Special Olympics

Jeff says:
Genesis of a project:
It always amazes me how many different people I meet at my kids sporting events.

This summer was no exception; my son Jack started playing travel baseball for the Oak Park Eagles. Travel baseball is pretty time consuming with 6 to 7 days a week of practices or games for the entire month of July. Needless to say you get to know the other families very well. Jack’s coach, Chris Winston works for Special Olympics Illinois and asked if we’d like to help him with a pro bono video about an upcoming fundraiser, the Illinois Law Enforcement Torch Run Plane Pull.


After baseball wrapped up, we set up a meeting with Chris to find out his needs for the video: recruit more sponsors and teams for next years Plane Pull. Our producer Stacey Evenson worked with Chris and set up all the details for the production. She recruited our friend and excellent photog Tom McCosky to shoot the plane pull.

Production:
The event included a couple of dozen 20 person teams from area law enforcement and fire departments as well as a number of local businesses. Each team played a tug-of-war with a UPS Airbus A300 aircraft (weighing more than 198,000 lbs.) at the Lynxs Cargo Area of O'Hare International Airport in Chicago all for the benefit of Special Olympics.

Stacey and Tom showed up at 7am and worked straight through a beautiful sunny September day. They recorded interviews with Mayor Richard M. Daley, Tom Reasoner director of the Illinois Law Enforcement Torch Run and many of the event participants. Tom really delivered some great footage. Great close ups of the participants pulling the rope, beautiful wide shots of the plane and the people.

Post:
After the event Tom delivered about 45 gigs of 720P30 P2 media to Motion Post and it was my job to make it into something coherent. I usually just go through all the footage and interviews to get a first impression, taking notes as I go. From there I’ll start to get my themes together, team names, plane pull techniques, how fun the event was, etc. With all the interviews categorized, I started to put together the show.

I decided to do a little montage at the top to create a little drama and excitement for the event. From there I figured I’d talk about the Special Olympics just in case a viewer did not know about the charity. After the brief Special Olympics introduction, I’d move into the event, showing the audience how fun it was to participate. For music, I grabbed a jazz track for the body of the show and an uplifting guitar piece for the end. Then I figured I needed some heart beats for the beginning along with a an uplifting track to help create the tension.

The first cut went over very well with our clients at the charity. They changed around a few bites and added a little voice over to the end. After making the changes I moved the entire sequence into Apple’s Color to color correct and finish the show. I really like taking the time to play in Color; the footage looked great originally but Color was able to really get the best out of each frame, adding more blue to the sky and pulling down the luminance on the concrete of the tarmac.

Take a look at the final product.