There is a certain stereotype that follows GoPro users around — one often associated with the words “adrenaline” and “bro” — but the company’s latest highlight reel showcases a softer side of its customers. The two-minute supercut is the first built entirely from user-generated content, submitted for GoPro’s Million Dollar Challenge, and the company’s editors selected a nice diversity of clips for the final cut.
Oh, don’t get us wrong, it still features plenty of death-defying stunts — and we admittedly eat that stuff up — but in addition to getting you totally stoked, this video will make you say “Aww!” more than once. Jumping a dirt bike off a cliff? Stoked. Little girl naming her pet chicken? “Aww!” Naturally, a broad selection of beautiful locations is on display, with views taken from land, sky, and sea.
Choosing and combining the clips was no small order. “There were certain clips I was always looking for,” creative director Josh Currie said in a GoPro blog post. “Stuff that’s aspirational, stuff that’s high energy — you want faces, you want to connect to the people, and you want all the people who submitted to feel that they are connected in a way as well.”
As this is the official highlight reel for the new GoPro Hero7 Black, all clips were shot on that camera and appear to show off one headline feature very well: The HyperSmooth electronic image stabilization. While GoPro doesn’t fully explain the secrets behind how HyperSmooth works, it is at least partially thanks to an increase in processor memory and a new algorithm designed to counter the jello-cam effect of rolling shutter. The result is the best electronic image stabilization we’ve ever seen, whether you’re just trying to get a steady handheld shot or barreling down the face of a cliff on a mountain bike.
GoPro says it received over 25,000 submissions for the highlight reel contest, which awarded a total of $1 million divided evenly among all users whose clips were selected. In the end, videos from 56 users representing 25 countries were chosen, leaving each user with a cool $17,800. At the time of writing, the video has been viewed over half a million times on YouTube.
