Aerial Reels

Occasionally, I take jobs doing data management for this team of filmmakers that does air-to-air filmmaking. This means film a jet from a jet or a helicopter. It's the type of footage you see cut into safety videos and playing on the monitor behind the secretary. Airplane manufacturers or airline companies will hire them to gather footage for multiple purposes. The production is extraordinary. The pilots are filmmakers themselves, and it's a dance between the subject-jet pilots, the camera-jet pilots, and the cinematographer controlling the camera. Essentially the pilots of the camera-jet serve as the dolly grip. These guys are the best of the best and it's incredible to watch them work. I'm just managing the media, but sometimes if the shoot is long enough - it might be as long as a five-day shoot - I will also edit together a highlight reel of the footage as we go to show the client at the end of the shoot roughly what was captured. These have historically always gone over well. They're fun edits to make because I can be as indulgent as I want and I like to be indulgent. It's all baby photos to the client and the footage is spectacular, it's also oddly sexual. The angles that you can get when you have two fast moving objects, an interesting background, and a zoom lens are mind blowing, and it's an incredible lesson in how parallax works. The first time I did this, and I got the footage, I called the DP immediately and told him to check to see if the camera was in slow motion. Of course it wasn't, and I was just new, but the footage, that high in the sky, with no reference point - and with their combined mastery of the craft - results in ethereal and surreal images that don't seem like they are moving at hundreds of miles per hour. I realized that often the clients don't want images that look like an air show, because they're trying to advertise a smooth ride, so it's all within their control how fast or dramatic they make the images look. And often with edits like this, it's common to speed up the clips to introduce some dynamism. I've made a total of three of these edits. The first one I did a lot of speed ramping, and then the third one I gave myself the challenge of seeing if I could edit the whole reel without ramping up the speed, and letting everything play as is. Often there are moments I'll find where they are simply re framing or something, that was never meant to be used, but for fun edits like this they serve their purpose.