Monday 13 August 2012

Getting high viewpoints with a carp rod and a Flymount with a Gopro Hero 2 and an Adixxion

We've got some interesting shoots coming up and I need to have a camera high above the action, maybe even out over a chasm, and been wondering how to do it simply, reliably and cheaply. It's got to be light as well, don't want to be lugging great masses of equipment miles from the roadhead.
So I bought a carp rod, 7 metres of light plastic rod that packs down small but is strong enough to hold a GoPro or an Adixxion.
I glued a 6mm thread into the end, after discarding the last thin section, and then made an adaptor so I could use the Flymount balljoint for flexibility and versatility of mounting. The Flymount balljoint is simply epoxied to an L shaped piece of steel which fits on to the 6mm thread stuck in the end of the rod.
A GoPro just slots on or an Adixxion screws on using the camera mount adaptor
The rod bends but you can get some nice distance out from where you are

I changed the settings so the cameras recorded upside down - both the GoPro Hero 2 and the Adixxion allow you to do this easily
and then adjusted the angle to suit
and shot a very boring sample shot
To give you an idea of scale, the cage at bottom left is 8 feet tall, I can get up about 6 metres if the rod is straight up - plus my height of just under 2 metres - and that's about 25 feet in real measurements.
The big thing I want to be able to do is to run the camera just over someone's head as they fly by, or jump off a cliff, so it seems as if the camera is flying behind them. 
I'll start practising now!








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