From the course: GoPro HERO: Car and Motorcycle Mounts

Welcome - GoPro HERO Tutorial

From the course: GoPro HERO: Car and Motorcycle Mounts

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Welcome

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- Hi, my name's Rich Harrington and I'm a producer and a director. - I'm Jim Ball, I'm a director of photography. - And today, we're going to be taking a look at using GoPro cameras and mounting 'em to vehicles. But Jim, it's not just about mounting to vehicles. These techniques translate to other types of shoots as well, right? - Sure, with the advent of these little GoPro cameras, you can literally put the camera wherever your imagination will allow. The basic set of principles of rigging a camera to any surface or position can apply anywhere, it's just up to your imagination. - And that's what we're going to do today. We've got eight cameras to work with, so we can get a lot of different angles of coverage. Now, this is going to sound like a lot of opportunity. Maybe you only have a few cameras, that's okay. You could of course do multiple takes or try moving the camera between shots to see what you can get, but I think the important thing here is that these cameras are becoming almost an industry standard and as such, you need to be a little bit more creative than a few years ago. - Yeah, just a few years ago when these first came out, putting the camera in interesting positions, say on a car down by the tire or on the hood was something really special and an unusual angle for low-budget productions. But these days it's almost expected, so you need to have those shots in your repertoire, but you also need to start thinking about how I can push the edge a little bit and find some different angles. - We're going to focus both on creativity, as well as keeping the gear safe. One of the things you really have to keep in mind as you're putting cameras on a moving vehicle, is that you have to make sure the gear is safe, that you don't damage the vehicle, and certainly that nothing falls off and causes traffic problems. Now, Jim, you've done a lot of shooting with this style, you work on a lot of different broadcast TV shows, documentary-style shows, what is so popular about using the GoPro cameras? Can they intercut with other professional cameras? - Yes, they are fairly inexpensive, so they're quote, unquote "disposable," and they also save a lot of time. The obvious use is on low-budget productions where you want to get professional-level camera angles that normally might take a few more crew and resources to put a larger sized camera in place. But even on larger-budget commercials and things that I do that are a little more upscale, these are time savers. They allow you to get extra coverage, extra angles that will cut in pretty well with your high-end production cameras. That's appealing at any level of production. - And one of the other things we're going to look at today is actually attaching cameras right to our subject. So we're going to be working with a motorcycle rider who often does stunts and other types of sports-oriented riding, and put the cameras in ways so that the audience can really get a sense of things from his point-of-view. And that's just something you couldn't do with cameras a few years ago. There's a lotta great things we could do with these GoPro cameras. We're excited that you're joining us today. We got a couple things to work through before the shoot just to make sure you're really up to speed, some of the pre-production, so we're going to walk you through that next.

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