KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 4 ― Well, they won a share of the winners’ pot, in case. GoPro has just concluded its annual Million Dollar Challenge for the second year running — with a US$1 million (about RM4.1 million) prize up for grabs. A two minute video with 56 clips from 45 creators is now up on their official YouTube channel, and it makes for some exhilarating viewing.
Have a look, and thank us later:
US$22,000 per winner
Despite the name of the challenge/video, the prize pool of US$1 million is actually being split among the 45 winners, which comes up to around US$22,222 (about RM90,500). Before 2019, the folks over at GoPro generally dropped in-house videos that showed off the latest range of GoPro cameras with action shots, but for the second year running, they’ve turned it into a challenge — as well as a compilation of the GoPro community’s most stunning efforts caught on camera.
The 56 clips squeezed into one exhilarating, jaw-dropping video with a run-time of just over 2 minutes come from 45 creators from 17 countries, and two of the winners are actually from Malaysia. Chong Jia Wai, whose clip was shot at Elmina Valley Park, Shah Alam, and Baki Zainal at Escape Theme Park, Pulau Pinang, are the two Malaysian winners — if you want to skip ahead, Jia Wai’s clip is at the 0:36 mark, while Baki Zainal’s shot is around the 1:27 mark.
The judges for the challenge had to go through something like 350 hours of footage, and compile it all into a short video (run-time: 2:17), and it’s certainly a great advert for GoPro’s latest hardware: the Hero 8 Black and the GoPro Max. GoPro Associate Creative Director (and the editor behind the challenge), Daniel Sherer explained:
“At first, when filtering through 42,000 submissions, you’re excited to see anything that’s well executed, but after a while, you start looking at it from the perspective of how shots will play with each other. We’ve seen a growing amount of curiosity and creativity influencing what people are capturing in their worlds, especially with the addition of MAX, so this is something we knew we wanted to highlight as well.”
Part of what GoPro tries to illustrate through the video is the versatility of GoPro’s cameras, as well. The variety of shots has some serious range to it, from clips of fireworks, to underwater recordings, to fighter jets in the sky — and of course, a ton of extreme sport videos. The modular nature of the GoPro Hero 8 Black, of course, means that an extra layer of flexibility is there, while the Hero Max is GoPro’s successor to the Fusion360 camera. ― SoyaCincau
