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Acro Camp Cameos

August 27, 2010 by Leave a Comment

As fun as going through the actual Acro Camp footage can be, I needed a break from it this evening. So I started going through some of the footage that I shot at various airshows this summer. I wanted to get footage of a number of professional aerobatic pilots so that I could intersperse them throughout the film as cameos at appropriate moments.
As I’ve gone through them, I’ve become pretty excited about some of the interviews and other footage that I’ve captured. Everything from the Pitts S-2C to the A-10 to the F-22. Here, to whet your appetite, are a few frame grabs that I captured.
This just gets better and better as I build the film in my mind. It’s really beginning to come together.






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Yet Another Cataloging Session

August 9, 2010 by Leave a Comment

I spent a little time today cataloging video and audio from Friday 14 May, the first full day of flying at Acro Camp. I got through all of the non-Panasonic footage and about half the audio. Fortunately, I’m finding that the various Out of 20 video sequences, something like eight are mated up with their sister sequences from the same flight. And I have the audio mated up with several sequences as well. I sure wish that I had used a clacker board for a lot of these, but it turns out that it’s not going to be as hard as I thought it would be.
I went through some of the footage from David Allen’s ride with Don Weaver that evening and it got me really lonely for the Acro Camp experience. I e-mailed Dave the frame grab above. He e-mailed me back saying that we could probably get away with shooting the next one without actually having the first one on the can. And then went on to suggest that some folks would show up for subsequent Acro Camps regardless of whether there was a movie attached. Ever wonder why people gravitate to Dave? That’s just one of the many reasons.
That Friday probably had the best light of any day at Acro Camp. The frame grab of Michelle Kole and Don Weaver above is an artifact of that. Just gorgeous sunshine and even some high cirrus and low scattered to serve as a background.
Next, it’s the panasonic footage from the 14th. Hoping to have that done this coming week and then I can move on the cataloging the subsequent days of airborne footage. Once that happens, I’ll be able to stick it all in multiclips and really sit down to watch it all. This is the scut work phase. It only gets cooler from here.
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The Most Fun Ever Had by a Human

August 8, 2010 by 1 Comment

I’ve been working my way through the footage from Friday 14 May, the first real day of flying for Acro Camp. I’ve been working mostly with the wing-mounted and other exterior camera footage over the last week. But, this evening, I began going through some of the footage from the in-cockpit cameras as well.
I’ve decided that no human has ever had more fun flying aerobatics (or doing anything else) than Paul Berliner. I could tell that he was smiling from the wing cam footage, but the in-cockpit cameras really tell the story. There are even times that I can hear min shouting over the engine noise on the ContourHD camera (and I don’t have the intercom audio synched up yet, so it’s strictly ambient sound for now). The frame grab above is Paul’s reaction to his very first loop. I think they heard about it in the tower back at Pontiac. Without the need for the radio.
It turns out that Paul has a G-face as well. In fact, I think it’s the same as his zero-G face. Here’s he’s pulling up for his second loop. Paul pulls a little less hard on the loops than Jim, but not much less. He got nice round shapes out of the loops that he did. I can’t tell whether Barry’s helping, but I suspect that it’s mostly Paul.
Michelle also got up at the end of the day for some pattern work in the Citabria. I discovered some issues with the ContourHD shutter artifacting when the prop shadow falls across the pilot’s face. It’s a little like skinny horizontal Venetian blinds. But it’s almost worth it when you get sun angles like this one.
I’m still having a good time with the extent to which the IPs seem to pay attention to the camera. Here, Barry gives a thumbs-up just before taxiing.
I understand that there were some pretty good conversations in the cockpit, as well, and I’m just beginning to get around to going through the intercom audio. I think I’ll do that once I get it synched up with the video. I’ll put together a multiclip for each flight and then watch each flight all the way though one camera angle at a time. It’ll be time-consuming, but it’s really the only way to get the whole story and identify all of the most interesting/compelling/beautiful moments.
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Cataloging, Taking Notes, and Jim’s G-Face

August 7, 2010 by Leave a Comment


Hey! Bet you’ve wondered where we’ve been! All over the place, to be honest. I’ve hit several airshows, toured the American Champion plant, and been to Beale AFB capturing footage, and other stuff for the movie.
With the airshow season winding down here in the northern part of the United States (or at least the northern part of the midwest), I’ve begun to have time to really sit down and systematically go through the video and audio that we captured in May. Tonight I got all the way through Jim Rodriguez’s first flight in the Super D with Don Weaver on 14 May.
The flight went 0.9 Hobbs and consisted mostly of stalls and spins and then a couple of rolls and a couple of loops – Jim’s first. The lead frame grab here is from just after the first real spin had become fully-developed.
The thing you don’t get in the frame grabs is the vertigo-inducing effect of the sun whipping by every couple of seconds and the shadows tracing an ever-tightening ellipse around the interior of the cockpit. I’m noting a few of those for a montage sequence for the trailer.
Here’s Jim on knife-edge in the early part of the first roll. Nice view outside the cockpit. These shots are from the ContourHD that I mounted on the right side of the cockpit. There’s a Panadonic on the left side, too, but I ran a redundant Contour on the first few flights before I needed to mount one out on the wing. Given the shake that the Panasonics inexplicably developed during principal photography, it’s good that we ran the ContourHDs in parallel in the early going.
Here’s Jim at the top of his first loop. Again, the stills here don’t show the whole story. The first loop was decidedly stop-sign-shaped. With the stall horn sounding in the middle of the second quarter. But he got it around!
By the way, if I’m criticizing as I go along, it’s not mean-spirited. I didn’t do much better (and, in many ways I did worse) than the campers when I flew this stuff for the first time.
Do you have a G-face? Jim has a G-face. This is Jim’s G-face. Check out his neck and jowls. That’s were I feel it most and, especially when you see it in motion, Jim gets the effect there, too. And it’s accentuated by the extent to which Jim pulled. This is most of the way around the back of that same stop-sign-shaped loop and he’s cranking about 4.5G to get her pulled up level.

Jim took the little white bag seriously. As did all of the campers. I’m pretty sure that he was the camper who least needed to worry about it, but there it is under his shoulder strap as he’s egressing from the airplane. Just one of the reminders that this is a new thing for each of the campers and that the experience was full of the strange and unknown.
I continue to be amazed that these people showed up and flew their hearts out for this film. We had all of the issues that you might expect in a first project. There’s some blown footage and some missed audio. But I’ve long since established for myself that we have more than enough material to tell a compelling story and to really turn some people on to aerobatics.
The cataloging is ongoing and I’m whittling away at it. The harder i work on the completeness of the cataloging, the easier and better the actual assembly and editing is going to be.

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Michelle Kole’s Epic Spin

June 8, 2010 by 1 Comment

Here’s a sample of some of the great footage that we captured with one of the outboard cameras. This is a GoPro HD Hero mounted on the right wing strut of the Super-D and pointed more or less straight at Michelle.

Michelle pulled off a great seven- or eight-turn spin. Nice and stable (you can watch where the horizon intersects the frame). This angle gives a real sense of the world rotating.

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The Tech Frame

June 6, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Going through all of this footage, one of the things that strikes me is an element that you probably won’t see in the film. It’s the first frame of most of the sequences shot by the airborne cameras. It’s almost invariably one of the crew staring into the camera at the moment he pushes the button to start up the camera. It could be me. Or Roger Bishop. Or Will Hawkins. Or David Allen. Or even one of the Acro Camp IPs.

The shot above is from a quick camera test in the hangar. Roger and I were configuring a GoPro HD Hero to go hang on an aircraft. Probably checking video settings and making sure that the camera liked the SD card that we’d put in it.
Most of the time, the first frame is one of us either leaning into the front cockpit or standing there next to the wing strut, sometimes with the prop turning. It’s lighter or darker out. It’s this or that aircraft. We’re more or less tired-looking. We’re more or less anxious to get the camera on and the flight launched. But, in every case, it’s a testament to the commitment and dedication of this crew.
Somewhere in the DVD extras, I’d like to do a string of the first three seconds of all of the Hero cam sequences. Or maybe use that for the menu background. And I’d like to take a series of first frames and use that for a border on the packaging. Technology in everything we use is increasing, that is an inevitable fact, many of us (including myself) still use telephony as a means to communicate with our contacts, today the best idea I have come up with is to use VoIP and SIP telephony.
This to me is a series of artifacts of the amazing amount of effort that everyone put into the film. Especially the techs. 18 or 22 -hour days. Constant technical challenges. Unpredictable sortie timing. Two or three aircraft out there on the ramp that might launch at any time. And getting all of this stuff safely offloaded onto hard drives.
And the quality of the people who gravitated to this project. Unreal. Can you believe that Roger Bishop took time out to come up and help out with this? Or that Will Hawkins jumped in to be DP? Or that David Allen, the most enthusiastic guy in all of general aviation, poured heart, soul, blood, and bile into this like he did?
In case you were wondering, the luckiest schmuck in all of aviation, filmmaking, and many other endeavors is the guy sitting at this keyboard right now. Holy shit, did we do a wonderful and special thing last month!
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Jim Rodriguez Gets Shirt-Tailed

June 5, 2010 by Leave a Comment

We expected that all of the instruction at Acro Camp would be dual. But it turned out that two of the campers actually soloed in taildraggers. And Michelle Kole soloed both the Citabria and the Super D.

Here’s a frame grab of IP Barry Sutton tripping Jim Rodriguez’s shirt tail after his solo in the Citabria.
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FOD

May 27, 2010 by 2 Comments

This is the first in what will probably be an occasional series of screenshots and other stuff that I find as I go through the footage.
Don told me during the camp that he had discovered some FOD (short for foreign object damage or stuff that can cause it – usually pocket change, the occasional mobile phone, etc.) in the cockpit during a flight with Paul on Day 3. I just happened upon the footage about 14:00 into the flight. Don rolls inverted and sees the FOD just above Paul’s head. He taps Paul on the head to get him to move a little and then snatches it in this frame grab.

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What’s Next . . .

May 24, 2010 by 2 Comments


Just a quick note to let everyone know what’s going on.

Yeah, we’ve been (and gone) a little radio-dark of late. A lot of that has been catching up on sleep and attending to various other responsibilities that have gone wanting due to the our devotion of energies to the film project. And one or more of us had coverage opportunities in associated with the other media hats that we wear that essentially came immediately on the heels of the film shoot.

So here’s what’s going on. All of the aerial footage is not off the cards and onto a hard drive and backed up. We’re still extracting footage from the big cameras on the ground and I expect to have that done in a few days. We’re also cataloging the still photography and paying attention to the other media that various people shot and are providing to us.

The next task is to sit down and watch and log all of the footage. I’m guessing that we have something in excess of 100 hours of footage. Much of it is from the ground cameras. And much of it is from up to three cameras per aircraft going at once. And the airborne footage will require synching up the audio with the video elements.

Then we start figuring out what the stories are. We have several anecdotal story lines that we think will be key, but we need to be sure that they’re borne out by the video and audio so that we can show the audience what happened. We really want to have this thing be free of narration and to speak for itself and it’ll take a thorough inventory of the video to be sure of what we have.

Then comes the editing and assembly of the material into the rough cut. Think months away. And think getting a lot better with Final Cut and the other applications that come with it (e.g. color correction, stabilization, etc.).

Much of the dust remains to settle before we’re in a true orderly post-production mode. But, once we get there, we’ll have the opportunity to put out a couple of teasers and continue the process of getting people excited about the picture. Stay tuned here for more information as it becomes available.

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Principal Photography Is a Wrap!

May 18, 2010 by 1 Comment


Have you seen us lately? Wow! Neither have we. That was a pretty intense week. But we’re proud to tell you that principal photography of Acro Camp wrapped yesterday afternoon.

I haven’t tallied up the sorties or hours or other information, but we captured a really broad range of subject matter, emotion, perspectives, and drama. All four campers performed amazingly. Each surprised him- or herself and the IPs in many ways. The acro was amazing. And, unexpectedly, we several of the campers got in solo tailwheel flights.

The ground school was outstanding. Don and Barry walked everyone through the local geography, safety considerations, how to use the safety systems, how to get into (and out of) the aircraft, and what to expect on the acro sorties.


The film crew was unbelievable. We ran this thing really lean. Crew at any one time ranged from two to five. We were up in the pre-dawn most of the time and rarely hit the rack before midnight. Whatever it took so get the video in and downloaded and everything ready for the next day.


Anyway, this evening, it’s more backup and extracting video from the shoot and starting to think about the editing process. Once we have all of the footage saved in at least two places and secure, it’s time to start watching it and extracting story lines. And there’s the music and other stuff to compose and record. We don’t yet have any solid idea of when we’re thinking that the thing will be out. The best we can say at the moment is that it’s more than one Christmas away but less than two Christmases away.

Thanks again for your support and well wishes. You don’t work this hard for this long without having a lot of encouragement from folks like you. We really appreciate it.

Now it’s time to crash on the couch and get such sleep as it necessary to be able to see clearly to do the editing.

Invertor et vomens! Smoke on!

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