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A hollowed-out cumulus cloud over the Queensland outback becomes the runway for two wingsuit pilots, and the camera that filmed it never needed a second angle.
The clip that GoPro pushed out under its Awards banner in mid-July 2018 looks, at first glance, like a cliff jump gone spectacularly right. It isn’t. The flight was an airplane jump, launched out of the Skydive Ramblers dropzone near Toogoolawah, Queensland, and the wingsuit pilots threading the gap in that cloud formation are Luke Rogers and Chris Byrnes. What actually makes the footage remarkable has less to do with the jump itself and more to do with the single camera that recorded the whole thing.
- Wingsuit pilots Luke Rogers and Chris Byrnes flew the jump over Toogoolawah, Queensland, operating out of the Skydive Ramblers dropzone.
- The entire sequence was shot on one GoPro Fusion 360-degree camera, then reframed in post using GoPro’s OverCapture software rather than stitched from multiple cameras.
- Daniel Hitchcock Sherer directed and edited the GoPro Awards release with producer Phillippe Matteini, and the footage went on to rack up millions of views along with coverage from outlets like GearJunkie.
An Airplane Jump, Not a Cliff Launch
Plenty of write-ups on this clip describe it as a cliff BASE jump by an unnamed crew squeezing through a cave-shaped cloud. That’s not what happened. Rogers and Byrnes exited an aircraft over Toogoolawah, a stretch of countryside northwest of Brisbane known to Queensland skydivers as home turf for Skydive Ramblers, one of the region’s established dropzones. The “cave” in the footage is a cumulus formation hollowed out enough to fly a wingsuit line straight through it, with the pilots tracking side by side as the cloud walls curve around them.
Mechanism of OverCapture Technology
The technical hook here isn’t multi-camera blending — it’s the opposite. A GoPro Fusion shoots a full sphere in one take, and OverCapture lets an editor punch a conventional, flat 2D frame out of that sphere after the fact, panning and tilting through the recorded 360 field as if a camera operator were live on the scene. That’s how the footage appears to whip-pan and reframe mid-fall without a second unit anywhere near the pilots. It’s the same underlying capture approach GoPro has leaned on across other extreme-sport releases built around its Fusion line, letting a single sensor do the work a rig of GoPros used to require.
One GoPro Fusion camera, one flight over Toogoolawah, and a reframing tool called OverCapture turned a cloud formation into a viral centerpiece.
The Team Behind the Cut
Daniel Hitchcock Sherer took creative direction and handled the post-production edit for the GoPro Awards release, working with producer Phillippe Matteini to shape the raw 360 capture into the finished clip that circulated online. Awards submissions like this one are how GoPro has built out its Fusion showcase reel — user and creator footage repurposed into short, high-impact edits meant to sell the camera’s capabilities as much as the stunt itself.
A Viral Showcase for Spherical Cameras
The clip spread fast through action-sports coverage, picked up by outlets including GearJunkie, and piled up millions of views across GoPro’s own channels. For a camera category still proving itself against traditional action cams, a wingsuit pass through a cloud cave — captured on one sensor and reshaped entirely in editing — was about as clean a demonstration as GoPro could ask for.
GoPro kept leaning on OverCapture in the Awards pipeline after this one landed, and it’s easy to see why: a single Fusion camera strapped to a wingsuit pilot did what used to take a chase plane and a second shooter, and the internet couldn’t tell the difference.
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