I (Jon Radowski) spent much of the 2006 season flying balloons and shooting footage for the scenic hot air ballooning film I have dreamed of producing for years. With filming nearly completed, the hot air balloon DVD is slated for release sometime in 2008. Stay tuned for more details, or sign up for the announce/discussion group on the main page to be notified of any updates!

The screenshots below are merely a random sampling of frame grabs from a handful of scenes shot for the brand-new hot air ballooning DVD film currently in production. Believe it or not, most of these beautiful scenes came from just five balloon flights early in the 2006 season! An entire summer of ballooning followed these, and there are many hours of amazing shots to sort through. The enlarged versions of the small thumbnail images below have been taken directly from the footage you will eventually see in the final production. A fair number of the scenes below will not make it into the final production. For that reason, I offer this sneak peek at a little of what I've been up to this year. I'd love to show you many of the much more exciting and beautiful shots of balloons, the people around them and some beautiful landscapes, but I'm not ready to unveil the rest yet!

There are two major differences between this film and most other ballooning videos that have been produced in recent decades - one artistic and one technical. First of all, a film has a clear purpose and a vision. There is a storyline, dialogue, soundtrack, and emotion. A video is typically just a smattering of video clips thrown together with music and sent to market. Take a look at all other available ballooning DVD's and you may see what I mean! Artistically, films have a visionary element that videos lack almost completely.

Technically, there is also a major difference between film and video. I can go into a lot of detail here, but to put it most simply: Can you tell the difference between a movie on the big screen and a soap opera? They look completely different. Movies are shot on film at a framerate of 24 frames per second (progressive scan). There's an organic, almost timeless feel to a movie. Soap operas are shot on video, which uses 60 alternating (interlaced scan) fields per second to convey a digital image to your TV screen. Such interlaced video is common to home video camcorders as well as the high-end studio video cameras used for soap operas and reality shows. Video such as this looks very immediate, and newsworthy. Quite a different look than something shot on film.

The camera I chose for this project shoots digital video at film speed and with a high-quality lens that offers a much more cinematic approach to capturing images than all other cameras I had considered. The only drawback is that it is not a High-Definition camera - my budget did not allow for my camera's $8,000 HD big brother (next time!). Basically, this ballooning DVD will look as close to a real movie as possible, only without the super-high resolution and dynamic range that traditional 16mm and 35mm film offers.

Click on the smaller thumbnails to enlarge a full-resolution frame grab.
This is a very small sampling of what you'll eventually see on your screen, 24 times per second!