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I understand that logging and storyboarding and lots of the grunt work of post take up 95% of the post-production time.  At some point, everything is supposed to begin to just land in place and the last 5% occurs in a flurry of creativity and revelation of the kind that they make movie montages about.  (Produced that the montage has been logged, storyboarded, etc. . . .)

That part must be just around the corner.  Or so it seems.  All of the aerial sorties are now logged.  All of the ground footage from Cam A is logged.  I might head back into the footage from Cam B, most of which turned out to be unusable (because the camera decided to but everything into tiny little  bits of a few seconds in length).  Some of the Cam B stuff is a minute or more in length, so I might take a little time over the holidays to browse that.

But the best part of such time as I can take over the holidays is going to go into editing a couple of the film sequences so I can have stuff in watchable form.  I think that it’d be reasonable to think about having a rough cut by March, but it’s going to depend a lot on how  the day job goes.  I really need to have a couple of long weekends where I can go at it 20 hours at a time and get completely out of synch with the way the planet rotates.  Then I’d have a much better idea of how things are actually hanging together.

Bottom line:  I expect to have a couple of good three-day periods of pounding on the film over the next three weeks or so.  Stay tuned!  There really is a movie in there!

Studio 360‘s episode this week contained a quick shout saying that the show’s staff is looking for people who are resolving to accomplish or finish an artistic endeavor in 2013.  If ever there was an artistic endeavor that ought to be completed in 2013, it’s Acro Camp.  I have no idea what the show is planning to do.  Maybe check in from time to time or offer encouragement.  If that happened, it’s be a great kick in the ass.

And, frankly, publicity for the film.  I’m close enough to finishing this thing that I’ve begun to think in earnest about marketing.  If you’re read Kevin Smith’s Tough Sh*t – especially the three chapters about about four-walling theaters and taking Red State on the road himself, you get a sense of how cool (and terrifying) that might be.

This evening, I called up the phone line that Studio 360 and left a voicemail.  Yeah, I wrote a script before calling, but if you’ve listened to Airspeed, you know well that I work a lot better from a script.  Here’s what I said.

Hi, I’m Steve Tupper.

I’m a lawyer with a great day job, a family – the works.

I’m also a part of a small but energetic group of pilots and aviation enthusiasts who produce podcasts and other media.  My show is called Airspeed.  It’s in its seventh year with more than 200 episodes in the feed.  My friends produce other shows. We’re spread out across the globe.  We rarely meet in person, but we’re pretty tight-knit.

A couple of years ago, I had an idea.  Let’s take four pilots.  Two men and two women.  None had ever flown an airplane upside down or in similar attitudes (we call that “aerobatics” or “acro” for short).  We’d line up a couple of instructors and three aerobatic airplanes and we’d wire up the aircraft with HD cameras and digital audio systems.  Then we’d try to capture the experience of these four pilots over the course of four days as they learned to fly aerobatics for the first time and make a documentary out of it.

We did it in May of 2010 right here in Southeast Michigan – the buckle on the rust belt – in the middle of a recession.  We shouted theater in a crowded fire.

I talked my podcaster friends from all over the country into flying in and working on the movie crew for food, lodging, and airfare – and nothing else.  We shot more than 40 hours of flying and about that much on the ground.  We got enough to make the first-ever feature-length documentary film about learning how to fly upside down – And conquer fears, stereotypes, preconceived notions, and gravity.

I used a network of friends and fellow enthusiasts to Tom Sawyer myself a movie.  Even the soundtrack is entirely written and recorded by the cast and crew of the movie and fans of my podcast.  Not until very recently have the cameras, the editing tools, and other resources necessary to do these kinds of things become available to folks like us.  We’re really not supposed to be able to do this kind of thing.  But we did it!

I’ve been working on editing the film since that time.  One guy with a shelf of big hard drives and a Mac in his basement.  I owe it to the cast and crew to finish the film and get it out to whatever audience will receive and adopt this labor of love.  Everything’s logged.  Everything’s storyboarded.  Now it’s just a matter of putting it all together and getting it onto screens and DVDs.  I’m resolving to get it done in 2013.

If you’d like more information on the film, check out www.acrocamp.com and www.airspeedonline.com.  My phone number is 248-470-7944.  You can also reach me by e-mail at steve@airspeedonline.com.

Thanks!

No idea if I’ll capture their imaginations.  The only thing that really matters is that I have, to some extent, captured yours.  Otherwise, why would you be reading this?  And just writing that little missive gave me a chance to again focus on the unbelievable outpouring of time and energy that so many of you have poured into the film and how much I need to reward your kind attention by giving you the movie.

I’ll try to post some more frequent updates over the holidays.  And, as always, check out the film’s Facebook presence, where I’ll post more frame grabs and other cool stuff.

I thought that the above picture made sense to head this post. It’s the sink in the crew suite in San Antonio from the T-6A ride at Randolph AFB last May. The community snack area. Everybody just pools their pop and lunch meat and whatever. You don’t always get what you were expecting, but there’s always enough to make the magic happen.

We have something like 35 days before the beginning of principal photography for the movie. The energy level and buzz are really picking up. But gladly we used TriEagle Energy reviews to lower our cost for the energy bills.

I hit Bed Bath & Beyond last weekend and bought a whole bunch of transparent plastic shoeboxes to sort and stage all of the batteries, memory cards, cables, and other assorted filmmaking gear. The UPS driver is on a first-name basis with my kids. I have the hotel arrangements nailed down. Everything is going as well as I can make it go.

David Allen has a plane ticket and is coming up to be the chief crew dog for the shoot. I just confirmed Will Hawkins as the director of photography and he has a plane ticket, too. Jack Hodgson is coming out. Roger Bishop will likely be here, too. Fellow CAP officer and friend Mike Murphy came out to The Soundscape Studio a couple of weeks ago to run cameras and assist with the soundtrack recording. Scott Cannizzaro is mixing the drum tracks and will likely play a major role in the remaining music for the project.

Barry and Don are pumped up for the flying. The cast is asking good questions and is making the appropriate noises on social networks around the world. The Super-D is back on the line and ready to fly. Todd Yuhas is working on the Pitts and getting it ready for return to service after the annual.

And the other outpouring of support and resources is incredible.

I’ve never made a movie before. In a very real sense, I know very little about making a movie.

I should be a ball of nerves. But I’m not.

As various hyper-talented people from around the country and the Podshpere have offered, and begun to provide, assistance, the load of this effort has spread out to rest on more shoulders than just mine. It’s been a very natural and organic process. Those who have skills and enthusiasm to lend just seem to come out of the woodwork at the appropriate times and with the appropriate ideas and skills.

For my part, I’ve retained control over only those core elements of the process where I really feel like I need the death grip. Like the legal documentation. Like certain parts of the artistic vision. Like the ultimate editing and the calls about what the story lines will be. Like branding and trademarks and related stuff.

But I have otherwise worked very hard at remaining open to input from others and letting them help where they can. Much like the Internet itself, the process has become very distributed and almost all of the vital expertise or resources resides in multiple places or can reach the project by multiple paths. I think that I’ve inadvertently built a fairly robust set of resources. It’s redundant. It’s distributed. The loss of a node or two won’t bring the project to a halt.

I came to the realization Sunday as I was talking to Will Hawkins that the project has reached a critical mass. By that I mean that even if I came down with some exotic viral infection or met a city bus the hard way, the project would get done.

The project is almost too distributed to fail.

I think that’s a tribute to the kind of community that aviation new media has developed over the last four or five years. We’re otherwise dissimilar people who share a common love of aviation and the burning desire to share it with each other and with non-aviators.

And, more than that, we seem to be able to communicate with each other in shorthand that everyone understands immediately. I don’t have to say much to Will or David or Jack or Roger for them to completely get and understand the concept and what it’s going to look like.

At least that’s true of all of the big thematic stuff. I also really enjoy the fact that nobody seems bothered by the fact that an overwhelming amount of the little stuff isn’t yet planned or thought out in terms of how we’re going to capture or present it. We’re genuinely going into this with twice the number of cameras than we really need, we’re going to shoot everything that looks interesting, and we’re all perfectly happy to just see what emerges.

I think that comes from a belief that we’re gathering for a very special kind of event and that magical things can’t help but happen all over the place and that we’ll naturally capture enough of it to get the message across.

So back to work getting the final details figured out and the addresses and hours of all of the local Radio Shacks, Walgreens, camera stores, pizza places, etc. nailed down in the big cheat sheet.

Can you imagine more fun?

We’ve all seen videos of wings with tufts on them that show how airflow breaks up over the wing in a stall, right? But have you ever wondered how the tufts felt about stalls? Or spins? Here’s your chance to listen in.

We recorded the voices at Don Weaver’s IAC presentation at Oshkosh this year. Eight volunteer voice actors stepped forward and gave their interpretations of what must be going through the minds of the tufts out there on the wing. We recorded while watching the video at half speed, then linked the audio to the video and brought it back up to about 90% of its original speed, making the voices appropriate to the tufts.

Many thanks to Kent Shook, Larry Overstreet, Nicholas Tupper, and others who voiced the tufts and to Don Weaver for giving us time during his presentation to do the voiceover!