Action Camera

An action camera goes where an operator cannot: on a helmet, on a bumper, under water, inside a jump. The footage carries that access before it carries anything else.

The wide lens puts the subject inside the frame rather than in front of it. A hand at the edge of the picture is enormous and the horizon is far away, and that exaggeration is the sensation of speed.

The lens is ultra wide and bends straight lines outward at the edges. That barrel distortion is the clearest single mark of the format.

The sensor is tiny, so everything from a few centimetres to the horizon is sharp. Nothing can be thrown soft, and nothing can be hidden.

Exposure is automatic and constant. The picture brightens and darkens as the camera swings between sky and ground, which no crewed camera would allow.

Use it for sport, for a chase, for a first person point of view, and for any shot mounted on a body, a vehicle or an animal.

Skip it for dialogue and for anything still. The format has nothing to offer a locked off frame.

A phone is also deep and wide, but its lines stay straight and it is usually held rather than mounted. An action camera bends the edges and rides on something.

A fisheye lens bends the frame the same way on any camera. The test is the rest of the picture: a fisheye shot can be shallow and lit, and an action camera shot is deep and exposed by the machine.

Hardcore Henry (2015) was filmed almost entirely on GoPro Hero3 bodies in a custom head rig, so the whole feature plays as one continuous first person view. Sport coverage has used the same mounts since the cameras appeared.

The model returns a wide shot from a tripod. Say the camera is mounted on the subject and moving with it.

The other failure is straight lines at the edges. Ask for barrel distortion explicitly, because it is the mark the model drops first.