Tag Archives: riveroaks

Hype & Recap Videos

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.

Houston Tournament Coverage

The US Men’s Clay Court Championship is an annual ATP event that has been played in some form on clay in Texas since 1910. It’s a small, but very upscale event. The Players Party video above showcases the spared no expense food, entertainment and everyone at the country club is required to dress entirely in white.

The River Oaks Report was a daily show I produced with Blair Henley. Blair prepped questions and talking points for Tennis Channel guests. The video above was filmed at the Tennis Channel desk at the tournament and lit with Arri Skypanels. Over the one week tournament, I managed to film and edit 20 videos. Some were creative, some were short, ten were similar to the video above.

Ladies Day. This is my attempt to make an engaging Facebook Cover video out of a 1hr event at the event’s Centre Court. The slowmo toss of the balls is a visual that seems to capture viewer’s attention. Because this tournament was new to video in 2018, I pulled out all the stops to try to make the videos short and sticky in an effort to build an online following and/or buzz.

Sponsor obligations are always part of any tournament video coverage. Above is a cornball piece for on on-grounds shop with lines very capably delivered by the consummate professional, Blair Henley.

The Bryan Bros are always playing and everyone always wants videos of them. It’s tricky because we cannot use their covers of popular songs. So finding music that works is always a challenge. In this case the larger challenge was harsh pink flood lights that washed the band in one tone. The video is black and white to compensate for the pinkness.

Here’s a piece that took multiple trips to film and was a good distance from the posh River Oaks community. A number of the American male tennis players banded together to give back to the community after Hurricane Harvey hit at the end of August/early Sept 2017.

Over multiple days I shot players responding to the question of what they are superstitious about. It was Friday the 13th that week and the video was released that day. I used an 80s knockoff of Thriller to tie it together. The use of the font “Impact” was intended to make the video meme-able. Hopefully somewhere out there are screen caps and looping GIFs from this piece. It probably did end up performing the best out of the videos featured here. It was shared by other tennis outlets with larger online fan bases.

Isner hit his 10000th career ace in Houston during the tournament. (Only the 4th person to accomplish this). I like the cop walking off with the ball in a ziplock bag to preserve for Newport and the Tennis Hall of Fame. 🙂