/ˌsiNGɡyəˈlerədē/ A point in time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. By Bradford Schmidt
“This is the only button you should use, right here,” I insist. “Don’t press anything else.” Anthony Walsh nods, but he’s barely paying attention. Each camera has three identical buttons and there are six identical cameras, which make for a total of eighteen identical buttons. Walsh’s instincts magnetically pull his eyes to the horizon. “The button with the orange tape on the side is the master camera. Wait for it to boot up, then press...” “Here comes the set of the day!” Manoa Drollet roars the jetski and the tow rope whips taut. Walsh is yanked from the side of the boat into the angry Tahitian lineup. Indeed, the largest set of the morning darkens the horizon. Drollet’s little brother, Matahi, is also on the rope, about ten feet in front of Walsh. We’re attempting to tandem tow into a double-overhead-plus Teahupo’o wave carrying a virtual reality prototype rig. Perhaps this has all become too complicated. As Drollet arcs the pair into position, Walsh frantically presses buttons as his eyeballs ping-pong from the two-story beast cresting behind him to the multiplicity of tiny blinking-red lights in his hand. The prototype camera ball is roughly the size and weight of a human skull, affixed to the neck of an extendable metal pole. A safety tether runs from the costly camera ball to Walsh’s wrist, but against an angry double-overhead Teahupo’o set, who are we kidding? Matahi and Walsh let go of the rope, draw their lines, and drop in deep. Too deep. It’s mean. The wave clamps. Several long moments later, Walsh and Matahi bob to the foamy surface. Walsh holds up a lonesome pole. Somewhere in the violent centrifugal chaos, the camera ball was decapitated and the tether snapped. “I don’t think it was recording anyways,” Walsh shrugs off the beating, back on the boat. I gingerly handed him our backup unit. It’s older and more unreliable. This was our last chance to get the shot or fly home empty-handed. Walsh listens intently to my explanation of how to set this specific camera ball to record. “Easy as,” Walsh responds flatly. Easy may not be the most accurate of adjectives.
That was September of 2014. Let me rewind to September of 2009. There’s a knock on my office door. Nicholas Woodman, the exuberant and eternally optimistic leader of our small camera company, pokes his head in. “What do you know about 3D?” It’s a corner office with a pleasant view of the countryside in Half Moon Bay. I’ve only just officially started the job, and even then, I remember thinking that there’s something about this idea, this tiny camera, that feels big. But no one imagined the behemoth it would become, not even Woodman. I’d met Woodman on a local chicken ferry out to the Mentawais in 2002. Back then, water cameras were expensive, fragile, and cumbersome, but we still wanted to document and share our experiences out there. Woodman used a broken leash and a series of rubber bands to strap a disposable water camera to his wrist, enabling him to surf and snap pictures at the same time. The results were good enough that he wanted to start a “wrist-strap” company, which adapted to any disposable water camera on the market. But Kodak and Fuji refused to allow their logos to be printed on the packaging, and that idea was crushed. Instead of giving up, Woodman flew to China to source a reusable water camera. His wrist strap company became an upstart digital camera company, one that would ultimately outsell all its rivals. It’s funny how sometimes the worst thing in the moment ends up being the best thing, though perhaps the pendulum can swing both ways. Post-it notes litter the desk in my corner office. Ideas, tasks, calibration charts, and color wheels. It’s organized chaos. “360 Cities,” scrawled on one particular note, was an app that stitched together photo panoramas, like a new thing called Google Street View. We riff back and forth about creating something like that for a moving image, to be able to freely look around inside a video. Beside me is a bookshelf full of older prototype cameras with various experimental wide-angle lenses, duct taped on for testing. This had been the camera’s real breakthrough moment, the 170-degree, fisheye lens that became the signature look of the brand. Woodman pauses at my office door before exiting. “Let’s start with 3D,” he says. “There’s a lot of buzz about it. Work on camera sync with the engineers in Shenzhen. Get your prototype together with footage to play on the screens at the Vegas NAB show in April.” His smile became mischievous. “And clean up your desk, man. You can’t possibly keep track of anything with shit everywhere?” I turn back to my screen. In the middle is a new Post-it note in Woodman’s handwriting: “Show them what they’ve never seen before.”
Time is not real. I don’t mean that in some philosophical way. It’s just a fact you must accept when attempting to sync multiple camera systems. Even if you have two cameras pressed to record at the exact same time, one camera will record a hair faster or slower than the other. The difference may not be perceptible in a single second, but after several minutes of recording, the two cameras will drift further and further apart, creating noticeable discontinuity. When you have a half-dozen cameras, this discontinuity grows exponentially. The wave of 3D receded as fast as it came. But the idea of multiple synced tiny cameras was left on the shoreline, unnoticed by many, except for a mustachioed Englishman by the name of Tim Macmillian. It was in April of 2010 when Macmillian and his brother, Cal, stopped by our booth at NAB in Las Vegas. GoPro had arrived in the consciousness of professional filmmakers and they were swarming with wallets wide open. A dozen of us worked to contain the onslaught. Meanwhile, Sony, Canon, and Nikon were glaring over at our booth, wondering how in the hell this little company was selling multiples of the same camera to a single customer. In the evenings, the 12 of us would empty wads of cash from our pockets onto the hotel mattress where wild-eyed Woodman would dole out portions so we could celebrate in the casino before waking up the next morning in a fog and doing it again. “Have you ever synced more than two cameras together?” yelled the jolly Englishman in my ear. The cacophony around us went silent, our blaring booth music fading to a low hum. “I want to use your cameras to stop time. Photogrammetry. You know, Matrix shit.” He really did have a fabulous mustache, one that demanded your attention.
excerpt from The Surfer's Journal feature article Issue 29.5 - October 1, 2020
