Cheetahs on the Edge

Cheetahs on the Edge–Director’s Cut from Gregory Wilson on Vimeo.

Cheetahs are the fastest runners on the planet. Combining the resources of National Geographic and the Cincinnati Zoo, and drawing on the skills of an incredible crew, we documented these amazing cats in a way that’s never been done before.

Using a Phantom camera filming at 1200 frames per second while zooming beside a sprinting cheetah, the team captured every nuance of the cat’s movement as it reached top speeds of 60+ miles per hour.

The extraordinary footage that follows is a compilation of multiple runs by five cheetahs during three days of filming.

This is an incredible piece of video and I highly recommend that you watch it full screen and all the way to the very end so you can see the making of piece and a real time chunk of video of how fast the animals were really running.

The cheetah’s heads are so steady it’s like they’ve got gyroscopes built into them. Having had a cat I can vouch for the fact that cats have special abilities in this area, no doubt to enable hunting on the run but cheetahs being the fastest cats on earth take it to a whole different level.

[via The Kid Should See This]