#routine flight

So a few years ago Gary Whitta and Mike Mika and I were talking and we came up with an awesome film idea: Routine Flight. Basically it’s like a ‘70s disaster flick, you start with this 737 with various ensemble characters getting on – the couple trying to re-spark their relationship, a little girl and her mom going to be reunited with her father who’s just back from the war, a retiring pilot on his last flight, a tired businessman who’s getting too old for this shit, the haunted looking guy who may or may not be a terrorist, maybe some kind of teen love connection couple who get randomly seated next to each other. Maybe a soccer team too, it depends on the final budget, 

Presented in real time through a 90 minute flight from San Francisco to San Diego, a lot of stuff builds up – dramatic music, terrorist guy getting up to the to the bathroom a lot, very suspiciously,as we get more involved with the characters -- teen love connection couple starting to talk, etc. It pretty much writes itself. We also see menace: A shot of a short circuit slowly building inside a closed wire run in the baggage compartment. Of course, nothing happens. We see the short circuit develop and we follow it in a great CG scene, certain we’re moments from disaster, when what actually happens is tired businessman’s seat back video screen goes out. A stewardess taps it a couple of times and apologies, but he says it’s no big deal and pulls out his Kindle. Moments like this keep happening -- we called them gags and we had about 50 or 60 built up over the course of one or two lunches at Emeryville’s legendary Doyle Street Cafe. Anyway of course eventually the plane lands and everyone deplanes and the movie ends. Because it’s a routine flight.

We had some good ideas for the sequel, Routine Flight: Return Trip, and even figured out how we’d take the franchise over the shark (Routine Flight III: Road Trip -- to be fair to Mike and Gary, I think this might have just been me.). Alas, despite how awesome this all sounds, Routine Flight never even got to the treatment stage.

Gary went on to be an actually famous screen writer, and Mike and I still toil in the game industry, with our only joint cinematographic output to date being our completed screenplay for DAY OF THE ICEBERG (like us on Facebook!) which remains unproduced, despite having what many people consider the best Golden Gate Bridge destruction sequence ever conceived for a disaster film. And roles written explicitly for John Gibson, Gabe Swarr and Tony Mora.

Anyway, if we had made Routine Flight, Kevin Wong’s Flight Sim could easily have been the movie tie in game. You’re sitting in an airliner window seat watching procedurally generated terrain (it looks a lot like the Grapevine region of SoCal) scroll by from about 20,000 feet. That’s it. I think it’s kind of got stylized graphics, but it may just be that I’m running it on a really crappy laptop, I can’t really tell. Camera controls on the mouse feel good, but an option to put your seat back tray down would be pretty cool – that may be coming via DLC or in a sequel. For now though, it’s a pretty contemplative way to spend a little while, especially if you haven’t flown in to LA lately. Tension does arise when the procedurally generated mountains get a little too close to the plane (which does happen), but luckily there’s no collision detection with the terrain, so nothing can really threaten this routine flight.