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Director's Comments on FLIGHT
The concept for the story came from my experiences as a kid. It's not entirely autobiographical but draws from a feeling I had throughout my youth that, though I was an integral part of my family, I stood outside of most things, watching them from some angle or point that never incorporated my own involvement. When I was drawn into a fight or any kind of event, I think I brought that perspective with me. A lot of the time I was excluded from something it was better I wasn't a part of, and when involvement finally came it was at the cost of the freedom and clarity of thought that I had on my own. I think growing up this way, I came to associate being alone or even lonely with the ability to think and create.

Flight was made as an MOS assignment, a film with no dialog or sync sound. NYU's requirement was that we shoot MOS and in black and white. The reasoning behind this assignment is that we needed to strengthen our ability to create films and tell stories with images, as opposed to using dialog as a crutch. This is a kind of "pure" cinema. I knew that Flight was at root, a silent film, but I really like the use of dialog not as a way to tell a story but as an ambient effect, as a sound that's more important because of the tone it creates than the information it delivers. I decided to make the film with synced dialog but made sure that the images told the story.

I shot on super-16mm color negative because I knew that the quality and resolution of the images would be much higher than those shot on black and white film. I also had a feeling that in a final cut, I would want the auburn colors of the leaves in the fall to inform the content of the film.

To fulfill NYU's MOS black and white requirements, I desaturated the colors in post and cut a version that didn't implement any understandable dialog - just a low murmur of an argument. That cut is a legitimately silent, black and white film.

The final cut that I made for myself used color and sound, but still tells the story through the images and is pieced together in a very similar fashion.

The main components of the sound design were the argument, as dialog and as ambient effect, the wind noises, which complemented the images and commented on some of the action, the ambient location sound of the neighborhood and the car, and the sound effects towards the end, which are composed of deeper, more base heavy wind noises and the sounds of an airplane engine in flight. I wanted to use these final sound effects to create an internal feeling, as we moved farther into Charlie's perspective and head.

We storyboarded the entire film and actually stuck to every shot, which I've never done before. As a result, the film looses a certain organic nature that may have given it a greater realism. But it also takes on a formal quality that feels focused and crafted, and that draws specific attention to the act of viewing and voyeurism, and the parallel between Charlie's spectatorship and our own.

For more information contact Phillip Van.

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