STOL – Trying Out Stuff
We’ve been playing with a new free mod for DCS World, and just love the performance envelope of the OV-10A Bronco. This aircraft was designed to operate from short, unimproved fields, so it’s slow, can land just about anywhere, and take off again.
As for the filmmaking, this was a different sort of experience. Normally, DCS World allows us to use (what’s called) a “track file” so we can re-watch a flight from any angle we choose. They are a little buggy, but when they work, we only have to fly a stunt once, then we can go back and film it as though we had a thousand cameras all filming a live event. The track files for the OV-10A are completely “horked,” so we couldn’t use one to film a short takeoff and landing. Instead we flew multiple takes (in 3rd-person point of view), filming as though we only had one camera – just like a real movie. Not every take was the same action. We edited is all together to make it look like we did the thing. There are a few points where we (knowingly) have “continuity errors” (like having the external fuel tank attached after the shot where we dropped it), but the point was using different materials and practicing different tools.
In fairness, the “after-credits scene” is a raw cockpit recording of our pilot flying into and out of 1300 feet of “hole in the jungle,” so we could demonstrate that we did, in fact, do the thing.