An introduction to our movie: Under The Flight Path [TEASER]

As many of you know, we’ve been working on a movie called Under The Flight Path: A Community History of Sea-Tac Airport. The movie won’t be released until Summer, 2025. But you can watch a draft version of the first six minutes now, and then sign up to our mailing list to get future teasers and learn where/when you can watch the finished product.

The explanation…

In show biz, they say you should never have to explain your act. So whether you read this before or after watching, we hope you found that Introduction compelling and sign up to our mailing list.

Not only is the movie unfinished, even this Introduction is unfinished! It’s ‘feature complete’ but not ‘production-ready’. Just a couple of examples:

• Many of the images are placeholders which will be corrected or replaced by snazzy, professional animations.
• The irritating/mumbling voice over will be replaced by a for realz actor.

We’re doing these kinds of things now, across the entire film.

A history of history…

We started working on this almost three years ago–story boarding 85% of the thing. But we never had money to turn it into ‘a movie’. Then out of the blue, we got some money. So it was like, “If we’re ever gonna do this, we gotta do it now!” We prepared this Introduction to show contributors that we are actually doing something and then decided it might have some promotional value.

Why an Introduction?

The reason this is an Introduction and not a ‘trailer’ is that we haven’t figured out how to do one. If you make a documentary on, say, World War II, most people will at least know ‘who is who’. But both the events and characters in this story will be unrecognizable to most people. Just throwing out video clips and stills from the past seventy years did not seem like a great idea.

Why this Introduction?

Having shown this bit to a few groups now, we’ve gotten some useful criticism.

One is that “It doesn’t look much like history.” Point taken. There are many histories of commercial aviation, Boeing, the Port of Seattle and Sea-Tac Airport. Whether positive or negative none really explain a lot of things–particularly ‘why’. They tend to present events as something called ‘progress’, or at least, inevitable. Neither is necessarily true.

The Introduction presents the major themes we cover in the rest of the movie in order to provide that ‘why’. The following 83 minutes go into the who, what, where and when. It’s poor writing to say, “Trust us, we’ll get there!” But trust us, we’ll get there.

The other note we’ve received is that it has an obvious point of view. To which we reply, all history comes with a point of view. This is simply the first from the community point of view; hence the title. However, that does not mean we are any less complete or accurate or objective than any other attempt. On the contrary.

Without giving away the punchline, we hope to show viewers that what has happened over the past seventy years often comes down to choices and values, as opposed to ‘fate’. Sometimes history becomes inevitable only because people on all sides come to believe that there is no alternative.

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