Being a filmmaker in the action sports game used to require one of two routes. The Snapt series comes to mind as a perfect example back in 2002, when Logan Dulien just grabbed whatever scrappy camera he could get his hands on and pointed it at Andy Irons and a few other big names. Dulien allowed his film to be “perfectly imperfect,” in his own words. The image quality wasn’t amazing, the camera work wasn’t ultra-professional, and he took chances on music that people didn’t associate with surfing. But it worked. It launched five films over the next two decades.
“It was kind of punk. People gravitated towards it because it wasn’t corporate. It was so wrong that it was good,” he said last year.
But if your vision of a launching a filmmaking career in action sports wasn’t so gritty, the barrier to entry wasn’t as simple as grabbing any old camera. And the costs of professional equipment have probably stopped dozens, maybe hundreds of people from ever starting.
Enter the action camera which, ironically, was just getting started in that same era as Dulien, just after the turn of the century. GoPro launched its first waterproof 35mm film Hero in 2004. The brand’s first digital camera came just a couple of years later. And the first HD Hero came out in 2009. And even through all of that, with other quality action cameras coming to the market along the way, the handheld tools were mostly just fun toys used for filming your own sessions on the slopes, at the beach, or in the skatepark.
All that to say how wild it is to see action cameras now and what they’ve made possible. Nobody was chasing an 18-year-old Travis Rice with a tripod and camera down the hill and through trees in 2001. Now those shots are commonplace. We have drones. We have Gimbal God. And even his own game changing follow-cam approach looks nothing like it did when he started out. The guy is lugging around more than just a single handheld camera on a small gimbal. The breakdown of this camera rig is pretty wild when you consider it’s all run through a GoPro and he swaps this setup for his RED when he can.
