Boston College: Sports

Disclaimer: I am NOT a Boston College sports fan. In 2002 I graduated from the prestigious University of Massachusetts at Amherst. But, having worked more closely to Boston than Amherst, Boston College provides more content for sports and, while I hate to admit it, they are the premiere college in New England for sports, except UCONN for men’s and women’s basketball.

Two sports projects I have been involved with are football and hockey, two sports that are main objectives in Chestnut Hill. Hockey in particular has been a powerhouse for years, having won 3 national championships in the last decade. Each year Cramer works on projects for each of these programs. The football recruiting video, which is an NFL Films style video that highlights the year for the team and acts as a recruiting tool for new players. In fact, up until his passing in 2009 Harry Kalas was used as the voice over talent. Since then, Joe Giotta has been lending his voice and picking up where Kalas left off.

This the open for the 2009 video. The main piece was edited by Vincent Higgins and written and directed by David Trainor. I used Avid to cut the footage and brought it into After Effects to do the composite. What I did was create a canvas at 1920 x 1080 and put the SD video on that 5 times. Video CoPilot’s Riot Gear was used to create the background and the grunge vignette. Since I had an HD canvas and an SD output, I used that to create the swish pans you see. I just moved it between the 5 continuous streams to create the swish pans. You can see what the 5 streams look like around 1:24 in the video.

Above is the 2010 Pike’s Peak Hockey video. At the end of each hockey season they hold a banquet for all the players, coaches, parents and supporter’s of the program. As you can tell, the video is ridiculously long (total running time of 10:30.) While something like this should really run at no more than say 5 minutes, just remember who the audience is for this. It is specifically for the team, so almost every goal and good save from the season is used. The video is broken up into 3 specific sections. The first is the Foo Fighters song which is the regular season. The Muse song is from the Beanpot (the mid-season Boston hockey tournament between BC, BU, Northeastern and Harvard.) The last being the Lupe Fiasco song which is the Hockey East tournament. I used Avid to do this entire video except for the logo open and the BC logo transition, which I made in After Effects but did an overlay with GenArts Sapphire Layer effect.