The Great Forest Park Balloon Race 2005

October 23, 2005

I shot a little more than a half hour of footage from the anual Forest Park Balloon Race about a month ago. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this yet. Its kind of amusing because the very last thing I ever did a music score for back in 1991-92 was for a short film on hot air ballooning that was supposed to air on the Discovery Channel. I'm not sure what happened with that project but for some reason it was rejected. Anyhow, after all these years I still have the music for it sitting on the shelf. It never dawned on me when shooting this video that I still had the music, although I doubt that I'll use it for anything.

I play a solo act these days but my old drummer from years gone by, and myself, holed up in a studio for two weeks and recorded about 45-minutes worth of music that's also been sitting on the shelf since 1993. I recently tranferred the music to my DAW setup and have been re-recording the guitar and bass tracks. I didn't think anyone was interested in jazz-rock fusion material anymore but I played a few tunes for some friends in the msic biz who, frankly, went nuts over it. So maybe I'll give it a shot after all. Besides, Bret (my drummer) and I could use the money even if its not very much. I'm thinking we might use this footage for a music video. Just thinking at this point. There are logo's all over the place so it might be a little tough getting clearance for it all, but I think the people at the Balloon Race committee will help me out. There's actually enough usable footage to do a 5 to 10 minute short film, so who knows, I might just enter it somewhere. I've already got all of the daylight footage edited.

I'll place a couple of stills here, but you can see all thirteen at the web page link above. All are 75%-compressed jpg's.

Edited October 23, 2005 by Charlie Seper

December 6, 2005

Great stuff also I got to hear some of your excellent guitar playing - Its not a big deal but the guy with the hot air balloon as seen on my website http://www.vinestreetworks.com wants a short film for his website and I think we could use some of the stuff you did (avoiding the logo balloons) The pay will probably be a cerificate for flying with these things, or something they are struggling too ...

December 6, 2005

Well, you're welcome to use any of it you think is worthwhile. Since its handheld footage and off-the-cuff, there's probably not more than 15-minutes that's all that usable. What I had thought about doing was putting things together in reverse order. I have day footage of balloons being inflated and then going up and away, and I also have night footage of the balloons parked and later being de-inflated and then crews rolling them up and tearing things down. Truth be known, the night footage was shot first the night before the race. Its a thing they do every year called "Balloon Glow", where they set them up and ring a bell every 5 or 10 minutes, at which time everyone fires up the burners. Its quite a sight. Then they tear down and set up again in an area on the other side of the park the next day for the races. They have a web page for it all here with some really nice still photos. Balloon Races

It would be really hard to find any footage without logos. Almost every balloon in the race has a sponsor. You could probably use it though. After all, the logos are there to gain exposure for the companies. As long as you didn't say anything negative about them they'd probably be happy to have the extra free advertising. Of course, it would be nice to get their permission if you could but I really wouldn't worry too much about. They probaby won't mind and it would fall under "fair use" very easily anyway.