Check out the current episode of Airspeed for information about how we’re crowdsourcing some of the music for Acro Camp! Listen to the episode, download the guide tracks, play or sing, and you might find yourself in the soundtrack of an independent film!
Crowdsourcing A Piece of the Music
September 6, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Wing Cam footage of Jim’s Botched Hammerhead
September 4, 2010 by Leave a Comment
More slaving over a hot Mac this evening. But eminently worth it. I think I’m about 80% of the way through cataloging the aerial footage.
I found the wing camera version of Jim’s botched hammerhead. About the same level of drama as the cockpit camera, but a different angle.
Here’s a pretty good frame grab of Michelle and Don in the vertical. The footage is becoming much more Pitts and Super-D heavy with the Citabria only doing two flights on Day 3.
A Taste of The Fun Part
September 4, 2010 by Leave a Comment
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 . . .
Jim’s Botched Hammerhead in the Pitts
September 3, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Think Acro Camp is all about beautiful and coordinated flying? No-sir-ee bob!
In this outtake, camper Jim Rodriguez botches a hammerhead. Ugly, ugly, ugly!
But how are you going to learn how to do it right if you don’t do it wrong every once in awhile? And, perhaps more importantly, you’re going to botch a maneuver every now and then. You might as well see what botched maneuvers look like and learn how to recover from (and eventually laugh at!) them. I can’t think of another IP or airplane that I rather have it happen to me in. Jim is in great hands with Don and the Berz Pitts.
Folks, Acro Camp is about real people who are a lot like you hanging it out there on the edge and getting a good snootful of what’s up there. It’s a genuine story of transformation and growth. Botched, beautiful, and otherwise. I can’t wait to share it with you!
Tech Frame Mosaic Proof of Concept
September 2, 2010 by Leave a Comment
No, you’re not going blind. It’s just that I think I have enough tech frames now to do a quick prof of concept for the DVD note card. A “tech frame” is a frame from the raw footage, usually from the very beginning or the very end of the sequence. It usually shows the tech starting or stopping the camera, but it sometimes also shows the interesting goings-on immediately before or after a flight.
In any case, I started grabbing these from the very beginning with the thought that I’d find a use for them at some point. And how about this? We use them in mosaic form as a background for the blow-in card in the DVD case. One mosaic of the tech frames for the technical notes and one mosaic using camper frame grabs for the explanatory stuff and credits.
Pretty cool, eh?
Movie One: My Own Little High-Speed Taxi Test
August 31, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Hey! Who’s that guy in the black Ford Escape out there on the taxiway? Is he authorized? Is he talking to ground control?
As a matter of fact, he is!
This frame grab from the rear-facing camera on the Super D on Day 2 of Acro Camp shows the vehicle from which Director of Photography Will Hawkins was shooting takeoffs out rear window while I drove and talked to ground control on the radio and Jack Hodgson rode along as safety pilot in the right seat.
With an airport taxi diagram gaffer-taped to the dash and a paper trail months in the making, we were cleared to go hurtling down Taxiway Delta between the threshold of Runway 27R and Taxiway Juliet about 3,500 feet west doing up to 80 mph paralleling the Citabria and the Super D on takeoff.
If you ever though you felt out of place at a party or other occasion, try driving around on a taxiway in an SUV in the busy movement area of a Class D airport. It’s like one of those walking-around-in-public in-your-underwear dreams, only it’s not a dream and yet it’s okay on this one special occasion.
I submitted a plan ahead of time to both the FAA and Oakland County months ahead of time. I had brand new batteries in my Sporty’s handheld radio. I briefed the profile until I was sick of it. I even had the current ATIS when I checked in on the frequency at Victor Row. But that’s what you do when you want to make some art out there in the movement area.
We only made two runs, but they were fun and we got some usable footage out of it. And it was a lot of fun using the callsign “Movie One” on an ATC frequency. After the first run, ground even cleared me to “back taxi on Delta” to the threshold to film the other aircraft.
“Back taxi.” In my car. Yeah!
The only sticky bit was that the word about us hadn’t quite gotten to the fire department on the field. The otherwise friendly guys who drive the big lime-green trucks saw us blazing down the taxiway and had a minor freakout. Understandable, of course. What would you think if you sawan SUV tooling around on the taxiway at high speed chasing airplanes?
If I could have convinced myself that they weren’t armed, I might have entertained the notion of jumping out of the vehicle, pointing wildly at the sky, and yelling something about how my ex-wife had just made off with my airplane. But nah. I still hold out the possibility that I might need those guys at the fire station someday. And I want them to think kindly of me if I ever do.
Anyway, Pontiac ground assured them on the radio that we were authorized to be out there and we even pulled into the station afterward to have a meet-and-greet and explain what was going on without little enterprise. We even made some new friends after everybody’s heart rates subsided a little.
Lots and lots of firsts doing this movie. I had a ball. And I’m getting to re-live it as I go through all of the footage. My only regret is that we weren’t running a couple of cameras on Movie One . . .
A Fine Day’s Cataloging
August 30, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Another fine day of editing here at Airspeed Studios. I got most of Day 2 (15 May) cataloged and ready to link up with alternate camera angles and the cockpit audio. And I found several of the Easter eggs that the cast left for me. Like this shot of Jim Rodriguez and Don Weaver giving the thumbs up, er, down, er up.
The tech frame evolved when Roger Bishop gave in to the ham that’s in all of us and gave the camera a wave. Being a guy with a true sense of lighting and composition, I’m sure that he couldn’t resist stepping out into the near-perfect lighting of one of the early flights of that day.
A nice shot of Paul and Barry in the vertical. Do I need a further reason?
Nicholas “FOD” Tupper stopped by and I got him in the frame of the rear-facing camera on the Super D.
Paul “Gump” Berliner mugs for the camera during a Pitts ride later in the day.
Watching Day 2 Happen
August 29, 2010 by Leave a Comment
I’ve been spending most of today going through the video from Day 2 of Acro Camp, namely Saturday 15 May. Beautiful sunshine in the morning with high cirrus clouds (much like you see here) that gave way to a high overcast toward the evening.
Above you can see one of my favorite shots of Paul Berliner. It’s not going to surprise me it Paul ends up being the favorite camper of many who see the movie. I haven’t even watched these flights with the audio synced up, but I can just tell from watching Paul and the IP that Paul is having a lot of fun and that both of the IPs really enjoy flying with him.
Shooting B-Roll With Don
August 28, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Don Weaver and I headed out yesterday so that I could fly a few instrument approaches for currency in a C-172 and so that he could head over to Ray Community Airport to do some dual in the Acro Camp Pitts S-2B. I took along a GoPro HD Hero and stuck it in the airplane to get B-roll footage of Don flying the Pitts. Pretty day out there and we got some good shots.
