Pre-Production

The promos last year presented a challenge: capturing the essence of something that hasn’t happened yet. There are a few ways to work around this, but it does take out-of-the-box strategizing. (We’re actually building videos now for a school that is yet-to-be, and it’s the same challenge for an institution that doesn’t yet exist.)

For that initial series of RSK videos, we started with stock footage of men playing softball, but we knew we needed to be creative to convey the excitement of a live game.

First, we got more tailored footage by filming several participants playing at local ballparks. We also filmed a few soundbites of them expressing excitement for the upcoming tournament.

When we filmed player Dovid Sanders exhorting viewers to “hit grand slams for all of Klal Yisrael,” we knew we’d hit gold. It was a great pep talk; that line fires everyone up, and it became this year’s rallying cry for the tournament. RSK even printed the slogan on the players’ jerseys.

One of these games we went to film was in the Monsey area, and our senior production manager Moshe Niehaus used some extra time in the schedule to go with the film crew to Evergreen Uptown to get more content from the general community. RSK is well-known and well-liked, and as one of their big focuses is helping families pay grocery bills, he thought a supermarket would be the perfect backdrop for the “man on the street” to share his impressions. These interviews can bring color and spontaneity to a project, but going in, you never quite know how they’re going to turn out. There was one person who kept shying away from the camera, though Moshe knew him to be both community-minded and a good speaker. He later called Moshe to apologize, explaining that he was very involved in a similar organization, and while he respected RSK and what they do, he didn’t feel comfortable being their “spokesperson.”

Event Footage

RSK came back to us after this Pesach with a proposal similar to last year’s.

“We also want you to film all the games so the players can take footage home,” Yossi said.

In the first round of 16 teams, there would be eight tournament games playing simultaneously. A regulation softball field is between 80,000 and 120,000 square feet. That’s a lot of area to cover, especially as recording a sports game entails capturing every part of every play.

“Wow, that would mean a lot of manpower,” I said slowly as I did the calculations in my head. “If you’re sure that’s what you want, let me research the best way to make it happen.”

This was new for us, so we wanted to consult with experts about the logistics. One of our cinematographers put us in touch with a company that specializes in filming large-scale sporting events — they have a lot of experience in the field (pun intended). We strategized with them about how to best film a softball game, and they helped us draw detailed diagrams of where to position our cameras so we could capture the necessary angles.

We also wanted to partner with them at the event so they could provide us with expertise and additional manpower, but as the RSK tournament drew closer, they realized they would likely have a scheduling conflict — with nothing less than the National Hockey League’s Stanley Cup Finals. (Postscript: The Vegas Golden Knights won the finals in only five games, so the scheduling would have worked out — but we didn’t know this, and we planned for an alternative.)

We turned to Stellar Productions, the company RSK hired to run the audio-visual portion of the tournament: microphone systems for play-by-play announcers, screens for live footage, and other live video and audio elements.

Stellar provided the cameramen and staff to capture every angle of every game, allowing our cinematographers to focus on more artistic shots with drones and dynamic camera angles. We learned that shooting a sports game requires balancing being as close to the action as possible without getting in the way or damaging expensive equipment. In fact, we made a point of flying our drones much higher than usual, to avoid having them knocked out of the sky by a hard-hit fly ball!

By the Numbers

800,000 square feet of ballfield (the breakdown: eight fields hosting 16 teams total, and each field is about 100,000 square feet), plus 200,000 square feet where RSK served food and provided family-friendly entertainment, for a total of 1,000,000 square feet being covered. Yes, that’s a one followed by six zeros: one million square feet.

21 cameras Stellar dedicated exclusively to game coverage, with the ratio of manpower to playing field increasing as the pool of games decreased — and as competition grew fiercer.

14 hours on the clock, because Bat for RSK was a full-day event — and I don’t mean nine-to-five. The day kicked off with breakfast at 8:30, and the championship dinner and ceremony didn’t end until almost 10 p.m., plus setup and clean-up — most of which was in the sun.

2TB total footage of Bat for RSK game day. To give a sense of how much that is: If we were storing it on your standard laptop with a memory capacity of 250GB, we’d need eight laptops. With each game ranging between one and two hours, the 31 tournament games amounted to about 40 hours of game time, multiplied by the number of camera angles at each game.

Highlight Reel

RSK wanted us to create a highlight video both years. This may sound like a simple task: Find a few exciting moments, add background music, and you’re in business.

Not quite.

Imagine you want to create a highlight reel of a special event in your life, like a memorable vacation. You wouldn’t just want to document the itinerary with photos and videos of individual moments; you’d also want to capture the essence of your trip, the atmosphere and the vibe, so you can relive it and view it not as a detached spectator but almost as an active participant.

For Bat for RSK, clips of batters and fielders would make for a dry reel, lacking the competitive spirit pulsing throughout. We used two strategies to capture the essence:

Run-and-gun style interviewing, which is more candid, similar to “point and shoot” in still photography. A good photographer takes some un-posed pictures; the parallel in video is to just ask questions on the fly, without preparing the interviewee. The results are the same in both worlds: a more natural look and sound that captures raw moments instead of orchestrated ones. By getting players to answer a short question in the heat of the competition, their answers have an energy we would not have captured in a formal sit-down.

In the post-production end, we called on our VFX star Jeremy Lewis and his arsenal of exciting effects. Using anime-type stylizing found in Japanese comics, Jeremy added graphics such as glowing outlines to batters as they swung the bat and fire trailing the softball at the point of impact. He also created a strobe light effect by rapidly fading the video in and out. These effects, along with a dynamic music soundtrack, helped re-create the game-day vibe.

Callback

When I started Mint Media ten years ago, I was a solo operator, doing everything from filming to editing. As we’ve grown, I’ve come to appreciate what it means to have an incredible team working alongside me. Especially for a project of this scope, which is so unique, so much fun — and so much work!

Moshe Niehaus’s ability to juggle dozens of moving parts and calmly pull all the pieces together really shone. I didn’t mention that the Friday before Bat for RSK, forecasters were calling for a Sunday washout. RSK ended up postponing the tournament until two weeks later — meaning Moshe had to arrange everything twice. As usual, he knocked it out of the park.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 974)