If, five years ago, you happened to find yourself on the rural roads of Tuscany and cast your eyes to the sky, you may well have seen something surprising. Rising from the trees... not a bird, not a plane, but a personal flying drone. That’s because here in the picturesque Italian countryside Jetson was working to change travel as we know it today.
Now, Jetson’s mission has become a reality. To record the trials and tribulations of building an innovative aerial vehicle, Jetson teamed up with camera company Insta360, with whom they share a belief in bold ideas.
“Thinking bold is about believing in yourself, and accepting risk”, Jetson founder and president Peter Ternström says of the mantra that guided their groundbreaking project.
To find out more about this amazing project and how Insta360 played a vital part in the process, take a look at the video below:
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… In 1980s Sweden, a young Peter Ternström had a life-defining moment. The release of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi left Ternström captivated by the way Speeders tore through the sky. Not quite an airplane, not quite a motorbike, they were unlike anything he’d ever seen before, and he was obsessed.
Tomasz Patan knows the feeling well. “As a kid I often stared at the sky, thinking about…how to get off the ground and just fly freely,” he explains. Regularly skipping classes to build his own helicopters and airplanes, he knew that this would be a lifelong passion.
• Why not check out the top 10 360 videos ever filmed?
In 2017, Ternström reached out to Patan, and invited him to Italy to try to turn his childhood dream into a real-life flying Speeder. “Life is about making your dreams come true, that’s how you become a complete human being”, Ternström says of the decision to start work on the project. Patan was soon in Italy, where the pair began their quest to change the way we travel and to make everybody a pilot.
Eventually, the Jetson One was born. Composed of a race car-inspired aluminum and carbon fiber frame and equipped with eight high-power motors, the One is an impressive feat of engineering. With a pilot sitting between the rotors in a lightweight chassis, it certainly wouldn’t look out of place in the Star Wars galaxy that inspired it.
Capturing such a sci-fi innovation required a camera with equally out-of-this-world capabilities. The pair started using Insta360 ONE X2 to record the progress and the successes of their build. Mounted to the back of the Jetson One with the Invisible Selfie Stick, Insta360 ONE X2 shot unobstructed third-person views in epic 5.7K 360.
The Jetson team could choose all the best angles after the flight thanks to 360 reframing, while built-in FlowState Stabilization kept the videos super smooth. Patan adds, “Creating the Jetson One, I knew it was going to be something very special and revolutionary. I couldn't imagine not having the Insta360 ONE X2 to record the flights”.
It just goes to show that the best 360 cameras can be used to showcase not just action, but a building process and become an "always-watching" solution for filmmakers and documentaries, highlighting important moments throughout a process, and of course always getting the right angle you or the filmmaker desires.
