Including Ericeira, a very secret slab and even Nazaré, all shot from the world's tiniest helicopter…
If his Facebook photos are to be believed, Pedro Miranda is a striking and hirsute man of, let’s say, late twenties to early thirties. Good jawline, a hint of a beard without looking like he came from 2010 and two fine legs held up by a powerful superstructure.
Pedro is part of a two-man “drone operation team highly specialised in surf and bodyboard action shots, a niche where we’ve been doing a lot of experimentation trying to get new unseen angles.”
Their setup is a custom-made DJI Quadcopter with a GoPro Hero4 Black mounted on a three-axis gimbal.
(Ladies? Are you wet?)
Pedro sent me his movie The Flying Machine today and wrote, “The waves featured in this clip are all in Portugal, and all captured during the last winter season. There are a few waves captured in several spots of Ericeira, including the ‘Cave’ which is one of the dangerous slab in the country. The most perfect waves on the clip were captured during one of the best sessions of the season on a secret spot of the west coast. At the end of the clip, there’s some action on Nazaré, Garrett McNamara rescuing Rodrigo Koxa from the rocks, a wave from Ross Clarke-Jones, another massive one by Tom Butler, and the last wave which you may recognise from Samsung’s latest commercial We are Greater than I. That’s Sebastian Steudtner surfing that wave. He won this year’s XXL Biggest Wave Award on an even bigger wave caught that day.”
My advice?
Breeze past the first minute, it starts slow, y’see, and maybe avoid it altogether if a cross-cultural mix of bodyboarding and surfing ain’t your thing.
The Flying Machine from Máquina Voadora on Vimeo.