The principal of the local high school, where my son’s in the marching band, is working with various groups — the teams, cheerleaders, and marching band — to try to make the fan experience at sporting events a more enjoyable and exciting one.
The band’s got a new pre-game show, working in conjunction with the cheerleaders (instead of the almost-competition that seems to be the norm), and he asked the scoreboard folks if they could create some sort of hilight video to play on the big screen before that gets going. Something to entertain and get the crowed “pumped up” for the game.
They turned to me, as one of the primary photographers who bring images for them, so I said I’d see what I could come up with. A hand-held camcorder at a couple of games and an afternoon of editing don’t make me the next George Lucas, but I’ve got four videos ready* for tomorrow night’s game and I think the crowds will enjoy them. I’ve got plenty of ideas and ways to improve in the future; this is just a start.
* btw, they do look much better on the computer and jumbotron than youtube would lead you to believe. One of my first changes for future videos will be to change my workflow a bit. These were rendered as QuickTime DV/DVCPro files and put on DVD, which works great for the scoreboard but are much too large fr youtube. I had to convert them to AVI files, then youtube converts those to Flash. All that conversion and re-compression leaves us with a less-than-optimal experience for you the web viewer.