My First Big Project

At long last, I am very excited to discuss a fairly major milestone in my placement year. Since my last post, I have been extremely busy working on my first project as TotallyMedia with the basketball development programme, Ball Up Sports, and on the whole, it was a great success.

I first came across Ball Up Sports right back in January through a family connection (further proving the statement that it's not what you know, but who you know). I was asked if I'd be interested in filming one of their training sessions as, at the time, they were looking for a video specialist. While I was excited at the prospect of filming basketball session (for those that don't know, I am a basketball enthusiast), I remember not really knowing what I was getting myself into and being knee-deep in university work. However, I didn't want to miss this opportunity to practice filming and apply what I'd been learning on my course. Therefore, I travelled to Surrey the following day with my camera and met with the Ball Up team.

To my delight, the filming went very well and the session was very enjoyable to watch. But, not only that, it was also mentioned that there would be future opportunities to work with Ball Up on promotional videos. So, here I am in September having completed a massive promotional project for Ball Up Sports. A shorter version of the finished video was featured as part of their website relaunch. If you haven't already seen it go to Ball Up Sports website or watch the video below.

The filming for this project took place over several days between January and July as I attended a variety of events hosted by Ball Up. After the final day of filming, I had captured 100 GB worth of footage, with a further 30 GB from other Ball Up sessions captured by the coaches. This was arguably the largest amount of footage I had ever had to work with on a project and therefore, half of the time spent in post-production involved sub-clipping and labelling all of the rushes. My labelling system was as follows:

[SHOT TYPE]_[CLIP NO.]_[DESCRIPTION]

e.g. CU_1_Ball Up Logo Banner

Obviously, the more important information was the shot type (wide shot, mid shot etc.) and the description. However, for this particular project, having a clip number helped me to identify the order in which the footage was captured and, therefore, at what point the in day the clip took place. This sometimes ensured continuity within the edit. While it might seem like I ended up spending an excessive amount of time just organising the video files, it proved to be extremely helpful when I began creating a block edit as I was able to quickly and easily select specific shot types and moments.

After many hours of recording narration, editing, audio mixing, graphics and colour correction, a final edit was completed and thankfully, the coaches were extremely happy with the tone, pacing and content in the video. I too was very pleased with the outcome of the project and very much look forward to working with Ball Up Sports in the future. However, looking back, I can really appreciate what a brilliant opportunity this was and that I was able to apply a lot of my skills developed through my university course to a client video.