GoPro: HERO3+ Black Edition: Smaller, lighter, mightier still

Contribution:

Directing, filming, co-editing, vfx, color grading

Directing

This video was obviously made from a culmination of great talents and productions. I was personally responsible for leading the urban mountain bike shoot in Valparaiso as well as the Chilean snow shoot with Travis Rice & John Jackson. The rest of the productions were done by the rest of the GoPro media team. When it came time to edit the piece, Jordan Miller and I took the lead.

Filming

Filming a project like this takes many forms. The majority of the job is knowing where and when to place cameras and what mode to put them in. I led the filming of the mountain bike shoot where I knew we could capture beautiful color, high production value shots, and fast action. We used a combination of ziplines, RC helis, cranes, sliders, and good old fashioned GoPro mounts on the athletes. As for the snow shoot, I was able to do a few follow cams but most of our higher production value shots came from the RC heli which Caleb Farro was piloting, as well as the athlete mounted content.

Editing

Jordan Miller and I took the lead on editing this piece. We’ve been the lead editors of the last two large launch videos (HERO2 and HERO3) so we’re quick in putting rough cuts together that will ultimately be shaped into the final pieces. We took around 3 weeks to edit this video down and it really came together easily and quickly relative to some videos in the past. We came across the music last year but still went through a pretty rigorous process of having artists create custom tracks for our video. In the end, nothing we had made specifically for the video was working how we had imagined it and the track we had from the start helped tell a compelling story.

Graphics

The graphics I worked on for this video aren’t actually in the video itself, but the GoPro bumper. I was responsible for creating the original GoPro bumper so every year we’ve updated the camera, I’ve prepped the files and updated it accordingly. Usually our creative team contracts out a photographer to take all of our product photos for launch; however, the lighting and look of the photos they had weren’t looking as clean as I wanted for the video bumper. I took a new GoPro camera and housing and took photos of my own with my 5D Mark III on a black background. I took the photos in a dark room and used long exposure photography with dim light panels to essentially light paint all around the housing. This made it so I could light paint all around the housing and get every side cleanly lit without any direct reflections or shadows.

VFX

In this video the VFX are pretty hidden. There wasn’t much to do, but there were a few shots where I painted out RC heli shadows or did some video lens correction/stabilization.

Color Grading

The color grading was done in Davinci Resolve. It was a little difficult to get a consistent look as the footage was from so many different venues and lighting but I basically just went for clean and bright. The cameras had some trouble in Moab for the rock climbing shoot since it was all really orange. The white balance tended towards blue to compensate for the orange. It was relatively easy to correct and get everything matching.

Contribution:

  • Color Grading
  • Directing
  • Editing
  • Filming
  • Graphics
  • VFX

Released:

  • Oct 4, 2013