Aerial Reels

Occasionally I take on data-management work for a team of filmmakers who specialize in air-to-air cinematography—filming a jet from another jet or from a helicopter. It’s the kind of footage you see in airline safety videos or looping on a monitor behind a corporate receptionist. Aircraft manufacturers and airlines hire them to capture material for a range of uses.

The production itself is extraordinary. The pilots are filmmakers in their own right, and every shot is a coordinated dance between the subject-jet pilots, the camera-jet pilots, and the cinematographer operating the camera. The camera-jet pilots are effectively the dolly grips. They’re operating at the highest level, and watching them work is remarkable.

My role is usually limited to managing the media, but on longer shoots—sometimes up to five days—I’ll also cut together a highlight reel as we go, so the client can see a rough sense of what was captured by the end of the job. These reels have always landed well. They’re enjoyable to make because I can be indulgent, and I like being indulgent. To the client, it’s all baby photos: the footage is spectacular, and there’s oddly sexual about it. The angles you get when two fast-moving objects interact against an expansive background through a long lens are mind-bending. It’s also a crash course in how parallax works.

The first time I worked with this material, I called the DP immediately and asked him to check whether the camera had been set to slow motion. Of course it hadn’t—I was just new. But at that altitude, with almost no reference points, and with that level of control and precision, the images become ethereal and surreal. They don’t feel like they’re moving at hundreds of miles per hour.

I eventually realized that clients often don’t want footage that feels like an air show. They’re usually selling smoothness, not adrenaline, so the perceived speed and drama are carefully controlled. In edits like these, it’s common to speed clips up slightly to introduce energy. I’ve made three of these reels so far. The first relied heavily on speed ramping. By the third, I challenged myself to cut the entire piece without ramping anything—letting the footage play exactly as captured. Sometimes that means using moments where the pilots are just reframing or repositioning, shots that were never intended for final use. But for these kinds of reels, they work—and they’re part of the fun.