Our duty was to serve as remote editor to The Championships this year.
In late 2016 Ashley and I found out that she was pregnant with our second child and that the due date was during Wimbledon. I informed the All England Club that we would be unable to work The Championships in 2017. It was unfortunate as I had already booked travel and accommodation. However witnessing the birth of my second child was certainly worth remaining stateside! 🙂 Baby Lucy and her Mama are doing spectacularly.
Alexandra Willis, the head of communications and digital content, for the AELTC was kind enough to employ me for a number of remote edits prior to and during Wimbledon. I ended up making sixteen videos. Below are a few of the most interesting for different reasons.
This year McCann London made a proper commercial that ran on ESPN. Roger Federer was nice enough to take part. A crew from McCann shot Roger in Dubai earlier in 2017. I was thankful to have the post-production job of putting together a behind the scenes vignette covering the shoot. Amazingly, this piece generated 1.5 million views. It’s my second most-watched tennis video ever.
Additionally we worked with McCann submitting footage from 2015 and 2016 for use in additional Pursuit of Greatness campaign videos. Most significantly I had the opportunity to cut a handful of “My Wimbledon Memory” videos. Two starred Federer watching clips of himself from the past. He retweeted one where he watched himself beat Pete Sampras. It is still exciting to have one of the most recognizable athletes in the world and the greatest male tennis player retweet our video not long before playing in the Finals.
Everyone has a favourite Wimbledon memory – what’s yours?
Here’s @rogerfederer to kick things off in style…#MyWimbledonMemory pic.twitter.com/8r0EXl05gA
— Wimbledon (@Wimbledon) June 29, 2017
Andy Murray is notoriously dull. The British people do love and respect him as their great 21st century male tennis player. He was the defending champion and World No. 1 this year too. I had fun doing my best to make a series of videos starring Andy interesting where he performed a number of children’s tasks from a 2017 Wimbledon pamphlet. This one was my attempt to add humor through editing and music cues.
The Opening Gates montage was also a fun one to cut. I got to use my own unused footage from previous years in addition to footage from the Wimbledon archive dating back to the 1940s. In fact, I cut this video the night before the tournament started from North Carolina. Wimbledon released it. Ashley went into labor. She gave birth. Later that day I looked at my phone and saw that it had 50,000 views on Instagram. There are times I still marvel that we live in a day and age where the cloud and high speed internet allow for this kind of remote editing. We were having a baby in America yet were still very involved with the tournament.
At the end of the Opening Gates montage note the kinetic logo outro. This motion graphics animation was also a request of the AELTC. It has been nice to know that even while I did not shoot Wimbledon in 2017, the majority of all videos produced were marked with my original graphic.
Some edits were as simple and short as this cover photo video. As these trophies remain the same year after year, recycling my old footage was entirely appropriate.
This one is broll of the grounds being meticulously prepared. It’s nice that I overshot and was early arriving last year so that an original piece could be made in 2017.
Lastly and most significantly I made the My Wimbledon Experience videos. Each year these are in partnership with IBM. Broll footage from around the grounds of different iconic activities edited to music makes up the skeleton of a video that can be personalized and populated with your own smartphone photos of the event. Patrons and viewers at home are encouraged to insert their own snapshots into the video via the Wimbledon App. (IBM programs a user-friendly interface). Then the app allows for quick and easy posting to all social media platforms. This particular video may end up being our most viewed overall if one counts all of the thousands of individualized iterations in London and across the globe.
Here’s what a screengrab of the personalized video portion of the app looks like:
It was a privilege to be included in an impressive team of pros pushing hard on social media during a two week stint when the attention of the world is on SW19.
