A GoPro slips from a skydiving plane, spins down thousands of feet, thumps into a farmyard and ends up nose to snout with a curious pig. The clip, posted to YouTube by Mia Munselle and picked up by CBS News, Time and Gizmodo in February 2014, became one of the most shared action-camera videos of the year.
The GoPro that fell from a skydiving plane
The footage opens inside the aircraft as skydivers get ready to jump. The camera then drops out of the plane and the picture becomes a dizzying spin of sky and ground. After a long fall it lands in a pig pen, and within moments a pig comes over to inspect it, sniffing, grunting and biting at the housing before losing interest.
According to the video description, Munselle found the camera on her farm eight months after it fell, downloaded the memory card and uploaded the result, with the title promising viewers they “must watch the end”. Reports at the time, such as KRMG and CBS News, told the story the same way.
Real or fake? The questions viewers asked
A clip this tidy drew sceptics. PetaPixel listed the main questions people raised:
- Could a small camera survive a fall of several thousand feet?
- Why does the spinning picture seem to slow and steady in the final seconds?
- How did the housing survive eight months outdoors in a pen full of pigs?
Redditors who studied the soundtrack concluded that the strange “slowing” effect comes from the camera’s rotation falling into step with its frame rate, the same stroboscopic trick that makes car wheels look as if they turn backwards on film. Nobody ever fully settled the debate, and the video’s fame owes a lot to that uncertainty.
How a small camera can survive the fall
Size works in a falling camera’s favour. A skydiver in a belly-to-earth position reaches a terminal velocity of roughly 200 km/h, but a light, tumbling object has far more air resistance for its weight and falls much more slowly. A GoPro in its housing is small, light and sealed, and a landing on soft, muddy farm ground spreads the impact out.
The housing itself was built for punishment. The HERO3 range, announced in late 2012, came with a case rated waterproof to 60 metres (200 ft), designed for surfers, divers and riders who crash their boards and bikes. That toughness is why cameras lost by skiers and skydivers sometimes turn up months later with their footage intact.
GoPro and the rise of the action camera
Go Pro was founded by Nick Woodman in 2002 as Woodman Labs, based in San Mateo, California. Its first camera, a 35 mm film model aimed at surfers, went on sale in 2004, and digital models followed. By the time the pig-pen video went viral, GoPros were standard kit on ski slopes, helmets and handlebars, and the company floated on Nasdaq in June 2014.
Viral clips like this one did a lot of that marketing work. A camera that keeps rolling in a free fall, a snowstorm or a pig pen is the brand’s whole pitch in a few seconds.
More camera stories: a deliberately controlled aerial-camera concept; animal footage shaped by presentation.
Related reading
- Felix Baumgartner’s Stratos Jump: The Descent and Its Camera Views
- Nate Bolt’s San Francisco-to-Paris Flight Time-Lapse
- Shawn Reeder’s Yosemite Range of Light
- Farmington’s February 2013 Blizzard in Backyard Time-Lapse
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