The Positive Train

I did a documentary piece on the Madonna University Women's basketball as my final project for my Field Production and Editing II class, and it was the most fun I had ever had working on a project.

I knew the assistant coach personally on the team, and he was more than thrilled about me pursuing the project. He mentioned the theme of the team was the "positive train", and making a video about it could be inspirational. After the coach was on board, I knew I wanted a talented announcer to introduce the piece. I spoke with a fellow Madonna student, Kyle, and he was also happy to come on board and do the open and close for the video.



One of my early goals was to be creative with my shot selection. I wanted to use two cameras during the interview, one a safe shot and one a "risky" shot. I wanted to go outside the box and try something new. What little did I know that during the editing process I found out, I could cut between the two cameras during any "uhs" or "ums" that may be said, and it would look seamless.

The head coach of the team gave me footage of the team at various vacation spots that they went on, and I used as the closing segment in the documentary. It really gave the piece a heartfelt moment, and I loved how it turned out.

I shot the documentary with three cameras. I used a Canon 7D, Canon T3i, and a Sony AX-2000. When it came to editing, I had to do quite the data conversion between the Canons shot in H.264, while the Sony shot in AVCHD, so I had to render all my footage to Apple ProRes to make the editing a smooth process. It took some time, but it was time well-spent.