because the camera operator is technically brilliant. And then there are shots that exist because the camera operator is slightly insane.
The shot Adarsha got for *Bato: Road to Death* is both.
The Film
*Bato: Road to Death* is a 2024 Nepali road thriller directed by Madan Thapa. The story follows three people — a paramedic racing to deliver a live heart for transplant, a taxi driver, and a filmmaker — who find themselves pursued by a psychotic cult across Nepal's highways. It's a film built on momentum, on the feeling of speed and danger, on the road as a place where anything can happen.
When you're making that kind of film, your aerial cinematography has to match. Static helicopter shots won't do it. Even standard FPV chase footage — which already looks more visceral than anything a traditional drone achieves — wasn't going to be enough for the sequence the director had in mind.
Madan wanted the audience to feel like they were *underneath* the chase. Not above it. Not beside it. Under it.
He called GarudX.
The Brief
The scene: a car in a high-speed chase on a mountain highway. The brief from the director was essentially: make it look like the camera is on the road surface, watching the car pass over it. Make the audience feel the weight of the vehicle. Make it scary.
Adarsha's solution was immediate: fly the drone under the car while it was moving.
The reaction from everyone else on the production was immediate too: that's not possible.
Why It Shouldn't Have Worked
Flying an FPV drone under a moving vehicle is one of those things that sounds straightforward until you think about it for thirty seconds.
The clearance between the road surface and the underside of a car is, in most vehicles, somewhere between 12 and 20 centimetres. An FPV racing drone has a propeller arc. The props cannot touch the car above or the road below. The car is moving at speed. The drone needs to match that speed — which means flying horizontally at vehicle speed while maintaining almost zero vertical clearance — in a situation where any mistake means either destroying a drone worth thousands of dollars, or, far worse, causing the car to lose control on a mountain road.
This is why professional stunt coordinators said it couldn't be done safely. This is why every conventional filming approach to "under the car" shots uses low-angle cameras bolted to the vehicle chassis, not drones.
Adarsha decided to try it anyway.
The Shot
The setup took two full days of preparation. The production team identified a straight section of mountain road with good sight lines. The stunt driver knew the exact speed and the exact line they'd take. Ground crew cleared a safety perimeter. The drone — a stripped-down racing quad with the minimum profile possible — was tuned to its absolute limits for horizontal speed and response.
Adarsha made multiple test passes without the car. Then at reduced vehicle speeds. Then at full speed with the car passing overhead.
He lost one drone to a rotor clip on the underside of a wheel arch. He replaced it. He tried again.
The shot that made it into *Bato* is approximately four seconds long. The car fills the entire frame, the asphalt rushing underneath. For four seconds, you are on the road surface. You feel the mass of the vehicle over you. And then it's gone.
Four seconds. Two days of preparation. One sacrificed drone. One shot that had never been done in Nepali cinema before.
What It Means
Nepal's film industry is growing at a pace nobody predicted ten years ago. Budgets are bigger. Audiences are more demanding. The productions that make it to streaming platforms now are being compared — internationally — to work from much larger industries.
The aerial cinematography has to keep up. And increasingly, that means FPV. Not just for chase sequences, but for the kind of dynamic, immersive camera movement that puts the audience inside the story rather than watching from a safe distance above it.
*Bato: Road to Death* is proof that Nepali cinema is ready for that level of ambition. And we'll keep finding ways to get the shots that shouldn't be possible.
You can watch the film — and the shot — on YouTube.
