Creative Approaches to Making Sports Movies

Just as there are dozens of sports to cover, from football and soccer to surfing and kick boxing, there are many different kinds of movies about sportsfrom the basic sports game movie to the reality TV series. This section looks at some creative approaches you can take to making a sports movie, including hosting your own sports newscasts, starring in a sports movie, or making a season series.

Hosting your own sports show can be a lot of fun. Have you always secretly (or not so secretly) thought you could do better than the TV announcer who covers the football game? Well, this is your big chance to come out of the closet and onto the screen. Instead of being a Monday morning quarterback, you (or a friend) can narrate the movie during the shoot (or after). Consider working with a friend on being on-camera hosts, with plenty of back-and-forth banter and disagreementslike the two brothers on the radio show Car Talk.

Tip

The quickest and easiest way to make sportcaster movies is to use Vlog It! software from Serious Magic. You can edit in scenes from your own footage at a game as well as on-camera shots of yourself or a friend. For sportscasts, using Vlog It! is faster and simpler than using Movie Maker. For more information about Vlog It!, visit www.seriousmagic.com.

If you participate in a sport, think about starring in your own movie. If you're a skate-boarder, dude, you could be the on-camera star (and/or host) as you show yourself and your friends doing your hottest tricks, making your own version of the X Games.

Tip

For inspiration, you can watch the online trailer for the feature documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys on Yahoo! Movies, at http://movies.yahoo.com/shop?d=hv&cf=trailer&id=1804383683.

You can try using one of the new sports camcorders or a disposable camcorder to record the action, if you want to capture some firstperson action shots without risking damage to your expensive camcorder.

If you're a parent (and the driver, for instance) who's going to be attending many games your child is playing in, you can make a movie about your son or daughter or the entire team for a whole season. Look for opportunities to make your own reality TV show.

Tip

For season series inspiration, rent the basketball documentary Hoop Dreams.

Making sports movies, like making other kinds of movies, is all about expressing your own creativity, and that can mean taking risks. What do you have to lose? If you don't like how a movie works out, well, you can just edit out what you don't like, slap on some cool music, and cut the action to the beat. Or you can perfect your on-camera act and do more takes. You'll find what works for you. The beauty of digital video is the ability to experiment and see what turns out to be magic onscreen.

Shooting First-Person Action Shots

Want to capture the action of participating in (not just watching) a sport? You have two options to consider: shooting with a sports camcorder (which features a remote lens and mike you can strap on your body, along with the camera) and trying a disposable video camera. Let's say you're going snowboarding, and you want to shoot the action during your run. You can strap on a tiny sports camcorder (smaller than some cell phones) and position the external lens on your bodyover your shoulder or anywhere else within a three-foot range of the camcorder. It will capture you (or your shoulder and the back of your head) as well as all the action. It's perfect for snow-boarding, surfing, skydivingwhatever!

The first of these cameras to be released is the SC-X105L from Samsung (about $570). (To read David Pogue's New York Times article about this camcorder, visit www.nytimes.com/2005/06/09/technology/circuits/09pogue.html.) Small and rugged, this water-resistant camera lets you shoot up to 10 minutes of best-quality video or more at lower quality (about 60 minutes of webcam-quality record time).

You can also see David Pogue trying out the sports camcorder (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2). Use the Multimedia search (in advanced search) at www.nytimes.com and type in "Pogue Tries a Novel Camcorder" to find and play the movie.

Figure 7.1. The New York Times tech columnist David Pogue gets wild and crazy with a sports camcorder in this clip from an online movie.

Figure 7.2. A close-up of Pogue's novel camcorder.

Don't want to invest money in an expensive sports camcorder? Try one of the new disposable video cameras (about $29; available at CVS and elsewhere). The quality will be lower, but so will the price. Strap it onto your body, turn it on, and take off! You can shoot up to 20 minutes of footage and, for an additional fee, get it transferred to a DVD. You can import the DVD footage into your computer to edit it.

Integrating first-person action shots into your movie will add a whole new dimension to your sports movies that can "wow" your audience.

Any sports movie is easy to edit because you have a lot of options for cutting itfrom making a highlights movie to showing the whole enchilada. It's easy to make highlights movies that show only the big action moments over racy music. On the other hand, coaches and athletes might want to watch every single minute of the game to learn and train. Seeing a movie of the event is often the only way athletes will see how they played and how the team as a whole performed.

To please a general audience, you should make an exciting, fast-paced, short highlights movie. Edit your shots over a rockin', amped-up music track, and you'll end up with a cool movie. Ah, the magic of editing! Are you ready to get started now?