A documentary about a pioneering cameraman who jumps from planes so he can film cars falling from the sky is set to be released.
Space Cowboy focuses on Joe Jennings who specializes in filming freefalling objects such as vehicles, living rooms, and dining tables.
Jennings has been a skydiving stunt coordinator since 1994 and has completed over 13,000 jumps. In Space Cowboy, filmmaker Marah Strauch explores Jennings’ “insane passion for dropping large objects from the sky.”
According to Variety, the film chronicles Jennings’ life from his start in a hippie-commune school to a fateful skydiving experience that led him into professional camera flying, which involves jumping with a helmet camera to film the antics of other skydivers.
He met Rob Harris, an extreme sports enthusiast who became his skysurfing partner. The pair won two world championship titles and a gold medal at the X Games.
“As a competition camera flyer, I was obsessed with framing, stability, and three-dimensional flight, and I trained until these skills became part of my natural muscle memory,” Jennings writes on his website.
Jennings has been involved with major Hollywood productions including Charlie’s Angels, San Andreas, XXX, and Point Break.
But Variety notes that a large part of Space Cowboy focuses on “the Holy Grail of flying objects” which is finessing a car so that when it’s dropped from a plane it falls without spinning, tilting, or flipping over. The car also must hold four passengers who will eject with parachutes at the last possible second. Jennings believes what he does is “art”.
“My ambition is to get a car to not only come out wheels to Earth but to stay flat and stable without rocking,” Jennings says of the car stunt.
“So that skydivers could stay in it for a while and we could get some shots. Then you can go up and be more of a cinematographer like I want to fly up and get this shot and I want to kind of move around it this way, you know, you can capture it so much more beautifully I think.”
There’s no word on a release date for Space Cowboy but it is currently being shown at film festivals.
