On 03/08/2004, at 1:44 AM, McLean Richard wrote:
If the need to use or employ professionals is so
'beyond question' then why is there so much good
amateur stuff on the web?
Well -- There isn't. Not for the purpose we've been talking
about.
There is plenty of stuff out there which makes people who already
fly think, "Wow, that's pretty good!" but this thread of conversation
has been about capturing the hearts and minds of people who don't
fly.
... and, as a pilot, you lack the perspective necessary to judge
whether stuff on the web is high quality or not *for that purpose*.
This is the age of 'reality
media' where the feeling of 'being right there' is
what sells - gritty, unpolished (to some extent
anyway) shots that show *reality* not staged, studio
polish .. and with the quality of the digicams
available (which I've seen firsthand in the last few
weeks at my own club) I'm perplexed by all the fuss
about how hard everything is.
Getting raw footage isn't hard: it's just a matter of being
at the right place at the right time with the suitable equipment.
You can "stage" shorts pretty easily if you know what you want
ahead of time (i.e., if you use a storyboard)
The editing job, however, is bloody difficult. The ridge and
wave videos I put on the web last month were the culmination
of about 12 hours of editing to trim nearly 2 hours of raw
footage down to 15 minutes of interesting stuff. (And even then
it's only interesting to glider pilots who already know what
wave flying and ridge flying is all about). Show it to the
general public (or even, for that matter, a GA pilot!) and all
you get is a blank stare.
If you see some aerobatic footage or some close formation flying
or some cockpit footage in wave, you enjoy it because you know what
it involves, you respect the skill of the pilots involved, you may
have even tried it before and worked out how enjoyable it is. You
"connect" with the footage and have an emotional reaction to it
because your experience provides you with linkage to whatever is
portrayed in the video.
When I show the video around my club, the emotional reaction I get
from a lot of people is, "You bastard, I wish I was there, how come
you flew in wave and I didn't?!" So I try to show it around the
club as often as I can <grin>
Give the same video to someone who has never flown before and they'll
have a different emotional reaction: "Geez, I bet if I tried that
I'd throw up. I wonder if it's as dangerous as it looks?" Then ask
them whether a view of the instrument panel is interesting an exciting
just because the altimeter is reading something in the flight-levels
and they'll start to wonder if you're on drugs or something.
That's why storyboarding, and review by someone who isn't a pilot,
is important. We've all forgotten what it's like to see something
like that through the eyes of a non-pilot, and we're not equipped
to judge the effectiveness of the video at provoking the emotional
reaction we want to provoke. We can't just throw together some
raw footage and hope for the best.
- mark
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I tried an internal modem, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
but it hurt when I walked. Mark Newton
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