On a lake somewhere before the real trip even began, wakeboarder Ty launched off the water and hung in the air long enough for the moment to feel almost fabricated. It was not fabricated. It was 480 frames per second on the brand new GoPro Mission 1 Pro, and filmmaker Chris Rogers was already grinning before he checked the playback. The slow motion alone would have made for a tidy project. Then came Namibia, a red sand desert older than almost anything else on Earth, and a camp full of the world’s best skydivers, wingsuit pilots, and paragliders. Rogers had no intention of jumping out of a plane, but he was absolutely going to film the people who did.
A freestyle skydiver, a chest-mounted rig, and nobody who had done this before
The Red Bull Global Aerial Performance Camp was not a modest setting for a camera test. Rogers stood in front of roughly 50 Red Bull athletes and gave a talk on storytelling and social media before a single frame of aerial footage had been captured. Intimidating would be an understatement. The bigger challenge was practical: how do you help skydivers find new ways to film their own sport when you have never jumped yourself?
The answer was world champion freestyle skydiver Maja Kuczyńska. Rogers had earlier shown the group how a sail video rig system had been mounted on a pro surfer. Maja heard the presentation and immediately volunteered to be the test pilot in the air. ‘Pretty sure nobody’s ever done this before either,’ Rogers noted before the jump, ‘so it’s going to be interesting to see if it’ll actually work.’ She landed. The rig stayed on. The footage worked. Rogers and the athletes reviewed and edited everything together on an ASUS ProArt GoPro Edition laptop at camp.
As sunset closed in, Rogers handed the Mission 1 Pro to freestyle skydiving duo Kyra and Toby specifically to stress-test the camera’s slow motion in low-light conditions. The results came back clean.
An RC car, a sandboard, and the oldest desert on the planet
Namibia’s desert demanded its own experiment. Rogers strapped the Mission 1 Pro to the front of a remote-controlled car fitted with paddle tires, which gripped the sand better than the larger option, and sandboarded down the dunes while his friend Nick drove the follow cam from the bottom. Rogers put the risk plainly before the run: ‘Hopefully Nick doesn’t drive it into me and kills me. But he’s a pretty good driver with RC cars. With real cars, it’s questionable.’ The follow cam session worked. The RC car also, at one point, did not. The surrounding laughter suggested the incident was immediately iconic.
Later Rogers mounted the Mission 1 Pro directly onto the car and sent it ripping across the dunes solo, chasing slow motion shots at ground level in the last of the desert light.
Maja, mid-air, in a rig nobody had tried before
Back at the aerial camp, Maja Kuczyńska described her discipline with the kind of simplicity that makes it sound entirely reasonable: ‘I do freestyle skydiving, which is basically like dancing in the sky.’ The chest rig that had never been tested on a skydiver before was still attached when she landed.
From a lakeside wakeboarding session to a Namibian desert at dusk, the Mission 1 Pro’s slow motion turned out to be exactly what Rogers called it after that first Ty clip came back: ‘an absolute dream.’
