This year has seen the introduction of Ray Ban glasses with cameras built into them which has seen on-ride POV recording of a variety of rides and coasters all around the world.
They’re discreet, the park rarely tells you to remove your glasses (especially if the lenses are changed to look like prescription ones) and the rise in on-ride footage on coasters where the parks DO NOT allow on-ride filming soared in 2024.
Fast forward to today and we were sent a POV of the upcoming Mine Cart Madness ride from Universal Studios Japan during a special preview where filming isn’t allowed. The footage is naturally, terrible BUT people wouldn’t need to resort to these measures if they were just allowed to film in the first place.
Many theme parks around the world allow on-ride filming with chest-mounted cameras and other parks require you to have public liability insurance to do on-ride filming safely.
If guests were allowed to film on-ride with mounted cameras you’d see a decrease in sneaky footage being shot on-ride and you’d see an increase in on-ride videos which promote the park and the ride experience and help to increase the quality of creator vlogs with more personalised on-ride footage.
The Mine Cart Madness POV is not official and it has been shot poorly from a strange angle and the ‘illusion’ that the ride will give riders just is impossible to be captured in this unofficial footage.
Parks should be doing more to screen passengers if they have a strict no filming rule and whilst no filming rules should always be respected it’s the park’s defiance against on-ride filming which puzzles many and therefore encourages people to do sneaky filming to get the content they want/need to share.
For those who create content and record on-ride regularly for a living, parks need to accommodate on-ride filming even if there is a blanket ban on EVERYONE being able to film on-ride.
It’s not a safety issue when all of these parks have at some point worked with influencers to film on-ride and also when Universal themselves released a small segment of official POV during the area announcement video.
Simply, release the official POV video and rake in the views or hold a media event where influencers can capture their content on the new ride. That way the influencers will get exclusive media day content, it’s exclusive and shot within a controlled and safe environment.
That way you get people who have experience doing this kind of filming releasing unique angles, shots and footage from a variety of positions and angles Vs these terrible quality videos that people are resorting to, to leak a ride before launch.
In time a proper POV will be displayed from the eye-line that will showcase the ride in a much better light than this one. The area and the new ride are set to open on December 11th and the Universal Epic Universe version of the ride will open in Orlando on May 22, 2025.
For crying out loud, just let us ‘professionals’ (I use that term lightly) do our jobs!
Check out the video by the original uploader (@dxnn91 on Tik Tok) below:
@dxnn91 Mine Cart Madness – Worlds first POV. #minecartmadness #universaljapan #donkeykongcountry #epicuniverse #usj #supernintendoworld ♬ 5 MINUTES SILENT SOUND – 🦇𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐅𝐈𝐋𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐆𝐔𝐘™
