Shooting Tape and Data To capture the boy’s basketball season leading to a much anticipated final championship game between urban archrivals Boys and Girls High School and Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn New York producer/director Jon Alpert and his co-director Matt O’Neill captured the event with the newly released Sony XDCam PMW-EX1 cameras. They also shot with tape cameras. The documentary will air this winter as an ESPN signature special. The documentary which has no title at this point not only covers the basketball season but also highlights the team’s female coach Ruth Lovelace and how she inspires team members to succeed academically as well as on the basketball court. Through her leadership the majority of the team’s seniors many from challenging home situations continue on to four-year colleges with full scholarships a notable achievement in a school with an overall 30 percent graduation rate. The movie will be two hours long. Whether it will have a theatrical release hasn’t been determined yet. Alpert shot the first half of the season using two Sony HVR-Z1U cameras his long-time tool of choice for documentary production but eager to try out the new Express Card media he added two XDCam EX1s as soon as they became available. Alpert won an Emmy Award for cinematography and directing for Baghdad ER a 2006 HBO documentary about Baghdad’s main ER hospital in Iraq shot with Sony’s HVR-Z1U camera. He also produced and directed Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq a 2007 HBO documentary also shot with the HVR-Z1U. “We were betting our careers on these cameras. We probably only scratched the surface of what they can do but I knew these were the right cameras for the job ” Alpert says. “We had a very short turnaround time on this project and shot more than 270 hours of footage. Our ability to digitize the EX1 footage in just four minutes – what normally would have taken an hour to download – was a tremendous time saver in post.” The EX1 holds two Express Cards that switch automatically when full making it possible for Alpert to shoot the entire game without stopping to change tapes or worry about missing a critical moment of play. Alpert immediately made the EX1 his hand-held workhorse covering the Boys and Girls High team with a second unit covering the opposition. “When I’m one-man-band shooting I generally put everything in my pockets – tapes batteries microphones. Midway through the shoot my pants start to fall down ” Alpert says. “The difference with Express Card media is that everything is so light and small it easily fits into your breast pocket and you’re set for the entire day trousers intact.” “You are shooting quality high definition with a $15 000 camera ” he says. “The video quality is comparable to what you’re seeing with network sports with equipment in the $8 - $10 million range. It’s an amazing leap forward.” Alpert says they used two-to-four cameras for each game depending on game circumstances. “Two cameras was standard ” he says. Once they got the new cameras there was one tapeless camera on each team plus one camera high up and one camera on the announcer. Coach Lovelace wore a microphone. Alpert spoke highly of Coach Lovelace both as a coach and person but also as a willing participant in the production. “There was a level of detail and access that was amazing ” he says. Partially as a result of that attitude her personality comes through in the movie. “It reflects the coach’s personality ” he says adding “She’s a surrogate mother to these boys.” The level of cooperation from Lincoln High School and its coach Dwayne Morton was not as high. That along with the lighting conditions of most high school gymnasiums and in particular locker rooms was probably the biggest challenges the producers faced. “Sometimes the lighting was very challenging ” Alpert says “especially the fluorescent lights in the locker rooms. But the footage looks fantastic.” He cited these conditions when he spoke of how well the PMW-EX1 performed. “Even when you crank up the dBs you don’t see it ” he says. Alpert says there were “a few tiny glitches ” most having to do with his unfamiliarity with it. One glitch if you could call it that stands out in his memory. He was still learning all the possibilities of the camera and was still somewhat overwhelmed by all the functions and options that the menu showed. He and his crew were in a car driving to an upstate prison to meet the father of one of the players. The inmate had become a father at age 14 and was subsequently convicted of murder. The father and son had never met. Alpert was shooting some footage on the drive to the prison and suddenly the camera went blank. Alpert says he called his Sony representative from the car and with his assistance and a push of a button the camera was back on and all the material Alpert had shot came right back. Alpert shot only in widescreen and says that no thought was given during the shoot to the viewer who only has access to a standard definition television. “We have left the standard def era behind ” Alpert says. He concedes however that “the reality is we have to deliver a pan and scan version.” Post was being completed in house with Final Cut Pro. “We do everything in house ” Alpert says. Overall they shot 40 percent data 60 percent tape. Alpert says that when they intercut the different footage together the data looks much better. “For that reason ” he says “We’re avoiding intercutting at all costs.”
