The Art of Flight

The Art of Flight is a live action sports film that follows a group of snowboarders who go all around the world to ski the best and most challenging mountains. The film, directed by Curt Morgan, is beautifully shot in high definition, it features hardware such as RED ONE, Phantom Flex, and Cineflex, and is a collaboration between Brain Farm Digital Cinema and Red Bull Media House. The trailer to the film is below:


A motion graphic artist that worked on the film went online to answer questions from fans and talk about the work he did. He was directly responsible for the space scenes, matchmoving, and object tracking. He was only 21 years old at the time and still in college. He was studying film production at Montana State University-Bozeman, it was there that he got into motion graphic editing and animation. When asked about how he got to work on the film he said "I started freelancing for the Helio Collective in June for some smaller projects and they liked my work, so I was brought on board for FLIGHT. After that I was hired on fulltime."

When asked about the process, he explained how he and his team were able to create the effects.

"For the tracking we used SynthEyes for matchmoving and sent that into Cinema4D or AfterEffects, depending on what needed to be added. For the points tracked to the riders I guess it wasn't true object tracking, but rather just 2D that was made to look 3D. That was done in SynthEyes since its tracker is much more powerful than AE's, and sent 2D nulls to AE for compositing with Plexus. For the matchmoves some were pretty straight forward, a couple clicks and you're done. Some shots did require tracking in separate segments, such as the shot of Travis boarding the plane, or sometimes we would have to do some serious color correction for a tracking shot and apply the data to the raw clip."

Here is the opening credits of the film, in which some of these effects are featured in: