About MG Drone Tours
Martin Graphics Enterprises was established in 2009 by Derrick Martin, a certified graphic designer. It began as a small vinyl cutting operation and grew into a full production shop — wide format printing, shirt printing, vehicle wraps, banners and logo design for businesses and individuals across the region.
MG Drone Tours was added in 2022. That is less of a jump than it looks. More than fifteen years of designing and installing things that have to catch someone’s eye — a wrap on a moving vehicle, signage read from across a parking lot — is the same problem as filming a property so a buyer understands it in ninety seconds.
What changed was the equipment. Flying a small FPV drone by hand through the inside of a building is a different discipline from photography, and it is the part most drone operators in southern Illinois still do not offer. Indoor tours have been filmed here since October 2022, and every one of them is published on this site with the finished video attached — not a showreel of best moments, the actual tours clients received.
Our values
Whether it is design, print, video editing or flight quality, the aim is the same: content that holds attention.
In practice that comes down to a few specific commitments. Tours are flown in one continuous take wherever possible, because a walkthrough that never cuts is the only way a viewer keeps their bearings inside a building they have never set foot in. Filming happens around real operations — occupied homes, businesses with customers in them, a daycare with the dogs and staff still working — so nothing has to be emptied or shut down for a shoot.
Finished video is delivered in two days, because a listing that goes live without video has already lost its best week.
Derrick Martin
I have spent more than fifteen years helping businesses get noticed — branding, print, vehicle wraps and signage — and that background shapes how I approach a drone tour.
Being a designer, a wrap installer and a business owner means I have sat on the client’s side of the table. I know what a property listing has to accomplish, what a business owner is actually trying to show a customer, and how little time either of them gets to make an impression.
I hold an FAA Part 107 Remote Pilot Certificate, which is what permits commercial flight and determines where a shoot can legally happen — near airfields, in controlled airspace, or alongside restricted land such as a national wildlife refuge. MG Drone Tours carries $5 million in liability insurance, and a certificate of insurance can be provided where a commercial client requires one.
The part I enjoy most is the indoor flying. Taking a small FPV drone through a house or a business in one unbroken shot, on manual sticks, is genuinely difficult, and it produces something a camera on a tripod cannot.
Based in Johnsonville, covering roughly a hundred miles across southern and central Illinois. See the portfolio or request a quote.