It took 25 attempts and all appeared hopeless, but pro skateboarder Jeromy Green and I were able to pull off an insane trick. One in which Jeromy takes my camera from me while mid-backflip as he flies by at a high rate of speed. Our first completion of this trick landed us right back in the final awarded edit for this year’s challenge. For Jeromy to land the trick and also successfully grab my camera while upside down required some practice with me physically handing it to him. I had to basically put in in his hand.
When we finally completed the trick we knew we had something special with our clip, but also knew we were running against 29,000 other clips from creators all around the world, and competition is getting much stiffer by the year with more and more people becoming camera enthusiasts. Still, the fact that Jeromy and I have been shooting together for several years gives us a good familiarity with each other and makes completing something like this, this is really by feel, a little easier.
Shooting for the GoPro Million Dollar Challenge has always been so much fun because it challenges us to think outside the box and GoPro cameras like GoPro HERO9 and GoPro MAX, along with all the creative mounting possibilities, help us photographers expand our possibilities for how we capture our ideas. We see the amazing shots each year from content creators around the world using these cameras and it’s so cool to see how they are used in new and exciting ways. Skateboarding is the perfect companion for us who use action cameras because we’re using our creative tool to to capture these athletes performing such creative and complex, not to mention extremely difficult tricks.
Last year it was all about 360 degree video and extension poles like the 270Pro to put the camera in harm’s way and get unique angles and nice dolly or crane shots. This year it’s the difficult camera hand-off. Next year, I really don’t know. All I know is it sure will be fun to come up with new ideas and see how much farther we can push the limits of creative, immersive video. If you want to know how to shoot for the Million Dollar Challenge, it’s either in the right place at the right time for an epic natural event like a sunset in a gorgeous location, or you need to put in some thought to how you can plus your current camera angles and pull something off that simply makes the viewer say, “Wow.”
You can watch the final GoPro edit above and a full length of our clip below along with a BTS of how we get our shots and the importance of camera motion to draw the audience in.
