Wow! Chippa Wilson’s Double Air-Reverse!

From the angle of the remote-control bird… 

Alex Bowden is a 23-year-old filmmaker, atelier and drone operator from Cabarita in New South Wales. Using two of these skills, he snatched from the wind this double air-reverse of his friend, Chris “Chippa” Wilson.

Chippa had sent Alex a message telling him the surf was better than average and that he might like to film with his cartilaginous remote control bird. Alex’s bird of choice is the Drone Phantom, which cost $1200 one year ago and which he has affixed a high-end GoPro ($600) and a viewing screen which he uses to see what the camera is filming, cost $300.

On this day, Alex had made three trips back to his little caravan that he keeps on the property of his parent’s farm to fish for various pieces that were missing from his drone set-up, batteries etc. When he eventually came back and sent his bird into the sky, just two minutes later, this is what occurred.

“There was another photographer on the beach and we looked at each other and went, ‘What?'”

Alex has form on a number of levels. He had a clothing label called Bammf which he only recently shut down, makes short films, snatches the occasional wedding and shoots surfing here and there, mostly on the drone.

“It’s pretty cheap for what it does,” he says. “That’s why I got into it.”

Once, he even flew his drone into the backyard of the Big Brother house in Queensland and dropped one of his Bammf tees there. He used a technique he’d seen a fisherman employ to drop bait a kilometre offshore where a coat hanger is affixed to the bird’s undercarriage and the pilot, back on land, gyrates the drone back and forth to shake loose its cargo. (Click here to watch.)

On the t-shirt was a skull and the words, “Fuck your mum.”

“I hate the show,” says Alex. “It’s degrading to put all those people in a little room and then monitor their behaviour.”

Alex also has concerns with the drone.

“I feel like drones are pushing the barrier of giving civilians too much fucking control,” he says. “I flew a shirt into the Big Brother house, flew around the CBD of Melbourne. Man, you could strap a bomb to those things.”

Wait, relax! He ain’t!

He’s got movies to make (Alex has a degree in filmmaking), music videos (Click here)  and (Click here) and he’s going to stretch that remote-control bird angle to its distant limit.