The HighRPM Experience, On Board With the Driver No this isn't an advert for one of those places that puts you in the seat for a h...
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| The HighRPM Experience, On Board With the Driver |
A lot of race fans never get closer to the experience of being in the cars they love to watch other than visiting the pits at an event. A lucky few might even get to sit in the passenger seat of a blown burnout car as it shreds the tyres.
With the help of the ubiquitous GoPro action camera however, it is cheap and easy to go along for the ride, so to speak. It seems almost everyone has, and uses a GoPro nowadays; the brand is so synonymous with action footage that people will refer to action footage from other cameras as GoPro footage in much the same way they used to incorrectly refer to smartphones as 'iphones', but I digress.
With the proliferation of the GoPro in action sport it is quite easy to find on-board footage online, just search YouTube or Vimeo for any action sport of choice and you are likely to turn up hundreds of matches. As one quickly notices when browsing; a lot of clips are taken from the same static mounted positions, many looking straight forward, some mounted looking out on exactly the same perspective as the person who is doing the sport.
You may also begin to notice that these angles become a bit sterile after a while; a single camera perspective does not immerse the viewer in the same context as the person who is in the midst of the action, in the same way a landscape photo, no matter how breathtaking, rarely comes close to the experience of actually being there. A viewer needs some context to the surroundings to appreciate the action that is taking place; remember the viewer is missing a plethora of sensations when looking at a video, the sound is not the same, the forces acting against the body are non existent, the changing view around is not the same so it is good to grab as many angles as you can, not just the ones that would be seen through the eyes.
Using these clips we did for HighRPM as an example I tried to find angles to include the overall experience of the ride with the drag racers whose cars we mounted cameras on. With Bouchere Racing's fluorescent Altered (below) there were plenty of struts to clamp cameras on with unobstructed views so highlighting the fact that the engine is right out in the open was an obvious angle. The cockpit of the vehicle is also an incredibly tight fit so that was another angle to help the viewer relate to what the driver is experiencing.
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