Master at Work. Watch Rutan in action in Jim Sugar and Brian Lawler’s 8-minute documentary pilot on the aviation genius. Photo: Brian P. Lawler
The idea for a Rutan documentary came to Sugar soon afterward. “I really knew nothing about video as a business or a process,” Sugar says. “At some point, I got it in my head that there was a film to be done on Burt, because this is something I’d wanted to do for a long time. I’d talked to Brian about it and talked him into taking a workshop at Apple on digital video and Final Cut Pro software for working still photographers.”
Former White House news photographer Dirck Halstead ran the workshop. Halstead believed that still photographers — particularly photojournalists — were especially suited to documentaries because of their technical backgrounds and storytelling abilities. “Ten to fifteen people were in the workshop. We spent five days at Apple in Cupertino, and it was a week that changed my life. it was that profound,” says Sugar.
After the workshop, Sugar and Lawler started committing footage to tape. And now, several years later, they’ve amassed and cataloged a collection of interviews — not only with Rutan, but with his brother, Dick (who flew Rutan’s Voyager around the world with Jeanne Yeager in 1986), with pilots Mike Melville and Steve Fossett, with Scaled Composite engineers and with people who knew Rutan as a child. They have scenes of in-progress working sessions and test flights and landings of aircraft, shot both air-to-air and from the ground. And a staggering 11,000 time-lapse frames capture Global Flyer as it’s being built — one image shot every 27 minutes for 15 months. “It starts from a beam going across the room and it ends with the airplane going out of the hangar,” says Lawler.
“We spent five days at Apple in Cupertino, and it was a week that changed my life. It was that profound.”
Take Me to the Pilot
Lawler and Sugar work in Sony DVCAM format. “The cameras are nice and the quality of the image we record is excellent,” says Lawler. Sugar shoots with a Sony PD150, while Lawler prefers to use a broadcast-size Sony DSR500W. “We have this routine we go through,” says Lawler. “We shoot, then we duplicate our tapes so that there are two copies. We have a FileMaker database where we keep a text record of the tape number and a brief description of everything that’s on the tape. And that way, if we’re looking for a certain scene or a certain subject we just search the FileMaker database. We have 76 tapes so far cataloged, and that’s all in the hands of our producer.”
The pair are working with Academy Award-nominee and DGA award-winning producer Chuck Braverman, who is helping to pitch the pilot to the networks. Once they line up an interested party, Braverman will edit the documentary using Final Cut Pro. “He’s an all-Mac shop,” says Lawler. “In fact, there are at least two Avid systems that are pushed into the corner.”
Take a Spin. See what pilot Steve Fossett will look at for 80 hours straight in this QuickTime VR panorama of the Global Flyer cockpit. Photo: Jim Sugar and Kevin Schumacher.
For their eight minute pilot, Lawler and Sugar used Final Cut Pro and created a DVD presentation using DVD Studio Pro. To include still images of Rutan’s historic planes, Lawler used Final Cut Pro to import the Photoshop files without modification. For the pilot’s soundtrack, Lawler chose Sonic Fire. “It has these wonderful libraries,” he says. They’re very clever. You can choose, for example, an introduction, an interlude and a conclusion, and you can make it 16 minutes, four frames, or four seconds and three frames long, and it will cut it to exactly the right length.”
Lawler also recommends using iTunes to keep track of soundtrack pieces. “iTunes files are completely compatible with Final Cut Pro, which is a tremendous thing if you’re moving music in and out of [the application],” says Lawler. “You can take it directly from your iTunes library.”
One Deal, One Agreement Away
The filmmakers realize that they’re at the toughest yet most important part of the process, which is getting a green light from one of the networks. But with so much already in the digital “can” on one of the most intriguing geniuses of our time, it’s difficult to imagine how this wouldn’t happen.
”We’re one deal away, one agreement away from having something that we think and hope is going to be pretty special,” says Sugar. “But we’re not there yet. What we do have is all this wonderful film on Rutan, but we haven’t taken it to the next step, which is to have a commitment for a one-hour TV show. This is what Brian and I want.”
It’s what anyone else interested in aviation history wants, too.
