This winter, all three of our kiddos were involved in the inaugural Upward Basketball and Cheerleading program at our church, Lifebridge. After the second week or so of seeing me up there filming with my new hi-def camera, LifeSports minister and Upward program director JR Masteller asked me if I’d put something together for the end-of-season celebration. Little did I know then how involved I was to become!

I also worked in conjunction with a local professional photographer, Tim Ellis of French Quarter Photography. He contributed over 200 stills of action shots and team photos to the project. I ended up shooting about ten hours of footage of the various teams and squads, and then interviewed four of the Upward program administrators and coaches.

Of course, the hard part was sifting through the hours of footage to find the best moments and some how distill an entire season down into a few short minutes. Luckily, I successfully lobbied to create two pieces for the event: the main piece to run during the ceremony, and another “highlights reel” to open and close the ceremony.

Upward Awards Video about 6 minutes

For the Awards piece, I focused on the Upward program itself, sticking with the interview pieces to work as a narrative. Even then, I left a lot of good stuff on the “cutting room floor” due to time constraints. I also focused my best motion graphics work in this piece, creating an “opening doors” montage with animated logos, then going into 3D action photos from Tim. I then found a clip of a kid joyously making a basket, and spent several hours playing with rotoscoping him and a teammate in After Effects. The actual interview segments took the least time to edit out of everything I did… which was a blessing. The final “shot” is of hand-cut team photos of every participant in the program, and a 3D camera dollying in and out to show them to the viewer. This shot took several days to set up, so I was thrilled when it received thunderous applause during the ceremony.

Upward Highlights Video about 6 minutes

For the Highlights video, I tried to present as many teams and participants as possible. As my first HD project, I appreciated the resolution I was able to work with, essentially stopping the action at any moment. I down-rezzed slightly from 1080p (1920×1080) to 720p (1280×720) to enable me to pan and zoom a bit and reframe any shots that were too far out. Even at this reduced resolution, I knew that it’s still way above the church’s projectors’ XGA resolution, but wanted the ability to have a 720p project “in the can” should I ever burn it to HD DVD or Blu-Ray in the future.

In the end, I produced a few minutes of tight video and I still have hours of footage for coaches and team members should they want to see it… if I ever get around to editing any of it!

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