Tag Archives: espn

Hype & Recap Videos

Leave a reply

Hype videos are meant to built interest, suspense and generally get an audience excited. ESPN is great at this. They mine hours of material and use footage of players bellowing, ripping their shirts, throwing their rackets etc. This hype video was built out of the two semi-finals matches I filmed before the final. We lit the player interviews with one ice light as a key and used room ambience for the fill. The harsh light worked well and the catch looks good in their eyes.

A tricky part about this hype piece is that it’s objectively difficult to tell which player you are watching in the supporting broll. Both men are late 20s, bearded, caucasian, American men wearing the same kit from Asics. They have a similar vocal tamber too which prompted me to flip their interviews in post so that there’s an additional visual clue as to whom is speaking.

The music for this piece came from a number of sfx I have purchased over the years. Instead of picking a track, I layered soundbeds to match the broll. The drone footage is from our new Mavic Air. We were working alongside the NFL photographer, Aaron Sprecher. I showed him how to fly, let him fly and he bought a drone the same day.

The Championship Point and subsequent “pool jump” were must-haves. It was tricky finding an unobstructed view from the stadium that would definitely capture Steve Johnson’s win over Tennys Sandgren. Thankfully I anticipated the right location, managed to get some unique backlit footage of the trophy and ran to the pool to place three GoPros preset to shoot 4k 60fps, 1080p 240fps and 2.7k 120fps. Additionally I ran a wide 5dmk4 at 60fps and the 1dxii at 120fps from the platform directly across from the jump. It was quite a rushed job. Thankfully the exposure, the focus, the framing on everything turned out better than expected. Not pictured here is a looping GIF-like video of Stevie J jumping in and out, shooting out of the water in reverse etc. It performed very well on Twitter. It’s always a little frustrating when the simple, goofy videos perform better than the ones that take more time. Aaron and I finished the day with a private photo/video shoot with Steve Johnson with the champion’s chalice. It was cool to be able to congratulate him on his then upcoming wedding and winning the tournament.

Wimbledon 2017

Leave a reply

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.

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.

For the 131st time, the gates are set to open at #Wimbledon…

A post shared by Wimbledon (@wimbledon) on

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.

19 days to go. Time to spruce the place up… #wimbledon

A post shared by Wimbledon (@wimbledon) on

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.