The Boston College Eagles football team is a Division 1 FCS team that plays in the ACC, a conference which includes perennial powerhouse programs such as Florida State, Miami, Clemson and Virginia Tech. Since their entry into the ACC in 2003, Boston College football has been more prevalent on the national stage, which means more TV time. Each year each school is given the opportunity to air a spot advertising their school on national TV, free of charge. Basically, it boils down to when ESPN is airing the BC vs. Florida State game, they are making money off of that so each school gets one free :30 spot.
This is the spot from the 2010 season titled “During My Years.” As you can see from the spot, you can tell why it is titled that. This spot was shot on the Sony F900 at 1080p/23.976fps. Like with any spot airing on TV, the deliverable has to be at 1080i/59.94fps. The footage was digitized using the Sony JH-3 with the 3:2 pull-down setting on, that way the footage was being digitized in the Avid Symphony at 1080i/59.94fps at Avid DNxHD 220Mbps 10-bit. There was also quite a bit of footage that was not shot by Cramer, specifically:
The hockey team celebration (ESPN – DVCPro HD)
Church interior with the candles (Boston College – XDCAM)
Mark Herzlich (ESPN – DVCPro HD)
Ballet Dancer (Boston College – HDV)
Torch Ceremony (Boston College – XDCAM)
As you can see, about 66% of the spot is from outside acquisitions. The Boston College footage was XDCAM and HDV at 1080i/59.94fps. I used the Avid 3:2 cadence to give it the 24P look. The ESPN footage came in on DVCPro HD 720. If memory serves me correctly that footage was sent out to Video Express and transfered to HDCAM. At the time we didn’t own a DVCPro deck and it was cheaper to have a quick dub made than to rent a deck for what turned out to be about 5 seconds of footage.
All the VO’s in the spot are actual Boston College students and are being read on-site with a boom mic. Normally VOs are done in a booth with a Pro Tools engineer, but given the fact the spot was shot at the campus and we had 12 separate lines of copy all read by different students, logistically it was easier to record them on-site. Things you may not know about the spot, the first shot of the chapel the sky is secondary color correction using Avid Symphony. The original shot was shot on a sunny day, but was done midday, so the sky still had a flatness to it. Not so much grey, but the blue was so light and de-saturated that I thought it could use a punch. The same was done on the last shot with the Eagle statue, but not as much.
The lasers in the physics lab were all done in post. They tried to shot them on set, but the laser was so light that the camera just wasn’t picking it up. I used After Effects and just drew a couple white lines with a blue and white glow added to them.
On the church interior with the candle lighting ceremony, I put a fairly heavy vignette on the color correction to draw the viewers attention to the candles, as well as added a hint of GenArts Sapphire Glare to them. The original shot was done with only the light from the candles and was extremely orange. I drew a couple masks with Avid Animatte to be able to keep the blue in the stained glass in the background and only apply the glare to the candles.
Barry Clegg 
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