There’s not much else in the world we love more than creative uses for GoPro cameras, and YouTube’s Sam and Niko definitely stole our hearts by attaching one to an arrow and giving us some POV archery.
Brought to our attention by Laughing Squid, we get to see exactly what an arrow sees when it’s launched from a bow. Sam and Niko — a channel chronicling film making techniques, life in Los Angeles, and various other adventures — hollowed out a portion of a foam-tipped safety arrow and (not to get too technical) jammed a GoPro camera into it. Once properly padded, the fellas headed outdoors to get some incredible one-of-a-kind footage that, until now, probably hasn’t been possible due to the weight of most cameras. Using the symmetrical cube-like GoPro Hero series allowed the arrow to be relatively stable and light enough to be shot at decent speeds and distances.
What’s really cool is what they did with the footage after the fact to counteract the rotation of the arrow when fired. Seeing the arrow spin is cool enough in it’s own way, but by rotating the video at the same speed in the opposite direction we get to see a stabilized version of the arrow’s flight. With special effects being what they are today, we doubt that something like this would ever be utilized in actual film making but it’s definitely on par with other POV videos giving us views we’d otherwise never get to see. We can’t help but get excited at what the future has in store for videos like this as commercially available cameras become smaller and lighter.
What POV footage would you like to see done? Let’s discuss in the comments below!
Image:Â Sam and Niko
