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Sneak Peek 02 – Formation

April 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment
Here’s another sneak peek of the movie! This is from Day 3 of Acro Camp. It covers the formation portion of the sortie. Three cameras in the Super-D and two on the Pitts, along with cockpit audio and engine sound from each.
If the Mac Book Pro can handle this, it can handle anything!
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Sneak Peek 01: Jim Rodriguez’s Hammer-Spin

March 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment
The editing is really coming together! Above is an example of some of the footage and audio that we’ve been working on. It’s a sequence showing Jim Rodriguez’s “hammer-spin” in the Pitts with IP Don Weaver. Jim figured out the exciting way that a Pitts doesn’t need as much forward stick at the top of a hammerhead.
We’re editing our heads off whenever we can to get the film out this summer. And the music is coming along well, too. Ace audio guy Scott Cannizzaro just dropped an early mix of his take on Acro Grass and it’s stellar.
More news as it happens!
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Filming Performer Cameos: The Starfighters

March 12, 2011 by Leave a Comment


Production has been off lately because I’ve spent waaaaay too much time in and out of the hospital getting some issues with my leg taken care of. Nothing that’s going to goof up my medical certificate or anything, but massively inconvenient. A bacterial infection in my calf that later developed into an abscess and required surgery to go in and take care of it. But I’m walking around just fine and the doc says that the surgical wound is healing well. I can fly all the acro I want, and that’s a good thing.

But there’s an upside. I really wanted to get more cameos by airshow performers in flight training for the film, but ran out of 2010 airshow season and didn’t expect to be able to get any done in the 2011 airshow season before the editing was complete. The delay associated with the leg problem has meant that post-production now overlaps with the earlier shows of the 2011 airshow season, so I can get some more performer cameos.


I got down to the Valiant Air Command TICO Airshow at Space Coast Regional Airport (KTIX) on Friday as the guest of the Starfighters. Starfighters, Inc. operates the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter in many roles, including flight training, flight test, threat simulation, and photo chase. The company is a substantial player in commercial space activities, in affiliation with NASA and otherwise.Although the Starfighters haven’t done airshows generally since 2008 or so, they perform for the hometown crowd at Titusville each year.

I took advantage of the opportunity by interviewing Mike “Bloke” Robinson and Rick “Comrade” Svetkoff planeside for Acro Camp. David Allen, who did a lot of work on Acro Camp, and who runs The Pilot’s Flight PodLog and Other People’s Airplanes, helped out massively with the shoot.


I also got some great B-roll of the aircraft and the crew, both to drop into Acro Camp and to use in an upcoming Airspeed episode. The aircraft is really photogenic and makes some amazing noise. For a Cold War aircraft, you’d expect the airplane to be old and creaky. But not so! The airframe, manufactured in 1963, just turned 3,000 hours and the engine has seen only 48 hours or so since LMOH. And we had low-angle natural light pouring into the hangar, which provided a pretty dramatic look to the footage.


In other news, I brought all of the ground footage for the film on a hard drive down south with me. I’ll be here with my folks on Jekyll Island on the coast of Georgia through Monday and I’m hoping to have the time to get the rest of the way through indexing the footage while I’m here so that I can start putting together rough-cut sections. It’s going to go pretty quickly once I get to that point.I’ve seen some of the rough cut sequences that Will Hawkins has put together for A Pilot’s Story and they’re stellar. He’s way out ahead of me. I need to catch up. We have a wager. Whichever of us releases his movie first gets a shot of Jeremiah Weed. The second-place finisher gets . . two shots of Jeremiah Weed.

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Post-Production Update

February 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment


It’s been a great couple of months, although without a lot of visibility for you guys, so I thought I’d toss up a quick update about how post-production is going.

I’m through cataloging all of the flight footage and about halfway through the ground footage. I’ve been putting up screen shots through TwitPic as I go and I’m including a few of them in this post. Be sure to follow me (@StephenForce) on Twitter for more updates as we go. The photo stream is available at http://twitpic.com/photos/StephenForce. Additionally, I’m post5ing video snippets in my Vimeo account and you can see them at http://vimeo.com/user2085678/videos.


In January, I put together the first trailer for the film and debuted it at the Great Lakes International Aviation Conference. Immediately after that, I settled in to edit the T-38 episode of Airspeed.

The trailer was an obvious priority. The T-38 episode not so much unless you understand that I remain very new to Final Cut Pro and the Mac operating environment. I needed to get the T-38 episode out so that I’d have a showpiece to send out along with proposals to military units in order to set up media flights for the 2011 season of Airspeed. And it worked wonderfully as (relatively) short project on which to try out and develop my FCP chops. I made a few mistakes in the early going of the T-38 ep that would have required a lot of re-work had I made them in the middle of a feature film and I’m glad that I made them in the T-38 ep and not in the movie.


The near-term goal is to finish cataloging the ground footage and then get a rough storyboard of the movie put together. As with any imperfectly-captured story, there are gaps that I need to fill in. I’ve resolved that I want to do as little narration of my own in the film. So, where I need explanation, I’ll probably get Don and Barry together sometime in March to shoot some interviews and commentary. I’ve been making notes of the places where I need some commentary or explanation and I’ll try to feed Don and Barry the circumstances from behind the camera and let them fill in the gaps.

I also need to get the music edited and produced so that I have a good library of stuff to lay under the images. That can wait some still, but I need to get it done.

Then all of the excuses will be out of the way and I can really assemble the movie. The T-38 episode ran about 49 minutes, which I realized at some point is just under half of the running time of Acro Camp. It’s beginning to dawn on me that, once I get all of the logging and planning and prep done, this movie is really going to come together quickly and it’s going to be a lot of fun when it does.

Stay tuned for more updates.

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The First Trailer is Out!

January 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The first trailer is ready to go! We’ll be showing this at the new-media/social-media booth at the Great Lakes Aviation Conference in Ypsilanti, Michigan this Saturday 8 January. If you’ll be in the neighborhood, please stop by, say hello, and find out more about the film!

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Marketing . . .

December 16, 2010 by Leave a Comment

So I’m listening to Studio 360 from December 3 and I hear this audio skit about a couple of guys who have market a movie so aggressively that they realize two weeks prior to opening that . . . they forgot to shoot the movie.

Not the case with Acro Camp, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded that, although the marketing is cool, it’s the movie that matters. If you need help marketing, researchign tech and are disabled go to https://truabilities.com for the best tools on the market.
_____________________________

The biggest release of this holiday movie season is in trouble: nobody remembered to shoot it. A satire by Scott Blaszak, performed by James Babson and Jake Newton.

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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 . . .
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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.

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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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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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