Friday Night Heroes

About the Book

There is no sport friendlier to the video camera than football and the proof of this special relationship is visible on television every Saturday and Sunday throughout the fall. Game action takes place on a horizontal grid with a defined starting place and goal. Camera angles are great, even at the smallest of venues, because the height of the stands allows virtually unobstructed coverage, the players are widely separated and modern telephoto and zoom lenses bring the action close to the audience. Play is separated into brief segments which allow the videographer to focus the viewer’s attention, recover for the next play and provide opportunities for replay and analysis during the game.

The visuals are stunning: vividly contrasting uniforms in fast action with occasionally spectacular physical results against the backdrop of a green playing surface. Sideline cameras can intensify the action and almost take the viewer onto the field. Photojournalism techniques in football television coverage are innately familiar to almost any fan of the game old enough to crawl.

Strangely, the most popular and ubiquitous level of play, high school football, is rarely covered or recorded in a fashion which makes these games accessible to the largest and sometimes most ardent group of football fans. Football coverage on Friday nights is at best spotty, often limited to brief end zone segments captured by a handheld camera manned by a local news crew with an assignment to “cover” several games on the same evening. High school football fans, players and families rarely have access to video footage of local games and when they do, the coverage is often of poor quality, without benefit of an editor’s judgments and generally marked by substantial degradation of image quality as the result of generations of successive analog reproduction on VHS tape. High school football and video recording technology are not strangers however. For decades, teams have routinely taped each game for later analysis and exchange with the next week’s opponent for scouting purposes. Until recently, these games have been recorded on analog equipment, usually by the most junior member of the coaching or managerial staff, generally on entry level-quality camcorders and sometimes without the use of tripod stabilization or sound equipment. In most high school programs, the emphasis on video quality has been provided to these junior staff members with occasional pithy remarks by coaches or players and little additional instruction. As an assistant coach explained the situation to me during a game break last season, “Any clown can run a video camera.” This approach is changing however and definitely for the better. Some of these changes are driven by the significant improvements in video technology in the past several years, mainly the widespread availability of inexpensive digital video cameras.

High school football fans’ expectations are also changing. One reason why high school football game video has not been more widely available is because the potential audience for a particular game has usually been small, generally limited to the players, their families, coaches and a small group of devoted fans. However, what this audience lacks in size is, in part, compensated for by the enthusiasm and demand for the finished program. Recent dramatic decreases in the cost of the equipment and supplies necessary for a high quality digital video program have made production for these micro-markets practical for the first time. The value of these recordings may also increase substantially with time. Consider what would happen if your house or apartment were on fire. If all the occupants had been safely evacuated, what would be the one category of belongings that most people would most wish to preserve if possible? For most, this would be family photographs and videotapes. If some of those videotapes showed your father or grandfather

About the Author

Anthony Bottini has placed a life-long interest in photography and videography in the service of recording and producing sports programs of both immediate and lasting value in his community of Sartell, Minnesota. Volunteering as a pressbox videographer for the high school football team has grown into a cottage industry that includes a cable access television program, scores of sports highlight videos and thousands of DVD’s produced for players, coaches and their families. Having made nearly every error possible in the pursuit of quality sports programming, this book is intended as a shortcut around those mistakes so that the fledgling videographer or editor can quickly progress to a higher level of difficulties.