Monday, February 14, 2011

Post-Production Update


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.