ROB HARRIS – Live while you live. We met by chance on a dz I’d visit perhaps once a month. Freestyle was new and camera flyers talked about how challenging it was to follow….
DAYS LIKE THIS – 5:30 AM: Malaysia, 6000 feet above the ground in an A-Star helicopter. We were in our third day of filming a skydiving sequence for an Indian movie called “Don”…..
SKYDIVING CARS – To date, I believe I’ve filmed over 200 skydiving vehicles. Flying with Cars and Objects has become a specialty. I know a lot about making them fly…..
FLYING FOR FOOD (my job) – In this article, I’ll try to give you an idea of what goes into bidding, planning, and filming for a production, and some of the things that can happen along the way.
HELICOPTERS AND WIRES – … the pilot took us down low for a cool shot. out of the corner of my eye i saw a glint of sun from a cable strung across the field.
FILMING A TIRE – Our problem out the gate was not knowing a thing about how tires fall at terminal velocity….
FLYING IMAX – The location was spectacular. The shoreline is carved into a tangle of inland waterways and our drop zone was a small island with palm trees and green grass surrounded by water and bridges
CATCHING A PLANE – The producers called to see how things were going with “my” project and all I could tell them was that we had no helicopter camera, no drogue, and a dust storm.
MTV BASE – When I learned to B.A.S.E. jump, I did it on MTV Sports….
PEPSI “GOOSE” – When we had the number one rated Super Bowl ad 🙂
So we go up in a King Air. I expected an almost impossible chase, super fast and changing fall rates. I’d heard it all from other camera flyers and didn’t know what to expect from my own flying skills. A feeling started to creep up on me, something I knew eight hundred jumps ago, that rush I used to feel chasing an AFF out the door hoping I wouldn’t take out the student and the instructors again. I was going to bust my ass on this one. On exit, my body was charged. Rob did barrels out the door and swung into a Daffy. Then he started a series of back and twisting layouts. I flew after him contorting my body, arching hard, flaring out, hugging the beach ball to slow fall rate and swooping into a dive to catch up. He was all over the sky and I felt like a human jet on a mission to stay with him, to keep the target in my sites. At deployment, I heard myself panting. I was hooked.
The competition in the intermediate division went like this. Tape five dives, turn in your favorite, and the judges would get back with the results. Bob Griner was there and around four others in our division.
Rob had less than 100 jumps, but his presentation to the camera was smooth. He looked cool. We won! I think I enjoyed that medal as much as any I’d ever taken home. And we were sure our names would turn up in Parachutist. They did in some small article and we felt famous. It was March ‘93.
It marked the beginning of our team. Rob decided to train – learn more about skysurfing. I liked to film skysurfing, I liked him. We trained in Taft, supported by the Jones family, for our first Advanced level competition at the ‘93 world meet in Empuria Brava, Spain. Around a month or so before the meet, Bill Jones gave us a bunch of free jumps from his Cessna. I guess he saw something in our work. And he’d take us for joy rides around whatever puffy clouds we could find and would show us different areas of the San Andreas Fault line (some day beach property) from the air. We did a bunch of jumps before taking off for Spain from Bill’s Cessna.
We flew business class (full flight, got lucky) to Spain via British Airways. From Barcelona we traveled to Empuriabrava via train. The competition was huge. Multilingual skysurfers, freestylists, and camera flyers from around the world. The equipment was slick, boards long, cameras tricked out. Rob reminded me that we were there just to do our best. That was our excuse.
One training day left. The otters at Empuriabrava had CD players jamming cool tunes all the way to altitude. We dialed in our best stuff and settled into the environment. Empuriabrava is one of the more beautiful places in the world to jump. The next day we landed from competition jump #1 in 3rd place just behind Eric Fradet and Werner Normberg with Patrick De Gayardon and Gus Wing in first.