Too Distributed to Fail

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.

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?