Producing THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR film documenting the development of a man’s dream into a scientific and historic reality was, in itself, an extraordinary effort. There was an immense risk involved in making a commitment to film a scientist’s effort at achieving something which had never before been done successfully in all of human history.
Filmmaker Ben Shedd met Dr. Paul MacCready soon after MacCready had drawn the original first plans for the Gossamer Condor human-powered airplane. Shedd used his NOVA producer experience to do extensive research into human-powered flight and MacCready’s sketches, and Shedd recognized that if such flight were possible, Dr. MacCready’s design for the Gossamer Condor should achieve it – and if his design failed, then human-powered flight was probably impossible.
With no guarantee of success, the film team followed the events as they occurred for almost an entire year, filming every stage of the plane’s development.
The Gossamer Condor project took nearly nine months longer than its designers originally thought, and producers Jacqueline Phillips Shedd and Ben Shedd maintained their determined commitment to document the project.
MacCready’s design went through 12 major prototypes and over 400 test flights before finally culminating on August 23, 1977 when Bryan Allen flew the Gossamer Condor into aviation history by completing the mile-long Kremer Prize figure-8 course in 6 minutes, 22 seconds.
The flight won Paul MacCready and his team 50,000 British Pounds, nearly $100,000. All this is captured on film, including the final, historic flight.
The 27 minute film is cut from over 25 hours of cinema-vérite footage, showing the persistent and creative efforts of the plane’s design team.
Filmmaker Ben Shedd feels that finding Dr. MacCready when he did was “like finding the Wright Brothers just before they built their first gliders and following them to Kitty Hawk, camera in hand to film what they did.”
The Gossamer Condor airplane is hanging in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, where the film was premiered on August 23, 1978 and excerpts from THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR are shown as part of the Gossamer Condor exhibit.
THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR film received the 1978 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject and 14 other international awards.
THE THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR FILM TODAY by Ben Shedd
THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR film has had many audiences over the decades, from pilots and aviation fans to classrooms of students to the general public and Film Festivals. For the past two decades, a clip from the film runs continuously as part of the Gossamer Condor exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR was originally made in 16mm color negative film and in 1985 a VHS video version was made. A 2007 Academy “Oscar Docs” Documentary screening series coincided with celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Gossamer Condor’s flight into aviation history and the Academy Film Archives restored the film using the original 16mm printing masters to make a Preservation Print. With support from the Academy Film Archives, a brand new DVD was released, remastered and digitally restored from the Academy Film Archive’s preservation film print. Thirty years after it was made, a new National USA High School Engineering curriculum Project Lead The Way used THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR for Introduction To Design Engineering in classrooms and whole new audiences saw the film through the DVD. Thanks to the Academy Film Archive for making the new preservation film print from the original film negative for this screening.
Now after 40 years, THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR is all new again, with a 2019 Digital Remaster to ProRes format, again made from the Academy Film Archives 16mm Restoration Print and Digital Master.
The Academy Film Archives 16mm Restoration Print was shown at the Academy Oscar Doc Series on September 24, 2007 and also used to make the DVD master – and the DVD looked beautiful! On the DVD release in 2007, Wall Street Journal Pulitzer Prize winning movie reviewer Joe Morgenstern wrote: “The disc is resplendent, thanks to digital remastering in HD (a rejuvenation that has wisely left traces of the imperfections that characterize all films of a certain age).” When THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR was first made in 1978, the Wright Brother’s airplane footage was the old footage “of a certain age” and now the whole film was “of a certain age.” The DVD was used for 8 years in schools across the country, showing to students who were half the age of the movie.
At the end of 2019, we were invited to show THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR film at the Port Townsend Film Festival. The Port Townsend Film Festival was having it’s 20th Anniversary and THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR film was celebrating the 40th anniversary of getting the Documentary Short Oscar, so it was a nice match. I sent off the DVD to the PT Film Festival and a few days later, I got a polite call asking if I might have a better resolution version of the film, as the 12 year old DVD was by today’s standards really low resolution.
Joe Linder, who had made the Restoration at the Academy Film Archives, helped me track down the post production film lab which had made the original Restoration Print/DVD digital transfer 12 years ago. I sent a blind email to them, asking if they had the 12 year old THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR master in their archives and I got an email back about 30 minutes later from David Moreno, the man who had made the original transfer and still at the company.
David found the THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR Digital Master in a form called D5, which was the top format in 2007 and is a now out-of-date digital format. He wrote to me saying they would see if they could get their old D5 machine to run. They did and it worked and I got a new ProRes digital file [now state-of-the-art] just three days before that Port Townsend Film Festival screening.
And when we screened it, THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR looked like it looked in 16mm when it was first made. It is sharp and detailed, showing the Gossamer Condor’s thin wire super-structure and every reflection in the transparent wing covering. There are vibrant colors in the film, like the orange red main title, which I hadn’t seen in decades, and I can see some of the original 16mm film grain in this version. And it still has some of those wonderful “imperfections that characterize all films of a certain age.”
I have thanked the Port Townsend Film Festival over and over for asking. It is so cool to have this long lived film in such pristine condition. Like magic, THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR movie is new again.
Earlier in 2020, the company Paul MacCready founded, AeroVironment, contacted me about having copies of this historic film story for the company’s 50th Anniversary. In my movie making career, I have seen the hardware and technology change from 16mm celluloid to high resolution digital formats and I have had many colleagues and experts guide me from format to format. When this request came in while I was Guest Professor at Linköping University in Sweden, I contacted Editor Mark Brewer, who had been the original Assistant Editor on THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR at Churchill Films in 1978.
Now a highly talented professional movie editor for 40 years, Mark and I had been corresponding about once a decade about projects we were working on. After Mark visited the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC in 2013 and saw the Gossamer Condor airplane and a video excerpt of THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR which runs in that exhibit, he had written to me about the poor quality of that old video and said “I am open to helping you out if you ever decide to futz with Gossamer Condor for the Smithsonian. In fact I’d be honored.”
Now indeed it was time to “futz”…using the new 2019 ProRes Digital master and digital copies of the Special Features from the DVD. It is my turn to be honored to work with Mark. EditGuru Mark guided me through this process and digitally edited this 40th+ Anniversary version of THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR at the highest quality, all done online and with care and new details which expands the film. I thank Mark Brewer deeply and we hope you enjoy this story of the Gossamer Condor airplane, history’s first truly successful human-powered airplane designed and built by Paul MacCready and his family and friends, as this fragile plane flies into aviation history…
THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR Original Production Credits:
Churchill Films presents A Shedd Productions film
Directed and written by Ben Shedd
Produced by Jacqueline Phillips Shedd and Ben Shedd
Director of Photography: Boyd Estus
Edited by Ben Shedd and Mary Bauer
Sound Design and Mix: John Brasher
Narrated by Roger Steffens
Associate Producers: Boyd Estus and Oscar Williams
Animation and title design: Jeff McGrath
Additional photography: Fred Elms, Carl Boenish, Michael Murphy, Kyoichi Furusawa, Patrick Allen, Ben Shedd, Terry and Donna Morrison
Sound Recording: Leslie Shatz, Wolf Seberg, Peter Hliddal, George Stupar, Keniche Yoshida, John Barbee, Jacqueline Phillips Shedd
Assistant Sound Editor: Roberta Doheny – FX Recording: Lars Nelson
Special Consultant: Winter D. Horton Jr. Centre Films
Still Photography: Mariana Gosnell, James Joseph, Paul and Judy MacCready
Production Assistants: Nancy Audley, Michael Bloecher, Susan Motteau, Dick Shedd, Mark Brewer, Jan Colmar, Jim Rice
Special Assistant: Nara Shedd
Special Thanks: Harry and Florence Phillips, Robert and Beverly Shedd, Robert Churchill, George McQuilken, Peter Hoffman, Geoffrey Haines-Stiles, Simon Campbell-Jones, Paul MacCready and the Gossamer Condor crew, Aerovironment, Inc. BBC, NBC News and thanks to all our friends and associates who believed in and supported this film.
A Shedd Productions, Inc. film Copyright 1978 DVD Copyright 2007 ProRes Remaster Copyright 2020 Distributed in 16mm by Churchill Films
VHS VERSION 1985 Credits
Distributed by Direct Cinema Ltd. One of the first video box covers to be designed with desktop computer design software. VHS Cover Design by Jeff McGrath and Ben Shedd
DVD VERSION 2007 of THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR Credits
Academy Film Archives 16mm Restoration/Preservation Print made from the original 1976-1977 16mm negative printing masters by Joe Linder, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences
David Moreno at The Post Group/now Runway in Los Angeles did the transfer to High Definition digital on a Spirit machine from the Academy’s color corrected preservation 16mm Interpositive.
Lightning Media replicated the original VHS video cover using the original artwork and created the DVD Authoring and Special Features with director Ben Shedd. Special Features title designs by Alycia Joy Shedd. DVD Chapter Headings developed by Brett Handley for the Project Lead The Way [PLTW] National High School Engineering Curriculum Introduction to Design Engineering.
LAGraphico added to the digital restoration of the new DVD cover and printed the DVD holder on environmentally friendly cardboard with soy based inks.
The DVD had its world premiere on August 23, 2007, the 30th anniversary of the Gossamer Condor’s landmark flight into aviation history. The Academy’s 16mm preservation print was shown in Los Angeles on September 24, 2007 at the Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater as part of the Oscar Documentary series.
DVD Distribution by Shedd Productions, Inc.
2020 Digital ProRes Remaster of THE FLIGHT OF THE GOSSAMER CONDOR Credits
Producer/Director: Ben Shedd Editor: Mark Brewer Music: J Jorgensen MX Q Hannah Brewer
2020 ProRes ReMaster from Academy Film Archives 16mm Restoration Print and Digital Transfer. Thanks to David Moreno of Runway, Joe Linder of the Academy Film Archives, and Technical Guru Bill Putney, & Executive Director Janette Force from the Port Townsend Film Festival.
Digital Distribution by Shedd Productions, Inc.