I had a pretty big grin on my face yesterday when GoPro discovered our DIY Cable Cam Video and made it their ‘Video of the Day’. We had 26.3K views yesterday and people are still watching!
Permalink to Snow Bike at the Chill Factore
Snow Bike at the Chill Factore
One Friday morning we had an hour to film our mates who had just built themselves a ski bike. The Chill Factore (a.k.a. the Manchester Alps) were very kindly letting us test the bike out on their slopes before the centre opened. We didn’t have long to film but we made use of unusual angles and lots of gadgetry. We filmed using a Panasonic GH2 & GoPro HERO’s 1 & 2.
About the bike: The idea was to make a mountain bike into something capable of sliding down pistes, and snow covered hills, in such a way that the bike could turn back into a bike, and also ideally the result should not be catastrophic failure, injury to rider or other snow users etc. It was a big success and a lot of fun.
Permalink to Lego Man in Space filmed on GoPro
Lego Man in Space filmed on GoPro
After endless hours of hard work, two guys from Canada managed to film stunning views of our atmosphere and put a ‘Lego’ man into near space! In the 1 foot cubic capsule they used 4 cameras. Two cameras were taking stills and two taking video (one of which was a GoPro).
Permalink to 3 Things We Learnt Making Our DIY Cable Cam
3 Things We Learnt Making Our DIY Cable Cam
- Choose a very slick wheel/pulley, the less rolling resistance the better. We used a set of rollerblade wheels with good quality ABEC 5 bearings in. £79.99 new. On sale for £25, bargain.
- Braking mechanism is really important. The forces of the unit running into the knot at the end of the rope were enough to bend the steel frame of the cable cam. We used a towel laid over the rope at least 10ft from the knot, this worked perfectly. Some people suggest using a double rope.
- A camera keeper is very useful for when you are setting up shots – ie a tether for the camera so it can’t go sliding down the rope accidentally. It can also be used to help you haul the camera back up to the top for the next take.
Click here to watch our DIY Cable Cam video.
Permalink to How to make your own DIY Cable Cam
How to make your own DIY Cable Cam
At first I thought it was impossible but increasingly I’ve been coming round to the idea especially if we keep it simple.
So there’s two key elements to a cable cam. The rope/cable the camera runs on and the unit holding the camera. Our first choice of cable or rope was decided for us. Coming from a climbing background I had plenty of rope and kit to get it reasonably tense so we decided on 10mm semi static rope as our ‘cable’. The major issue for us was the design and build of the unit. I had seen a really good version on the web so decided to pretty much copy it.
We selected some heavy duty aluminium box section, found in my Dad’s shed. (We saw some steel or Aluminium box section in B&Q which would have been fine.) Cutting the box section to length was easily done, we cut it at about 75cm. The frame for the camera to sit in was made by bending the drilled steel plate to make a squared off U shape. The tilting plate for the camera was made using a cut to shape section of plywood and the corner brackets from B&Q screwed together. These all bolted together with some M6 threaded bolts cut to size and butterfly nuts. The thought then was to use cord to attach the pulleys to the box section once the cable was in place. This was all bought and cobbled together in about 4 hours on a Sunday afternoon.
Some lightweight steel plate with holes already drilled in it looked to be perfect for the frame for the camera to sit in. We also found some corner sections of steel in the roofing section of B&Q which worked perfectly as the tilting bottom plate for the camera once we screwd a section of plywood to it.
