Nikesh Shukla is a novelist in the U.K. with a new book, Meatspace, released this past summer. Like any budding author, Shukla was eager to promote his new novel in any way he could. That’s when Shukla and his friends came up with the idea of attaching a fried lamb chop and a GoPro camera to a hot air balloon.
The balloon launched without a hitch on June 14th of this year. Sadly, the cold temperatures of the upper atmosphere destroyed the sensors on the GPS device. When the lamb chop and camera came back to Earth, Shukla couldn’t find them. The lamb chop was lost in the English countryside for 5 months.
Lucky for Shukla, a couple of farmhands 82 miles from launch found the camera with the footage intact. Here is the delicious lamb chop reporting for duty.
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Once Shukla and his team retrieved the camera, they found that it had captured around 100 minutes of footage.
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The footage included the lamb chop’s stunning ascent through Earth’s atmosphere.
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Boldly going where no lamb chop has gone before.
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The balloon carried the lamb chop around 100,000 feet up into Earth’s atmosphere before it burst.
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After they got the camera back, Shukla and his team cut the recovered footage together. The result is one of the best book trailers I’ve ever seen.
Via: The Independent
That’s one heck of a marketing campaign. It’s a good thing they managed to get that camera back. If the footage intrigued you, you can check out Shukla’s book, Meatspace, on Amazon.
