Netball Content Day With The London Mavericks
Having worked in netball for the last 14 years, we were incredibly excited when it was announced that in 2025 the Netball Super League would be going fully professional.
But this would come with some changes, a major restructuring of the UK's netball set up and the league now being reduced to eight teams meant things were going to look a little different from previous seasons. We've greatly enjoyed working in the netball space and we want that to continue in this new era. So we were thrilled when we were contacted by the newly formed team, London Mavericks about creating their team announcement content.
What's more, this team led by founders Lucy Wray and Olivia Hall are committed to a gender equality mission both on and off the court, dedicated to making real positive change in the world of women's sport. We couldn't be more excited to work with an organisation whose ethos aligns so strongly with our own mission at Ben&Jack Studio.
Content days are always incredibly enjoyable but with the volume of content needing to be captured they are an intense day of work for both the players and film crew! Therefore we've created and refined a setup that we use in these kind of scenarios to help maximise quality content output for both video and photo, whilst being able to work quickly and effectively, you can see more about it in our recent YouTube video below...
We love starting with green screen as this very quickly and easily gathers a bank of hugely versatile assets that can be used for match day graphics, social media posts and other key artwork the team will need throughout the season.
But it's not just photography green screen is useful for, capturing a range of movements from the players is an incredibly helpful bank of footage to have. We'll always tend to start with the classic 'Sky Sports', walk towards the camera, stop and fold your arms and then once the talent is relaxed get them to do some fun, less serious movements to capture some candid, authentic reactions.
After your initial set up it's highly unlikely you'll have time on the day to majorly change the set up but green screen content alone will rarely suffice for what you need (not to mention the added editing time when using green screen). Therefore this lighting setup allows us (once we quickly swap in a more neutral white backdrop) to create a scene in the organisation's brand colours. On this production we went for Maverick's turquoise and pink brand colours creating a vibrant and exciting backdrop for our players to deliver their piece to cameras whilst simultaneously keeping the content completely on brand.
Studio based content is important, but Mavericks wanted to give their fans something more. Therefore working alongside the brilliant Melissa Mullins the team had crafted a series of teaser videos to slowly breadcrumb information to the fans about which players had signed for Mavericks ahead of the season. This was one of the favourite concepts we'd ever filmed, get the players in a classic London Taxi, drive around close to their training base and slowly but surely give away information so the fans could guess who they were. Think Question of Sport mystery guest but with a lot more laughs!
Anyone working in sports media will tell you that these kind of days are great fun, particuarly when you're filming so far ahead of the season the players can relax and really be themselves. Mavericks have assembled a team of not only fantastic athletes but also really great personalities and with such a focus on their community work it's going to be a real pleasure to watch how this team can have a major impact on the local community and inspire lots more young people to play and watch netball.
However as brilliant as their on-camera performances were, we all agreed the true star of the day was Phil the Cab Driver, who although was only briefed to do some driving ended up having a major speaking part in every video and without him the content would not have been anywhere as near as exciting. Thank you Phil!
A sincere thank you to everyone involved in a great day of content production, not least the phenomenal Flynn Duggan who not only captured all the photo content on the day but also all the behind the scenes photography we've used in this blog post, check him out here...
With the Netball Super League season getting underway in a few months we can't wait to cotninue working with London Mavericks to capture their games as well as promote their gender equality work all across London.
You can get tickets to see the team in action via their website...
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