Producing Instructional Film

This is the second part of my reflection on film from this summer's adventures.  The last piece was about using film on the same day to help the U-23 Mixed team this summer.  This post will be about some of the film work that I did helping Chain during the fall.  They are distinctly different types of film, and there is still a third type (watching the film) that I would love to do a piece on with Lou, Kyle, Matty, Bob or Whit.  That is a long list of people, and an open invitation if anyone is interested.

This summer Chain Lightning asked me to help them out a little.  The scope of the help was left somewhat vague (intentionally on my part) because I didn't think that stepping in as a full Coach was the right thing to do.  My job involved being at team meetings, planning some practices, and being a bird in the ears of the captains as they steered the ship.  One thing that I wanted to do was to film practices/games and use that to improve individual players and team mistakes.  It is a practice used in all sports, so why not use it in ultimate.  I had experience doing similar work with Olympic Athletes earlier in life, so I knew a little bit about what I wanted to be able to convey to the players with this video.

Chain has a certain reputation and so my first task was to use film to either reinforce or refute that reputation.  The team also had certain strategic goals they were trying to achieve, and the film was a good way to determine if they had achieved those goals.  Then there were specific player goals that could be checked with film.  All of these things required me to get film, go through it, edit it and then add commentary as needed.

Acquiring film was pretty easy.  I didn't have time to sit and film all of the practices, but Chain set up cameras for me so I got some film from practice.  In the future having a "camera man" feels pretty key. That can be a tough thing to find since most people who want to be involved with ultimate want to play, and unless you are paying them (or they are related to someone) people aren't likely to give up their weekends to stand behind a camera.  Ultiworld made getting prior game film easy since they were filming at tournaments and for a cost you could get the raw files.  The film on NexGen and ESPN was perhaps of better "quality" but was often shot a little too close for my taste, and was streamed so you couldn't edit a file directly.  More on that later.

With film in hand it just took time for me to go through it, and finding an editor that I could use.  MPEG-Streamclip is a quick and dirty editor for mp4 files and became the editor de jour since I could trim quickly and convert between file formats with little problem.

Finding the right pieces of film to cut was difficult at times and easy at other.  If I went in with a narrative in mind it became easy to find the film that supported what I was thinking about.  When I was approaching film with a broad mentality (not knowing what I was looking for) it took significantly longer.  Out of the average game I was pulling somewhere between 20-30 clips dealing with a range of topics (defensive positioning, offensive structure, red zone, choices, etc.).  Breaking down all of those clips into a meaningful message was difficult at times, but felt like the important part of the film.  It became an issue of seeing what clips fit with a theme and then pulling them together.  Usually I would be able to break the film down into 2 or 3 themes.

With themes determines I would then combine all of the video (again in Streamclip) and start the annotation process.  If I were using iMovie I could have added captions to the video, but that felt like it was going to take too long.  So instead I used a Wacom tablet, Quicktime for a screen recorder and a piece of software from my job (teacher) called ActivInspire to allow me to draw over the screen using the tablet.  I would then go through the video, pause at certain points, telestrate the image then continue, all while providing audio commentary.  It was very easy for these videos to be long, but I tried to keep them under 15 minutes.  We as coaches have the ability to drone on about tactics and strategy for hours if we are allowed to, so I needed to prevent that tendency.  From that I would upload the film to a site and let the captains know about it.

At times the film was used to inform the next practice.  Other times it was forwarded to the team for everyone to watch.  Now that I have a mechanism for producing these videos the challenge from a coach perspective feels like learning how to integrate this as part of the overall process.  The questions that I left this summer with were: How do I improve the quality of information I get from watching film?  How to I speed up the process of editing and annotating the film?  How to I best deliver the messages I am trying to deliver? And finally, how do I establish that using film is helping the team rather than hurting the team?

I will have a chance to work on those questions during the upcoming high school season.  Instructional tape will be important for those players since they are so you and haven't played/watched as much ultimate as the rest of us.  Also with scouting being less important it is something that I can work on during the year.  My plan is to record practices, break down some of the film and watch it on rainy day (of which there always seem to be plenty).  Then I can have the players decide which sections of film should be put into a legacy bin that we use for years to come as an example of our our style of play.  I want to get away from highlights, of which there will be plenty and players understand what they look like.  What I am hoping to find is film of things like Baccarini's history 100+ pass zone point, so that players understand how our team operates and see things on the field they don't normally see.  I'll check back in on occasion to see how that is going.