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.
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? |