FInding Football
In association with YouTube Red, we were tasked with creating a long form web series that was equal parts travel, football, and music. Spanning eight episodes, we traveled around the world highlighting how traditions & culture impact the style of play certain countries developed. The finesse of the favelas vs the glamour of the gambeta.
Editor // POst supervisor
Background
Whistle Sports was asked to concept a dynamic sports show for YouTube Redās premium show catalog. After finding their hosts in F2, Whistle developed āFinding Footballā for the eight episode order. It would follow hosts Billy & Jezza as they traverse foreign and familiar territory, exploring more of the unique ways an aspect of certain cultures influence their football superstars. Neymarās control learnt from tight quarters living in Favelas. Messiās feints from the crafty Argentinians.
All of these themes collided with a music superstar to help bring the episode to a close, incorporating trending artists directly into the action. A$AP Ferg flamenco dance skills are like woah, by the way.
production
After coordinating our schedule with YTRedās release schedule, we were able to map out and coordinate the seven remaining productions over a two month period to wrap filming by end of year. Our pilot episode on Brazil, gave us needed insight on what we missed our first go around since certain remote locations would be inaccessible outside of our allotted time.
Coordinating between one traveling internal crew & seven local crews in seven languages was an exciting challenge to face while ensuring the terabytes of 4K footage coming in from the field was properly channeled to the episodeās editor, a small team of four.
This quick delivery to the edit team gave us the ability to review footage and create story layouts; revealing if any scenes were lacking coverage, need a rework, or should be focused on more. Real-time communicating that feedback to the team a few hours ahead (or behind) to potentially slot in their next day. The core crew gave us a tightly framed display of the world, each location photographed with a sharp, creative eye.
Thatās when the edit team really started going.
Post production
To help our schedule move along as fast as possible during our fairly quick timeline, we had an editor travel with the crew depending on which episode they were editing. This led to faster turnarounds, lessened the number of assistant editors, all while they acted as script supervisor on set. Their dailies edit would then come to me in New York, uploading to YTRed.
Growing the idea of the pilot into a structure we could replicate across the remaining episodes helped refine the style and overall tone. We needed to communicate to each crew that joined us with little time to prep live so to help portray the direction our team was looking for, a visual style guide was made to avoid hiccups in the field. Using that as an anchor point, each episode found its unique language and storytelling devices. Some were a comedy. Some had a few lessons. They all had a lot of fun both in front of and behind the camera.
Our tight team of editors and graphics artists worked tirelessly but cohesively which helped keep the pace of not just the show but the edit itself. This project introduced a connected server for Whistle so this UHD project was a great litmus test for our own systems and new workflows. Those practices we followed led to a constructive feedback sessions, more dedicated days editing, and overall better storytelling - not to mention the ease of on-the-fly graphics changes.
All of this led to a successful collaboration internally & externally with a project that was fully realized from script to screen. Seeing ideas pay off in post is always a rewarding feeling, more-so than ever coordinating at this scale.
