AirVuz has been celebrating the best drone video content since it launched in Minneapolis in 2015, and The Drone Girl has been along for the ride almost since the beginning — from judging the annual contest to attending the live awards ceremony in person back when it was still a Minneapolis winter event. And once again, I was a judge for the AirVuz 2025 Drone Video of the Year contest, and the results are in.
The 2025 field reflects two clear trends: the continued dominance of cinematic travel footage, and the steady rise of FPV as a serious creative discipline rather than just a niche sport.
AirVuz is a aerial video-focused website that has grown to become one of the largest drone video communities in the world. Its annual Video of the Year contest is one of the key benchmark for what’s possible in aerial filmmaking. Here are the winners, how they were chosen and how you might win next year.
How the contest works
Every video you upload to AirVuz.com is automatically entered into the weekly Drone Video of the Week contest — no extra steps required. Each week, five videos are selected and one wins $250. That weekly winner advances to a monthly contest, where another round of voting awards an additional $500. Monthly winners automatically earn a spot in the year-end contest.
From there, the AirVuz team reviews high-ranking videos from throughout the year and selects 30 additional wild cards to round out the field. This year’s pool was 42 nominated videos, judged by an external panel including yours truly. Other judges included my friends Elena Buenrostro of Women Who Drone, prolific writer and photographer Kara Murphy and Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE.com. We all voted using star rating across multiple criteria.
According to AirVuz, seven of the nine recognized videos were wild cards — meaning the judges frequently diverged from the internal team’s preferences. Entry is completely free.
Oh, and by the way, the 2026 contest is already underway, meaning anything you upload now could win next next.
The 2025 AirVuz winner
Muhamad AbuShakra took top honors for the AirVuz 2025 drone contest with “Namibia | Land of Contrasts”, an aerial portrait of the southwest African country filmed over 14 days. The video moves from the Namib Desert (one of the oldest on Earth) to the Atlantic coastline where the desert runs straight into the ocean, to the rusted shipwreck Zella half-buried in the sand at Henties Bay, to safari wildlife footage that rounds out the portrait of a country that doesn’t get nearly enough attention from drone pilots.
The runners-up
Jay Christensen of JayByrd Films earned a runner-up spot with “When You Fly – JayByrd Films Reel”. Christensen is one of the pioneers of cinematic FPV content creation, and his resume includes major client names such as the MLB All-Star Game, the White House and U2 concerts inside the Las Vegas Sphere. His bowling alley video remains one of the most-watched drone videos ever made. If you haven’t seen his work before, this reel is a good place to start.
Makhorov took the second runner-up spot with “The North Pole Journey”, which was filmed from a Russian icebreaker at one of the most remote locations on Earth. The North Pole sits atop an Arctic Ocean nearly 14,000 feet deep, covered by constantly-shifting ice.
The finalists
Timelab.pro brought a drone tour of Kazan, Russia — a name Drone Girl readers will recognize, as Timelab.pro won the very first AirVuz Drone Video of the Year back in 2017 with aerial footage of Moscow. Nearly a decade later, they’re still in the finals.
Other finalists included:
- FADAH_FPV, who captured Greenland’s icebergs.
- Eneour, who filmed Norway’s Svalbard Archipelago with a Red Komodo, a DJI Mavic 3 Pro, and a GoPro on an FPV drone.
- onlythenico created “Iceland: A Symphony of Seasons” — hitting Gullfoss waterfall, the Dynjandí waterfall, the Vatnajökull icecap, the Dyrhólaey rock arch, the Fjaðrárgljúfur canyon, and an erupting volcano across five minutes.
- Skynamic — another returning name from the 2023 contest — delivered an FPV flythrough of the Thyssenkrupp steel factory in Duisburg, Germany, one of the great heavy industrial sites in Europe.
- zimydakid rounds out the finalists with “The Great Outdoors.”
What’s worth watching in this year’s field
The AirVuz 2025 contest is proof that FPV has matured from a racing hobby into a legitimate cinematic tool. And I expect 2026 to be even more interesting. The Antigravity A1 — the world’s first 360-degree FPV drone — launched in late 2025.
- Buy the Antigravity A1 drone now directly from Antigravity.
- Buy the Antigravity A1 drone now from Amazon.
- Buy the Antigravity A1 drone now from B&H Photo.
And then of course, the DJI Avata 360 arrived in March 2026. Both drones capture full spherical footage in flight and allow pilots to reframe any perspective in post.
Filmmakers who enter contests like this one will have widespread access to an entirely new creative tool as opposed to the usual slate of new drones that tend to be nothing more than a small spec upgrade. With these new drones, which offer the ability to capture every angle simultaneously then choose your framing after the fact, expect to see more possibilities that weren’t available to any of this year’s finalists. Whether that translates into better contest entries or just different ones is an open question, but expect the 2026 field to look meaningfully different from what we’ve seen before.
For now, congratulations to Muhamad AbuShakra, Jay Christensen, Makhorov, and all the finalists and nominees. You can watch all the winning videos on AirVuz’s website here.
And just remember, every upload to AirVuz.com is automatically in the running for next year’s contest — and it’s free.
The post AirVuz names its 2025 Drone Video of the Year — See the Winners appeared first on The Drone Girl.