Flying Planes (Example)

I was walking my dog the other day and I came across some men flying their RC planes. I returned yesterday with a camcorder. The guys told me that videotaping RC planes is hard, mostly because they move too fast to track if you're zoomed in close. I wondered how I'd shoot something like this, so I gave it a try.

I shot 30 minutes of video, and today spent about an hour cutting the first 15 into a single sketch of 4 minutes. No music. Just the natural ambiance of the morning.


Flying Planes from m.h. rubin on Vimeo.

My plan is to cut the entire 30 minutes into about a 3 minute sketch. It will be interesting to see how the narrative changes from documentary non-fiction to something more dramatic and fictional when you continue to cut the material down. Let's revisit this material when we can compare it to a different version.

NOTE: the essence of this sketch is similar to shooting your dog in my Dog Park examples -- it's very hard to hold still when you're shooting something moving. Normally the rule would be to zoom out more, which allows you to track the moving plane (or dog) more easily, and also to intercut often with nice steady shots of other things. But for me, shooting wider wasn't good -- the planes were too small when zoomed out, so I just had to practice tracking shots and had to toss out most of the video of planes in the air.