Tag Archives: roger federer

Best of 2018

Filming in 2018 brought us to seven countries and eighteen states on behalf of universities, non-profits, startups, Fortune 500 companies, and professional tennis tournaments.

Super Blue Blood Moon

On February 1, 2018 a blue supermoon and a blood moon occurred in tandem. We positioned ourselves using a moonrise iPhone app to capture the lunar path passing behind the Bank of America Corporate Center in Uptown Charlotte, North Carolina. Using a 400mm lens and shooting in 4k ultra high definition, we put the clip on Instagram. Overnight we were contacted by ABC News, CNN.com, The Washington Post, HLN, Reuters and other smaller outlets for publication. Combined, the clip reached millions of people resulting in a lot of earned media exposure for T&T through television, news websites YouTube embeds, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Hammock Coast
Sometimes we get the opportunity to work locally in the Carolinas. We completed a seven ad CVB series of short web videos that promote South Carolina coastal community tourism. Shrimp, fishing, egrets, gators, kayaking, Spanish moss, golf, old plantation homes. It was a great project to be tasked with.

Return to China
Coming back to Sias International University was unexpected impossible to turn down. Sias is where we first started dabbling in video production. One of our earliest uploads to YouTube was a minor viral hit in 2008. It was exciting to be flown back to Zhengzhou, China to film a piece promoting the 20th anniversary celebration of the university. It was a whirlwind two weeks. But the freedom to fly our Inspire2 above the unique architecture of the “East meets West” campus and thousands of marching students is a memory we will not soon forget.

Camp Greystone
Our involvement with Greystone dates back to 2014 when we filmed our first high-energy summer camp video. Since that year, other elite summer camps have continued to be part of our June-August workload. In 2018 however, we were tasked with creating a Greystone mini-doc in preparation for their centennial year. It’s an absolutely amazing camp. Excellent staff, facilities, programs and location. Interviewing campers, their moms and grandmothers throughout the summer was a pleasure. It’s not often we are provided the opportunity to film eight+ hours of interviews and really take the time to craft a narrative. The archival 8mm clips and photos worked well when match-cut against the 2018 camp activity footage. This piece took the most time to film and edit of any of our work over the past year, and we hope it shows. In addition to this 5min video, we completed another highlight and a piece on camp being a safe place for teens to detox from phones and social media.

The Institute for Speech and Debate
The nation’s best speech and debate summer camp program needed a 30sec commercial and two new social media videos promoting their offerings. The pieces were filmed at UNC Chapel Hill entirely in 4k using a Canon C200 and 1Dxii. The interviews are probably our favorite from 2018 because of our lighting choices pairing window light with an Arri Skypanel S30c and large softbox. The videos were successful and we returned to the ISD camps later in the summer of 2018 to capture broll and more interviews for 2019 ads.

Shot Clock
Each year at Yale for The Connecticut Open we try to outdo our previous all-access attempts at a funny viral video. This is a tennis tournament that provides a great deal of freedom with regard to what we are able to do with the players. This piece is a significant win because we again wrote a script, filmed and edited a piece that was not only popular with players and tennis journalists but became the most-viewed video ever released by the tournament. It helped to double the number of Facebook followers and did even better numbers on Twitter. Alongside PR guru, Katie Spellman, we executed what could safely be called the most successful tennis all-access video from any smaller tournament (WTA or ATP) in 2018.

Indian Wells

Despite working sixteen hour days in the California desert, The BNP Paribas Open somehow always feels like the best of vacations. I guess that’s why it’s called “tennis paradise.” We increased our presence this year adding the ever intrepid Ian Davidson to our ranks. This enabled us to double our video output to 26 videos in 13 days. Additional work was created to be viewed on video boards throughout the site. The below three-minute piece hopefully ended up being one of the most valuable videos we completed for Indian Wells. (Footage from T&T, ATP Media, 312Media with production assistance from HolderMedia Inc.) The video is now used as a tool by the IWTG to help land potential new sponsors for 2019 and beyond.

Conferences

MSD’s Better Together convention took place at the storied Miami Fountainebleau luxury hotel. We were invited to film for 309 Productions, another multimedia production company, from Boston, MA. Editing on the below piece was completed by T&T friend and owner of 309, Lauren Foley.

The TEAMS Conference and Expo is an annual four-day convention for the sports event industry. We have now served this event five times. 2018 showcased Louisville, Kentucky as the host city. It is an exciting day to go from a green screen shoot to filming racehorses at Churchill Downs to filming world-class BMX cyclists, to Olympian Shawn White and then a bourbon distillery. TEAMS really packs in the activity in addition to educational sessions and networking. This video was filmed by Drew Carlisle and edited by Javier Mosquera.

Tootsie’s Fashion Show
The River Oaks Country Club in Houston, Texas hosted a “Spring Is Served” themed fashion show this past April. Everything about this piece ended up going well. Note our use of real prisms waved in front of the camera lenses to refract light and create transition points for the edited footage.

UNCC
We often work for and collaborate with advertising agencies to provide video production capabilities. Little Red Bird out of Charlotte, NC has been tapping us for projects since 2013. This was a particularly complex one to tackle. We had actors read University of North Carolina at Charlotte degree requirements from a teleprompter against a white seamless backdrop at that UNCC campus. That coupled with some drone footage and stock broll of campus then turned into an exercise in motion graphics to best present the information. Kudos to Tim Paulson of LRB for his vision and our own Ian Davidson for the motion graphics execution. This series ended up producing 12 unique program videos for UNCC.

The Nest
Another example of a local commercial is this 30sec ad that ran in the Columbia, SC television market. On behalf of Sting Creative we produced a next-day-edit piece for The Nest, a plumbing fixture and electrical appliance showroom for Cregger Company.

Clawguard
Here’s a startup in the pet industry with door guards and tape in their product lineup. We were taking product photography in a dark fulfillment center warehouse and on the fly decided to shoot an explainer video with the CEO introducing their new furniture shields. It turned out okay for being a one-take/no planning piece.


Laver Cup
One of the great thrills of 2018 was our involvement with The Laver Cup and the strong support staff at Tennis Australia. The Team Europe versus Team World event was an incredible competition held at the United Center in Chicago this past September. But first, in March, we filmed a promo video of epic proportions. It was logistically challenging with players arriving on separate planes, separate cars, celebrity guests, amazing Windy City locations all filmed in five hours with all editing completed two days later. Thanks to everyone from MVTPR, and TA for helping make this video possible.

JP Morgan hosted another Midtown Manhattan promo in August, the week prior to the US Open. Here’s our 2018 promo featuring Novak Djokovic, John McEnroe and Rod Laver.

As one would expect, the Navy Pier gala the week of the event was very classy. This piece involved four cameras, interviews, a stage presentation and had completion deadline of that next morning. I share this one because we wrapped and then stayed up all night cutting the footage.

Cliffs of Moher

This place often tops many lists of the most beautiful places in the world. We were not sure how DJI’s little Mavic Air would fair against the North Atlantic winds. It acquitted itself nicely and captured many views unseen by the 1.5 million annual visitors.

Roland-Garros

Here’s a preview of some of our French Open work. For the second year we returned to Paris in the spring. Unlike at Indian Wells or Wimbledon, we are not part of the same-day-edit social/digital team. Instead we are hired, alongside two other contracted production companies, to provide carefully crafted tennis match action videos. This time we were assigned to cover the younger up-and-coming next-gen players. After culling through the sixteen hours of footage, ten 30-60second videos were completed in November of 2018. They will be released and used by the FFT later in 2019 to excite fans prior to and during the clay court season.

Wimbledon

The Championships is the highest profile video job we are tasked with annually. We are honored and thankful for the opportunity to continue serving the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. This year we began creating mini-docs (scripted by the brilliant Leigh Walsh) using archival footage. Between April and the end of the tournament in July, we shot and edited over 40 videos for The Championships.

Part of the joy of working Wimbledon is that we are asked to do a little of everything. Each day is different. From filming the 2018 jewelry collection, to a proper British afternoon tea, to celebrity tours and of course match action on Centre Court. It’s the best tennis venue, the cleanest visuals, and a fantastic place to work. The Wimbledon Social/Digital team and IBM expertly and consistently stay on top of trends providing fans with the best experience possible.

Many of our videos achieved 1 to 5 million views on different platforms. The below piece is a themed video we have repeated annually since 2015. “Finishing Touches” is always completed right when tennis fans start to turn their attention to Wimbledon, but there are not yet matches on television. That, plus shares from ESPN, the BBC etc probably helped bump the numbers up on social.

This year we experimented with longer form cinematic storytelling on IGTV featuring the best match action paired with press conference post-match soundbites. Timing-wise it worked out well that we were able to cover the Nadal/Delpo match because with many dramatic dives by both players, it was one of the most exciting matches in 2018. The Women’s Final was a rematch of 2016 and was also a treat to film. Both of the below pieces filled a programming hole that fans seem to appreciate and is not otherwise provided by commentary and live coverage.

For this one note Gwri Pennar’s very-helpful overhead shots from the Centre Court crow’s nest.

Jodi Benson (The Voice of Ariel, The Little Mermaid)

Let us end this post with our most successful video ever. We also own and operate a wedding cinematography business filming 30-40 events annually. Seldom does the wedding work end up on Tried & True, but this piece was special. The video below is now our most-viewed content ever with 17+ million views and counting. We were filming a Jersey Shore wedding reception and the father-of-the-bride surprised his daughter with The REAL Little Mermaid. She sang “Part of Your World” in addition to other Disney standards. It was Jodi Benson’s first time singing at the wedding of someone who was not in her family. The fact that it was a surprise, that the bride’s reaction was perfect, that Jodi Benson performed flawlessly and that the recording was solid made us suspect that the piece had some potential to go viral. Never did we imagine 17 million views though! It ended up snowballing through Facebook and later aired on a number of TV news shows, was embedded with articles throughout the web and so on. It was a great privilege to be there in that moment to film something that Disney fans all over the world have now seen.

Additional work was completed in 2018 for Thornwell Home for Children, Monarch Medical Technologies, Pierce’s Project, PlaySight Technologies, The Western and Southern Open, US Men’s Clay Court Championship, The International Tennis Hall of Fame, Häagen-Dazs, The NFL, Porsche and Fila Sportswear. Thank you very much to our all of our clients, collaborators, contractors and connections in the creative and corporate worlds for making last year our best year ever.

Here’s to 2019!

Laver Cup Chicago Promo


Tennis Australia handles the PR and social media promotion for the Laver Cup regardless of which continent the event is played. We thoroughly enjoyed working for them at a promotional event in Manhattan during the summer of 2017. Thankfully they asked us back and invited us to take part in a stunt, this time in Chicago, to encourage North American ticket sales in 2018.

The piece and the day itself went through numerous revisions in the weeks prior as celebrities and locations were added to the itinerary. The final script called for Tried & True to provide a production crew consisting of five camera operators and two field audio technicians. With enough advance warning, I put together a staff of talented professionals who had all filmed social media videos about Roger at other tournaments. From the Red Sox, Billie Weiss and Lauren Foley were brought on. Direct from Indian Wells, Ian Davidson and myself flew in. Mark Reidy from Tennis Australia, Joe Miller and Dustin Berta rounded out the team.

Roger Federer’s agency, Team8, with the USTA and TA is a partial owner in The Laver Cup. They are pursuing a marketing strategy using Roger as a primary draw for fans. When we filmed this video, Roger was still the number one player in the world and was still fresh off an 18 match winning streak for 2018.

Using Roger to amplify the video worked very well. For example, The Laver Cup’s Facebook page reached 60,000 views. But Roger posting the video natively to his Facebook profile meant that we achieved the maximum possible audience. Without an ad buy, Roger’s celebrity was a strong enough generator of earned media to achieve nearly 500,000 views on Facebook, over 600,000 views on Instagram and over 200,000 views through Twitter.

Interest was further amplified by the inclusion of 1990s NBA all-star Scottie Pippen and the international superstar soccer player, Bastian Schweinsteiger. Bastian is married to a retired female tennis player, Ana Ivanovic. They live in Chicago and have a strong social media presence. Scottie made for a good representative to lead Roger through The United Center where the Laver Cup will be played. Mike Tirico is notable to American audiences as he is fresh off of anchoring his first Olympics as NBC’s replacement for Bob Costas. Mayor Rahm Emanuel is currently perhaps America’s best-known mayor, having served as a pugnacious congressman from Illinois and later President Obama’s Chief-of-Staff.

We had one day of location scouting and then four hours with Roger, John McEnroe, Rod Laver and Nick Kyrgios. We were fighting Chicago traffic and a tight schedule that allotted ten to fifteen minutes per stop. We shot very run-and-gun. There was no time for rehearsal with the talent. The crew reviewed the script carefully and were prepared to film enough to satisfy the requirements for each scene. We split into two teams with an operator shooting telephoto and others running gimbals. We received a permit from the city to fly a drone above the stunt at the Bean too. Tried & True used GoPro Hero6s in the cars in addition to DSLRs and Westcott Ice Lights to provide even lighting on the faces of multiple generations of tennis players. GoPros were attached to the headrests of the front seats. The ice lights were taped with gaffers tape between those two seats too. Ice lights are a great LED long-running option to provide soft, continuous lighting.

We filmed Roger’s plane landing at Midway Airport and his departure with McEnroe in a Laver Cup branded Mercedes SUV. Lou Malnati’s is a chain of iconic Chicago pizzerias. We captured the four generations of professional tennis players chatting and eating. We stopped by the Chicago Theater with the pretty interior and iconic marquee and swung by the United Center as mentioned above. The Bean stunt went off without a hitch thanks to the efforts of MVT PR. Members of the media were present as were tennis fans, security was in place and the black Laver Court looked perfect in front of the Bean. Kyrgios and Roger definitely had fun with their hit and giggle in front of the crowd. Afterward we proceeded to a rooftop photoshoot and then a press conference.

We covered the press conference with six angles and immediately produced a VNR for international media consisting of the best broll and soundbites. The edit of the social media piece went well. It took one day to organize data from ten camera sources and two audio techs. The next day was spent listening to the material to find the best bites. Prue Ryan of Tennis Australia and Kellie Morgan, the producer on the piece, were instrumental in the scripting and vision for the deliverable. The video production team departed after the shoot. Editing and revisions were completed remotely, but the piece was finished by deadline. Tickets went on sale and hundreds of thousands of tennis fans saw the promo. The Instagram video was completed at a 4:5 ratio, meaning that it is taller than it is wide. As a result, the piece took up more room in an Instagram feed. The fact that this version of the video was optimized for phone consumption is partially why the content overall performed the best on Instagram.

All 3-day ticket bundles under $2500.00 for the three-day Laver Cup event sold out two days after the release of the video. Again, we extend our thanks to Tennis Australia for tapping us to cover another Laver Cup event.

The Mini-Monets

Similarly to our kid press conference video from 2017 that garnered 1.5 million views through Facebook, we hoped to rekindle the magic in 2018. Our team had elementary school students create portraits of Roger Federer for him to critique in person. His interaction with them ended up working as a condensed piece. The video ends with Roger walking the kids down to a professional mural unveiling of him on the side of Stadium One inside the tennis garden.

The second piece featured here is a kid press conference starring Novak Djokovic. Novak, who is currently experiencing a slump while recovering from an elbow injury, requested to star in a kid press conference similarly to Roger’s 2017 rendition. Novak has long been the villain to both Roger and Rafa. I have seen him booed at Indian Wells and the US Open. Novak is booed, not for his character, but because he’s often been the one stopping Roger from capturing more titles. From 2013-2016 Novak was incredibly dominant. But that dominance did not come with a Nadal or Federer-like adoration from a global fanbase. Maybe only now that he is struggling, fans will get behind him as an underdog to champion. It seemed like he used this press conference as an opportunity to espouse his personal moral philosophy, rather than as a time to relax and cut loose. That sincerity and seriousness ended up making the piece somewhat difficult to edit. It is interesting comparing the two press conference videos from 2017 and 2018. The first became our most viral hit of all time. The second earned a paltry 6.5k views on Facebook before Novak lost in the second round of the tournament. One cannot help but feel for Novak. He may have made over 110 million in prize earnings and inked a new sponsorship deal with Lacoste, but he’s not Roger. Roger seems to singlehandedly carry the sport of men’s tennis. For most fans, even the third-winningest active male tennis player in a video with cute kids is not enough of a draw.

 

Indian Wells Memories

Similarly to what I have done for Wimbledon, this year we had players watch iPad video of themselves during a pivotal time at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.

Roger had an epic rally with Lleyton in the early 2000s. Isner became the #1 American at IW. Jack Sock won the doubles title in 2015. Petra thoughtfully recalled being injured, missing the tournament and the large poster fans signed wishing her a successful recovery. Lastly, Elena Vesnina remembered when she was in the press conference after winning the single’s title in 2017. A man came up and took the trophy. This was Matt Van Tuinen, the director of media for the tournament. The men’s final was going quickly and they needed the only trophy back on court for the ceremony. We had Matt return to take the iPad from her during the filming of this memory. Elena got the meta joke and took it really well. She ended up posting the memory video to her personal Instagram profile where it reached 22,000 views.

This series was moderately successful. The epic point with Roger and Lleyton is genuinely amazing tennis archival footage. Roger provided some solid play by play for us. The other memories were released sporadically but remain on the tournament website as a bingeable series.

Also of note is that we shot this series in an interview room filming in 4k ultra high definition using the 1DXii. We lit the subjects using Arri Skypanel S30-c LEDs. The hedges with the flowers were brought in by the onsite florist to fit the full bloom theme.

Tennis On The Roof

Tennis Australia approached us to cover a team announcement for The Laver Cup at a JP Morgan skyscraper on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Members of Team Europe and Team World were present. Our second shooter for the day was Tried & True’s Ian Davidson. We arrived two hours in advance of the event to scout the rooftop location and test audio for the press conference portion of the morning.

We had the objective of trying to make The Laver Cup piece appealing to a younger audience, making the video playful, finding a New York sounding track while retaining the air of a classy affair. We filmed from 9am-1pm and I edited a VNR (video news release) for Australian television that afternoon. That night, I created this same-day-edit that was released on all Laver Cup platforms immediately. The piece made it through multiple rounds of revision, I hit send from the airport lounge in LaGuardia the next day and we successfully became the last piece of tennis news before the US Open draw. (The US Open sucks up all media attention at the end of August and beginning of September).

It was quite a day riding elevators with tennis stars to a rooftop one-thousand feet above sea level to film them playing around against the Manhattan skyline.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictured above are our cameras filming timelapses of the city and Ian capturing a shot of tennis legend Rod Laver hitting a ball into the glass revolving door.

Wimbledon 2017

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.

Kid Press Conference

Kid Press Conference with Roger Federer:

The teachers, parents and students at Gerald R. Ford Elementary came on board two days prior to the shoot date. Roger Federer was set to participate. The thought was to stage a kid press conference and emphasize the cuteness of the children, the likability of the greatest male tennis player, and to hopefully capture some laugh-out-loud moments.

My objective was to film the piece in such as way as to be very flexible when editing. Editing allows us to take a scene or a moment and make it funnier by playing with the timing, the cutaway expressions etc. We ran four cameras. A closeup on our star, a wide providing context for the press conference room, and two closeups on kids at different mics. We set it up town hall style to keep everything consistent visually.

I directed the camera operators on the floor to use the techniques of cinéma vérité such as crash zooms and whip pans familiar to fans of the shooting style of NBC’s “The Office” or any TLC reality show.

Kids are unpredictable which is part of what made the press conference so much fun. We ran audio through the built-in house system. However we also ran redundant lavalier mics taped to all house microphones. Our mics proved to be of higher quality and are what made it into the master mix. It is always important to have two clean sources of audio when filming something live that must be captured in one take.

Roger entered and while these kids may live next to a large tennis complex, not all knew who he was. But they knew to scream because a superstar was entering! What really mattered was that Roger was a good sport, had never done anything similar in his nearly 20 year career and seemed to truly enjoy himself.

I think we may have made news when Roger said he hoped to play five more years until he is 40. Other details like his pet rabbits being Blitz and Blacky were lighthearted new nuggets of information into the life of a man studied and admired worldwide.

The piece quickly hit over 10k reactions, 1.1k comments and 1.5 million views on Facebook between the tournament and Sports on Facebook pages. It was uploaded natively to the BNP Paribas Open Twitter account and later retweeted by Roger Federer’s personal account. This single video surpassed every metric from from the totality of our work at the tournament in 2016 and 2015. It was picked up by news outlets worldwide providing additional positive earned media brand exposure for Indian Wells. Our crowning achievement may have been that part of the video played on ESPN’s SportsCenter and was on the homepage of ESPN.com for more than a day.

I thank those behind the original idea (Sara Romano & Steven Villatoro) who also served as the child wranglers. Our camera crew was stellar and everyone behind the scenes who negotiated and organized a very special moment. What a team!

Rotoscoping

To rotoscope video is to trace over each frame creating a cartoon. The cartoon bares a remarkable photo-realistic quality because that’s exactly what it was derived from. For this piece, the tournament was hedging that Federer would win a fifth title at Indian Wells. I was hired to spend a week tracing frames of video to create the animated sequences within the below piece. The hand drawn quality is intended to immediately catch the viewer’s attention. Rather than an average action highlight, the video should transcend to be a more memorable piece. The tracing and animating took approximately one week. The video was completed pre-tournament. The footage of Federer winning was inserted right after it happened on the last day of the BNP Paribas Open 2017.

Roger Returns From Injury

Federer took time off before Wimbledon in 2016 for minor knee surgery. He was eventually felled literally in this tournament by Milos Raonic. He never falls and yet he tumbled and lay sprawled on the Centre Court grass. He went on to lose the match. After this tournament he took six months off, returned and won the Australian Open. This video was an attempt to capitalize on Roger’s initial return to the sport. Wimbledon is after all where he has been most successful. The video hit over 400,000 views on Facebook for The Championships. That was a significant number. Wimbledon is such a large tournament that a ton of video is produced from multiple sources. So much is being put out and released daily that for one piece to be seen by so many was a success. 

Paul Annacone Web Series

Paul Annacone is a former professional tennis player and former coach of Pete Sampras and Roger Federer. He appears regularly as an analysis for the Tennis Channel. He’s also an advocate and spokesperson for PlaySight. PlaySight is a tennis technology company that delivers everything a player needs to get better at their game. The system uses high definition video from cameras mounted strategically all over a court coupled with cloud storage and an on-court kiosk. The software breaks down serve speed, percentage of forehands or backhands in, it calls lines, does instant replays, shows footage in slow-motion etc. It’s an incredible amount of data and analytics too. Tennis is a sport that lacked a use of data for a long time. Baseball had Moneyball back in the mid 2000s. Tennis is catching up due in large part to PlaySight’s tech.

The video below is part of a series of ten tips with Paul. Paul works with two recent University of Southern California graduates on their game. He analyzes and instructs while they are in action, then he follows through at the kiosk bringing PlaySight’s observations into the mix.

“Age is just a number.”

A few years ago at Indian Wells I started making “mini-movies.” Essentially these are cinematic highlights. I would letterbox them and shoot with the intention of a wider filmic look. Fans seemed to like the look. But I learned quickly to focus on the most popular players in the sport. As an employee of the tournament, my goal is always to get as many eyeballs captivated into staying within the tournament ecosystem. Making a video on Roger in this case is purely fan service. But even though I knew it would get clicks because of who it starred, my secondary goals were to show off the grounds in a manner never done before, to capture the highest quality footage, and to find the best real soundbites by listening to all of his interviews and press conferences from earlier in the week.

With that said, what is most significant about this piece is the music. At Tried & True we wanted to try something different that had never been done before. Our sound engineer doubles as a composer. We carefully recorded the audio of our local college tennis team (Winthrop University), isolating serves, bounces, backhands etc. These sfx were then used in Cubase, music composition software, as the drum kit for a song. Joe Miller, our afore mentioned audio guru, and I discussed the action of the video. How it might start, rising action, where soundbites might fall and so on. He constructed the piece using a Moog synthesizer, electric guitar in addition to a number of electronic elements and samples. The track turned out well as an example of a fully immersive and synergistic viewing experience. The music absolutely ads to the video and the enjoyment for the viewer.