Video: The American Knight: How much work was really done?

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It seems the director of aerial photography for Outlander also did some work as DoP for a project you may have heard of ages ago. It was a world war 1 air combat/ romance (and was not Flyboys) that was to be directed by Chris Roberts and was to be called The American Knight.

Mr Jeremy Braben, who works for Helicopter Film Services is listed on their site as having worked on some of the preliminary work for the film... I have no idea how much work was actually done on the film before it seemingly vanished into thin air. Other then a handful of screenshots, not much is really known about the project.

So I was a little surprised to see that Helicopter Film Services included about 30 seconds of the work they did in their Showreel on their site. So with a little effort (I edited out the relevant portion) , their low-res flash video is now a 9MB Divx that you can get HERE.

It's a really neat little clip.

Some other info can be found here: http://www.upp.cz/rs/generate_page.php?page_id=251

Director : Chris Roberts
Producer : Chris Roberts, Brian Frankish
UPP Authors: David Vana, Jiri Sabata, Rasto Simocko, Jaroslav Matys, Maros Kejsar, Ales Dlabac,

A story about a pilot from the First World War. UPP worked on the adjustments of experimental shots scanned in London. The film material was digitalized on a Kodak Cineon device and after processing recorded again onto film.

Squadron scene : The shooting of the shots was made with only two aircraft. The specialists in UPP cloned them into a whole squadron. There were many different details added to every newly made aircraft, so that each of them looks different.

Dog fight scene : In fact the triplane was too far away, that is why it had to be recreated as a bigger computer model and inserted into the scene.

Crash landing scene The downed aircraft falling to the ground is a master-stroke. Of course the real aircraft with a smoke-cartridge flew closely over the tree tops. The specialists in UPP removed the real aircraft from the shot in the last phase and replaced it with a computer model. The creation of the illusion of a crash is utterly convincing.

 

[Don]

Few bits of the flying remind me of Flying Corps.

Some really great scenes. Quite a shame that the film never pulled through.

My guess is that this must of been some pre-production work shot for any scheduled air-battles, maybe for principle photography before full production took place (and probably before any casting directions, which I suppose never really happened).