"HD video cameras were getting smaller and cheaper, and I thought - I could fix these to the microlight itself and get some amazing shots as we fly," he explains. "And it works. But the video was the easy part, relatively speaking."
Whilst filming for his documentary Flying The Falls, about a flight to the waterfalls of Northern Namibia and Zambia, he was plagued by the sound of the wind. "It's completely impossible to record using a standard mic while flying along - I use a headset mic in my helmet if I'm doing commentary as we fly. But when we land, I use a couple of Sony mics to capture the ambience and it was all being ruined by the wind. It's really frustrating."
Before his next filming project, which became Flying The Blue, about a 3000-mile trip up the coastal atolls and reefs of Mozambique, he contacted Rycote HQ in the UK and talked through what he was planning to do. He agreed to try using a Softie camera mount and windshield. As a result, the audio on Flying The Blue was a lot less troublesome. "It transformed what I was doing," he reports. "It's enabled me to try all sorts of things I couldn't have done before."
(Jim Evans)
