5-10-23-Skiddoo

I had a pretty exciting weekend professionally.  After shooting cheerleading competitions for the past two years, I had the chance to shoot a different, more traditional sport: football!  A guy I worked with in the past named Ed, who is based out of Philadelphia and has his hands in a lot of things, contacted me to shoot a high school football game Saturday afternoon in Montvale, NJ (a two-hour drive for me) on two days notice.  I took him up on it since I'm up for anything, especially something new.  The shoot was for iBN Sports, a Los Angeles-based company that is doing more stuff on the East Coast now.  Instructions called for me to shoot in 16:9 in standard definition, which is no problem at all on my end.


During the shoot, I worked with a New York-based broadcaster.  I had to pick him up on the way to Montvale by stopping in East Orange, subsequently getting lost in that town going to and from the shoot, but that was the only real negative on an otherwise smooth day (plus I left home early enough to give us plenty of time for error).  Using an XLR adapter I have attached to my camera at all times, he plugged in his headset mic for one channel of sound, while the other channel was for my shotgun mic picking up the game and crowd.  I was told to bring a monitor when I was brought on to do the job, so I bought a 15" monitor that same day which I would be needing down the line anyway.  It helped me make sure the picture was accurate and wouldn't actually be too dark or too light on the tape, plus the broadcaster used it on occasion for reference  We were shooting from a media booth right above the crowd that housed a couple other broadcasting representatives, including the ESPN radio station out of New York and Verizon.  The sound came out good, the picture was good (the weather was on our side), and the football game itself, between St. Joseph's Regional and St. Peter's Prep, was actually quite fun. 


After wrapping up, dropping off my broadcasting partner at the train station and getting lost in East Orange again, I met up with Ed so he could get the tapes from me and edit them.  Sure enough, as of last night, the game I shot is available for streaming on iBNSports.com.  It's free to watch, but the site requires Microsoft Silverlight (a video format free to download and trying to rival Quicktime) to view everything.