BRIEF

The Melbourne Boomers are a professional women’s basketball team in Melbourne, Australia and approached us about producing a piece on Tess Madgen, who plays for the Boomers and is also a member of the Australian national team competing at the Tokyo Olympics. The Boomers wanted to combine a talking head style interview with B-roll of Tess, including her preparation for the Olympics and performance during the previous league season.

The purpose of the video is to not only celebrate the success and journey of one of their star players, but to also launch memberships and encourage the public to support the Boomers in the upcoming season by signing up and becoming a member.

EXECUTION

We had only a small window to get the interview with Tess as we were balancing this piece with another project we were filming with the Boomers (also featuring Tess). You may notice the sun coming through and blowing out part of Tess’s face. This was unexpected and unfortunate, however we did not have the luxury of stopping to rearrange the set and had to live with what we had. The movement of the sun and a very small window caught us off guard on this occasion, but we feel it does not detract from the powerful narrative delivered by Tess. Compromising does not feel great, but being too precious also has its drawbacks.

We were fortunate to be given access to an Opals training session, where Tess and several other national players prepared for Tokyo 2020 (2021?). This B-roll worked extremely well and punctuated many of the points Tess made in her narrative. We also reached out to Basketball Australia and broadcasters to gain access to footage of Tess playing in the national league as well as another Opals training camp we were not present at. When all was said and done, we had a plethora of B-roll and were able to choose the most appropriate scenes to tell her story.

FINAL THOUGHTS

We are so glad that the Melbourne Boomers chose to go with a storytelling piece to help launch their membership campaign. Athletes always have challenges and setbacks, as well as goals, dreams and everything we associate with sports. This provides a rich pool of content to draw upon and can make for some extremely impactful and engaging videos that centre on resilience and overcoming adversity. We believe that audiences connect with players first before teams and the league itself, so going with a player-centric and personal piece on Tess is exactly the kind of content we love to create.

CREDITS

DOP, Editor, Color: Adam McKay
Assistant Camera: Lauri Jean
Talent: Tess Madgen
Producers: Christy Collier-Hill, Adam McKay
Special Thanks: Nelson Kahler/Basketball Australia