A Beginner's Guide to Ultralight Flying
The Tape That Launched a Thousand Ultralights!
A Beginner's Guide to Ultralight Flying is an 80 minute videotape produced for those who have heard about the sport and are interested but don't know how to get started - a video primer to ultralight flying. Among other things, it covers the basic federal regulations for ultralights and provides information on the topics of flight training and the purchase of aircraft. One of the nation's largest and most successful ultralight clubs is visited and it's president is interviewed. Also, there are many interview sessions with ultralight flyers and owners of ultralight aircraft. These interviews provide the viewer with many unique, personal perspectives on the sport. They also allow viewers to 'meet' some of the type of people who fly ultralights. There are many interesting pictures of ultralights in flight as well as several 'music video' type segments. It is the first in a series about Ultralights in America.
Ultralight Flying! magazine, the official magazine of the United States Ultralight Association (U.S.U.A.) awarded FitzGerald "Best Video Journalist of the Year" for "Beginner's Guide".
Click Here to see one of Brian's music videos called "MXing It Up". It features him flying his MX (shown above). It is a fairly large QuickTime file so depending on your bandwidth - it may take a while... Windows users can go HERE (Apple's QuickTime Site) to get the QuickTime plug-in if you don't already have it.
Tech Notes
Prior to editing, FitzGerald accumulated 18+ hours of videotape over the course of 3 years of shooting. The camera used was a Canon L-1 which is Hi-8. For editing, a Sony 9700 editor was employed. Camera footage was run through a Hotronic AP-41 Time Base Corrector. Graphics, annimation and titling were all produced on a Macintosh ci running at 50MHz. Other hardware items included RasterOps 24STV and RasterOps ProVideo32 Nubus boards. The software used included InfiniD, PhotoShop, Morph, and MacroMind Director. For final dubbing to distibution on VHS, the program was mastered on 1" videotape.
Brian wrote and performed all of the music used in Beginner's Guide drawing on his background as a musician working in Northern California in the 1970's.
His trusty Gibson SG is the guitar used on all tracks. A Yamaha DX-21 keyboard synthesizer and a Sequencial Tom drum synth were used for bass and drum tracks. The software used was Opcode Vision. Some of the music was "pre-mixed" on a Yamaha 4 track MT-100 recorder and then dropped onto the PCM track of the Hi-8 editor in stereo. Other tracks were recorded directly to Hi-8 using the MT-100 as a mixer.
All of the music was written, performed and copyrighted by FitzGerald.
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