Okay, I couldn’t resist. I put a couple of angles of a flight up in side-by-side frames and loosely synced them by hitting the start buttons at the appropriate times. Then I watched for a few minutes.
Suddenly, instead of gritty, disjointed, insider-only raw material, it looks like something that might soon actually be cinematic. It’s pretty. The sun wanders over the fuselage. Your eye gets drawn from angle to angle as the aircraft banks rolls or pitches. Oh, man, am I getting excited.
I’m still in the very early stages of editing. In fact, not even editing yet. Just cataloging and indexing and figuring out what I have. Call it Phase 1.
Once I get that done, I’ll assemble the video from all of the cameras (usually two or three per flight) along with the audio into multiclips in Final Cut Pro. That way, I can experience all of the multiple camera angles and the audio at once and actually figure out what I like and what the story is. Call That Phase 2.
Phase 3 is still a way off. That’s where the parts come together and get dropped into a timeline and actually assembled into a movie.
I think that the amount of fun is only going to increase as this thing goes on. Not that I’m not having fun right now, but I can’t wait to get to the later phases and really movie a movie out of this. It’s going to take pallets of Sugar Free Red Bull to make it happen, but I’m completely up for that.
And I guess there’s this, too: I see and hear stuff in this footage and in the music running through my head that is completely and utterly satisfying. Moments of beauty and truth. Not the bullshit rhetorical kind. No, these are things that happen when you fly that you can’t experience adequately because you’re too busy flying, but that are nevertheless there. Stuff that’s so beautiful, it hurts. And I get to see it in slow motion or from multiple angles and say, “Look! This matters! Pay attention to this! Now that! Now listen to this! Now shout!” And I get to capture it and show it to myself in a cogent way. Herein, ladies and gentlemen, I rationalize and make real to myself things that I’ve felt since I first read Sabre Jet Ace when I was six.
I suspect that you will like my movie. But it’s no longer essential that you do. It’s enough for me to do what I’m doing. I’ve heard people say that this mindset is the proper mental space in which to make things like this movie. If so, great. But great even if not.
The journey continues . . .
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