The soul-stirring Canberra Balloon Spectacular is underway and Balloons Aloft pilot Gary Lacey is making short, exhilarating films of his daily flights and posting them on Vimeo.
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Most Canberrans, for lack of time or money or basket-room or pluck, can never go aloft with the balloonists, but Lacey's films enable wistful terrestrials to take virtual flights (and at thrillingly unballoonlike high speeds).
As you will see at Vimeo the little films are excitingly strange. They offer novel views of Canberra and of Lacey's balloony neighbours in the skies while he is up there among the dawn armada. We wondered how on earth Lacey makes them and caught up with him, to ask him, in Thursday's pre-dawn darkness outside Questacon as he prepared for that morning's ascent. In the darkness I found myself interviewing his silhouette.
His silhouette explained that he takes up two of the impressively miniature GoPro cameras. The first of them fits into a frame that also contains a regulation camera that takes in-flight still pictures of the passengers (as souvenirs of the adventure).
That frame hangs behind and out from the balloon, between five and 10 metres of the basket, from a rope hanging from the edge of the actual envelope of the balloon. The other GoPro is clamped somewhere on the basket, to look in a different direction, at front views, from the aforementioned dangling, backward-facing one.
"There's nothing highly technical about it whatsoever with the GoPro cameras. I just turn them on. I press 'record' and leave them alone for the entire flight."
We'd been sure, looking at the videos, that they were quirky works of art by an artist but Lacey, cheerful and modest, doesn't really think he deserves to be thought of as a film-maker.
"It was for my own interest that I started doing this [using the GoPros]. I didn't do it [laughing at the thought] for any artistic or commercial reason. I just wanted to have, for myself, a record of the flight. For training purposes really, perhaps to see if I'd missed a possible landing site where I might have put the balloon down earlier. I'd look at the film to see what happened and to assess the flight, to see whether I did it right or wrong."
So it's a record of the flight that works, in its far simpler fashion, like the black box carried on airliners.
"Of course I carry GPS but that only tells you so much. You can plot that on a map in two dimensions but these films sort of tell you where you actually were and what you were doing at the time.
"So the films started out as highly practical things. But then I showed them to a few friends and they said 'These are really good. You should put them on YouTube.' "
And so Lacey, not a fan of YouTube, is posting them on Vimeo the online gallery that boasts "Vimeo is the home for high-quality videos and the people who love them.".
A big part of the quirky joy of the Lacey videos is that the action in them, greatly speeded up, makes them helter-skelter entertainment, at entertaining odds with ballooning's stately glidings.
"Yes, they're sped up," Lacey's silhouette confirmed.
"Each flight lasts about an hour and no one wants to watch an hour-long video. So we speed it up between eight and 20 times. So you get a three minute video from a one hour flight."
