There’s a part in A Clockwork Orange where Alex (Malcolm McDowell) jumps out of a window. The shot is done from his point of view as he falls. I’d heard before that Stanley Kubrick accomplished this by dropping a camera, but not this:
We bought an old Newman Sinclair clockwork mechanism camera (no pun intended) for £50. It’s a beautiful camera and it’s built like a battleship. We made a number of polystyrene boxes which gave about eighteen inches of protection around the camera, and cut out a slice for the lens. We then threw the camera off a roof. In order to get it to land lens first, we had to do this six times and the camera survived all six drops.
—Interviews with Stanley Kubrick
Six takes!