Post-Production

Ingest

Using Adobe Premiere Pro and Media Encoder, I began my workflow by organizing the project, creating proxies, and syncing interview footage/audio.

Interview Cutting

Women’s Basketball Interviews

I cut each of the women’s interviews into audio packages, forming the foundation of their respective segments. With six sets of questions/answers, my goal was to cut and arrange each women’s answers in a way that formed a cohesive “story.”

The general formula I came up with after finishing the first audio package was to connect the answers from:

1. “What has basketball meant to you during your time here?”

2. “How has this team helped you grow?”

3. “What’s next for you after graduation?”

4. “What will you miss most about playing here?”

The answers to these questions, in this order, tended to present the most natural flow between topics.

Men’s Basketball Interviews

The men’s interviews were somewhat trickier, with more variety in speaking styles and answer depth, which necessitated some deviation from the formula:

1. For answers that felt scattered, I would cut those answers up and rearrange parts of them to make them more concise. I strived to ensure that doing so wouldn’t “change” what the subject was trying to convey with their original answer, and if I couldn’t find the right balance, I’d scrap the answer altogether.

2. For answers with run-on verbiage, I would make cuts at strategic points to strategically shorten the answer without losing the core part of the message; for example, the phrase “I’ll miss my teammates, like Johnny, Bobby, Xavier, all of them, because they’re like a family to me…” can still work without the extra 10 seconds’ worth of naming each teammate.

3. For answers without built-in context, I used recordings of my voice where I’m asking the question.

Additionally, because of the variance in the men’s answers, I used answers from the non-formulaic questions when they proved to be better fits within the segment at large.

B-Roll Logging

Women’s Basketball Footage

I went through each clip from the women’s basketball game and organized them as follows: gameplay, B-Roll (ceremony), and time-outs. I further organized the gameplay and B-Roll into player-wise clip sets, and from there, consolidated those player-wise sets in to respective sequences.

In short, I logged the footage and culled it down to prepare for clip selection.

Men’s Basketball Footage

I had enough footage from two games to further organize plays, each of the six available players having multiple plays to choose from, ranging from 2-pointers and 3-pointers to steals. As mentioned earlier, with two games’ worth of plays with hero shots, I spent more time during the men’s final home game capturing crowd/team/cheerleader reaction shots.

Clip Selection

I knew that I wanted each interview to start and end with gameplay footage if possible. The first play would lead into the first interview shot, and the last interview shot would lead into the last play.

The sophomore ceremony clips and “starting lineup” clips were consistent and reliable pieces I could place around the “What’s next for me” and “What I will miss most” segments; beyond that, the right move was to fill out the segments with more gameplay footage.

Women’s Basketball Segments

• For Holly’s segment, I turned to archival photos of her from past games to showcase her playing time on the team. Without B-Roll footage of her, this was the best way for me to maintain some level of consistency throughout the segments.

Men’s Basketball Segments

• For Angelo’s segment, I took full advantage of his multiple 3-pointers to craft his segment into more of a highlight reel (similar to the Replay packages I produce for the Washington Wizards). The fact that he wants to take his game to the next level in college basketball made this one a no-brainer.

• For Zef’s segment, I added some archival photos of his past games. Even with my B-Roll of him interacting with teammates and reacting to his teammate’s plays on the bench, I wanted to better-showcase his role on the team throughout the season the way I did with Holly.

Color Correction/Grading

For color, my initial priority was color matching between shots as much as possible, correcting exposure as needed. I trusted the baked-in white balance from my camera; with feedback, I went back for another round of color correction to improve the white balance.

Audio

Within the interview cuts, I applied Premiere Pro’s Essential Sound settings to each of the audio clips, specifically for loudness matching. After this, I applied simple audio adjustments to the full mix: Dynamics Processing and Hard Limiter. The goal here was to ensure consistency in the audio levels.

Graphics

I used Adobe After Effects to build a transition and lower third for the videos. Hillary sent me the AACC Riverhawks logos and logo color details, which I used to craft both motion graphics templates.