The very first BaseballSoftballUK Performance Combine
When your brief is to create a moody, cinematic, Netflix style looking piece you know it's going to be a great day! That's exactly what happened as we headed to 'The 108' in London to capture the first ever BaseballSoftballUK performance combine.
We've been working with the amazing team at BSUK for many years on a range of different content and it's been fantastic to see how their programme has grown and evolved as the team work towards the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
This event was the first of it's kind for BSUK, a performance testing 'Combine', where athletes could measure their strength, speed and agility using state of the art Vald Performance Technology to benchmark their current level of performance and set targets for improvement. The majority of player's in attendance were from the younger, age range squads, all eager to impress and from the start all were putting in maximal effort on each drill, which made for some fantastic footage.
Gary Anderson, BaseballSoftballUK's Head of Performance had a clear vision for the piece, wanting to create the feel of a high-end Netflix documentary. Although there are a broad range of styles on the platform, we typically interpret this direction as a request to create the look and feel of Netflix's 'Untold' and 'Bad Sport' series, which have a distinct, contrasty overall tone.
We considered filming on anamorphic lenses as we had done for our 'Game On' documentary which Netflix acquired, however with the content being primarily for social use, we decided to stick with spherical lenses instead filming in the classic 16x9 format to allow us to deliver in both landscape and portrait formats.
Trailer for our Netlfix Documentary 'Game On: The Unstoppable Rise of Women's Sport"
The location lended itself perfectly to create a moody, contrasty look. The 108 is a converted warehouse, with the natural light largely excluded and overhead spotlights in rows throughout the venue. These were a perfect background to shoot in to, deliberately choosing to compose our shots looking up and the players to make them look powerful and getting the bokeh of these lights in the background.
We chose our Sony Cinema range for this project given their excellent low light performance coupled with Sony Zeiss Batis prime lenses, allowing us to shoot at low apetures for shallow depth of field as well as allowing maximum light to hit the sensor in the darker environment. The amazing autofocus tracking is another huge benefit, particuarly helping us keep fast moving subjects sharp. We added a 1/4 Black Pro Mist filter to our lenses which slightly softened the sharp digital image and added a glow to the highlights.
The piece captures all the action from the day, with interviews from key team members helping to tell the story. We introduced some soft light here from our Litepanels 1x1, diffuesed through a silk and able to be powered off a V-Lock battery, meaning it we could easily move it around the venue. Often using just one light for an interview can create the most dramatic looking image and we carefully positioned our subjects and lighting to create the best looking interview frames possible.
In the edit we really pushed the grade to create a strong, moody look. Using a Christopher Nolan style LUT, combined with heavy contrast and desaturation, we wanted the imagery to emulate the grades you see in Netflix's 'Bad Sport' interviews.
We had a fantastic time filming this project and really was a dream brief! We're excited to follow the progress of the team in this next Olympic cycle as they continue their journey towards LA 28.
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