Love or hate Flight, I don’t think there will be many out there that didn’t at the very least enjoy the first 30 minutes or so and weren’t jolted to attention with the film’s dramatic crash sequence. Today the New York Times is taking a closer look at the editing of the sequence, which includes the above image, which previews a look at what six minutes of the film looks like in the AVID editing system. Give the picture a click for a much larger and detailed version.
Jeremiah O’Driscoll edited the film and tells the Times, “There was a lot of footage, but it was relatively well-defined. What I didn’t know and what was really intimidating to me was all of the technical business of it.”
O’Driscoll adds that director Robert Zemeckis, who has experience as a pilot, had to help him with specifics saying, “So he did some hand-holding to say ‘This is where this dial goes and this is where this alarm would go off.'”
“You have to put together the scene so that it works technically,” he said. “But then once it’s all together, you have to go through and create a little bit of chaos with it. Sometimes you don’t want every camera pan to land. Sometimes you cut to Denzel when he’s in the middle of a sentence. I’m trying to keep everything in this relentless, chaotic pace.”
I’ve added a clip from the crash sequence below along with a sound design and making of the crash sequence featurettes, both of which you really should watch if this interests you at all, especially the sound featurette as a lot of what you see in that image above comes into play when Randy Thom (Supervising Sound Editor & Sound Designer) and Dennis Leonard (Supervising Sound Editor & Sound Designer) go to work.
I was one of those that didn’t really take to Flight (read my review here), but I absolutely loved these opening moments.
