March 17th, 2014
More than any other sport, surfing lends itself to insanely beautiful documentary-style filming and photography. Principally, the videos (and stills) are taken by guys with fins and water-proof cameras hanging out in the water. At big competitions, you might get a helicopter for arial shots.
Well drones are in the process of revolutionizing video production. They’re going to totally change what’s possible with tracking and arial photography, and at a pretty low price-point. And one of the first places you’ll see this is in surf footage. Like this:
Pipeline Winter 2013 from Eric Sterman on Vimeo.
That was all shot using a quadricopter. The combination of drone photography, with HD, with super-slo-mo is just mind-blowing for surfing. Check out the 1:00 mark.
Giggity.
Steve Sailer March 25, 2014 at 11:45 pm
It seems like being up in the air kind of flattens the impression of the height of the wave compared to being on the beach or, best of all, in the curl. The surf feature movie “Blue Crush” from a dozen years ago was shot handheld down in the water and it was thrilling. I’ll have to check out Point Break to see what was state of the art two decades ago.
I’m trying to think of what sport would televise best with drones. Polo? I went to one polo match. It was on a 200 x 300 yard field. It was extremely exciting on the rare occasions when the horse would thunder by close to the grandstand, but most of the action took place halfway to Peoria.
Golf might benefit from these new 4K TVs. You might be able to track the flight of the ball in relation to the landscape like you can if you are actually attending the tournament.