How Shots Of The Olympic Divers Are Done

How does the camera follow the divers as they leap off the platform and gracefully move through the air until they enter the water? The answer is amazingly simple yet brilliant.

Well, there’s a rope. There’s a pulley. And the rope and the pulley work a contraption made out of a pipe. The whole gizmo is based on the brilliant insight that objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass. A Tuscan by the name of Galileo came up with it about 400 years ago; if he were alive, he’d call it cutting edge. And there’s the beauty of it: It’s sophisticated, yes, but only because it’s simple.

Read more over here at the Wall Street Journal.