Flying

Though hugely clichéd, it is a great picture to take.

I am of course talking about the photograph of someone jumping and the fact that although it has been done more than one hundred thousand times before, it is impossible to take a bad 'jumping picture'. While someone jumps they are incapable of not pulling a humorous face and most likely an interesting pose. If you happen to take a picture of someone before or after the core action of a jump they will still have a genuine smile/stupid look across their face and perhaps an even more entertaining stance.

I try to capture a jumping picture where ever I go and even though they are all very similar I see little chance of me getting bored of them.


This video ended up being a collection of two hundred well executed jumping pictures (we had a bin to lean the camera on) lined up as stop motion. My sister suggested the video, it's not new but we knew it would be fun to construct and we would look stupid.

We set the camera up on said bin (we marked out its position with sticky tape to try and minimise video jitter) and agreed to jump two hundred times each to give each of us around 30 seconds of flight time at fifteen frames per second.

What we weren't prepared for was the immediate physical pain in the front side of the thighs. After fifty good tall jumps I was ready for a break and a shower, by the time I had got through two hundred jumps I was knackered to say the least.

Something I wasn't expecting the next day was a new pain in the obliques, the muscles that run down the side of your stomach. On speaking with surprise trampoline victims, the results are the same, perhaps the muscles are tied in with throwing your arms in the air for upward motion?

Anyway the nifty effect of flying via the complete appropriation of other peoples video ideas makes this three day pain worth while.

In terms of compiling the video, we first found that it was quite tricky to jump consistently for smooth video flying. Secondly, we noticed that to achieve smooth(ish) movements whilst flying (spinning around, etc) requires varying the position of your jump by such small amounts (given the rate that the pictures are played back in the finished video) that the task becomes quite tricky. For example, to spin round three hundred and sixty degrees over three seconds of video would (at fifteen frames per second) require you to split the spin into forty-five jumps of eight degrees each.