It's an epic musical battle that melds raw talent, expert technique, fierce ambition and world-class showmanship, playing out on a worldwide stage before throngs of enthused fans. The event? An air guitar competition.

Once relegated to the bedrooms of wannabe rock stars, air guitar has emerged within the last decade as a legitimate form of performance art complete with its own aesthetic, celebrities and subculture. Hoping to capture the drama of this nascent music/performance scene, filmmaker Alexandra Lipsitz turned her cameras on the World Air Guitar Championships. The result is Air Guitar Nation, an entertaining documentary that chronicles the rivalry between the two top stars of the genre: C. Diddy (David Jung), a caped samurai warrior who sports a Hello Kitty breastplate, and his arch nemesis, Björn Türoque (Dan Crane), a rocker hailing from New York's Lower East Side.

Executive producers Kriston Rucker and Cedric Devitt came up with the idea for the film after attending the 2002 World Air Guitar Championships in the small fishing village of Oulu, Finland. Devitt entered the competition and ended up winning fourth place. He and Rucker returned to the U.S. determined to bring the U.S. competition to television. "They thought it would make a great anti-American Idol reality show," says Lipsitz.

VH1 agreed and picked up the show but eventually chose not to develop it further. Owning the rights to hold the U.S. competition and with the pre-production in place, Lipsitz and her collaborators at production company Magical Elves decided to shoot the event anyway and turn the footage into a feature film.

Using camera equipment loaned to them by the film's director of photography, Anthony Sacco, Lipsitz pulled together a skeleton crew to document the U.S. Air Guitar Championships and, following that, the 2003 World Championships in Finland. "We didn't really know what the story was going to be when we started shooting," says Lipsitz. "But the good thing about air guitar is that it always delivers--no matter where you are, what event you're shooting or how many people are involved."

In 2003, Lipsitz and her crew started off shooting on a Beta SP camera and a Sony DSR-PD150 Mini DV camcorder. Lipsitz and the film's producers begged and borrowed whatever cameras they could, shooting mainly on a Panasonic AJ-SDX900 and a Panasonic AG-DVX100. Toward the end, they also shot with a Sony HDCAM and, for one sequence, a Panasonic P2 camcorder.

Shooting the championships required little in the way of lighting from the filmmakers. "We had stage lighting, so we didn't need to set up any lights," says Lipsitz. "I always make sure my operators and I use a small onboard light. And I make sure we're all plugged in to earphones."

Shooting the championship required six cameras. Sacco was in the front of the stage, Lipsitz was on the side; one camera was located in the stairwell to grab on-the-fly interviews, one was trained on the judges and one captured a wide shot. Of the six cameras, three were shoulder-mounted Beta cameras and three were small Mini DV camcorders.

"One of the most technically difficult things was getting all that footage on the same timeline in Final Cut Pro, reconciling all that on a da Vinci, then doing a 30p conversion and mastering it on HDCAM," says Lipsitz. "It looked great when we went to film festivals on HDCAM and DigiBeta, but when we went to film, it was another whole ball of wax because we had so many different formats and frame rates on the timeline." In addition to the various formats they shot, Lipsitz also received PAL footage from Finland.

Editor Conor O'Neill cut the bulk of the film at Lipsitz' house in Final Cut Pro 5 with an AJA Io card for the analog footage. Lipsitz had some PAL Beta footage professionally transferred to NTSC Beta but didn't like the way it looked ("It was oversaturated and blown out, and we couldn't fix it in the da Vinci."), so she turned to a $199 plug-in (she can't recall which one) for the conversion. She says, "It worked great! The big lesson: use the cheap plug-in."

The editing process took about a year. "We weren't cutting full-time because this was a self-funded project. When we lost Conor halfway through, there was a period of time, almost four months, when there was no cutting. Then Clark Vogeler and I came in for a final month to finish it," says Lipsitz. In fact, she has had to re-cut Air Guitar Nation several times since then because of difficulties with music clearances. "But the good thing is that air guitar can work with any song," she says. "No matter what we lost, we could throw another one in there."

Lipsitz worked with Allan Kelly at Filmlook in Burbank to complete the film's online. "We went through the entire film digitally and evened it out by doing a 30p conversion. We had so many different formats--this [conversion] was helpful to give them an overall equality," she says. "There were a couple scenes where we had to correct the color temperatures or make it look like the sun was going down, but there was nothing major." After color correction, the project was laid back to tape with the benefit of 30p conversion and a film look plug-in laid on top of the footage.

It was screened at festivals on video mastered to HDCAM and sometimes downconverted to DigiBeta, but when Air Guitar Nation was picked up for theatrical distribution, the producers paid for a film-out at EFILM and a 35mm print at Deluxe.

"The Finnish people believe you can't hold a gun and play air guitar at the same time," says Lipsitz. "So if everybody in the world was playing air guitar at the same time, there would be no war. I think a lot of people expect the movie to be this ridiculous, silly thing that's just about people drinking and loving rock 'n' roll. And it is about that, but it's also about much more. I think the big surprise for a lot of people is that this film is about competition, humanity, alter egos and why people want to get out of themselves for 60 seconds and do something totally different."