We’re sponsoring the Santa Cruz Derby Girls again this season and are producing a whole new array of videos, different than what we’ve done in years past. We worked with Tall Can from SCDG’s Community First committee on ways to highlight the work the league does with their featured non-profits. The plan: create videos of four of the eight non-profits by covering events the derby girls participate in over the course of the season (Look for another post on the first two videos we’ve already created).
Another change this season was to explore ways of increasing the entertainment value at bouts. That’s where the idea of doing videos on individual players came into play—kind of like what you might see at the outset of a football broadcast when the starting offense or defense is announced.
For this effort, we traveled down to the league’s practice warehouse to shoot all the players from the Boardwalk Bombshells and Harbor Hellcats on green screen. We set up lights as we normally would for green screen—two backlights and one fill light up front. As Murphy’s Law would have it, when we powered up the lights to shoot the first of the Bombshells, our best-laid plan became the victim of the warehouse’s power issues. We blew a circuit and were unable to use the lights we brought. Time to improvise. Left with the warehouse’s top light to shoot each of the players, Tam then went into post and did his magic, making it appear as if we had the lighting we had originally planned.
In the end, we have a series of clips of all the players and coaches (and, of course, Roller Derby’s own Mildred Fierce) posing, smiling and mugging for the camera, bringing out their personalities right there on screen. These videos have two purposes—the first is to promote the upcoming game and line-up. Tam edits the video of those scheduled to play the next bout and posts it to our YouTube Channel. This gives a little extra boost for the game and for the skaters themselves. Then on bout night, as each player is introduced, we display their clip on the giant screen. This really makes the introductions more spectacular and allows the crowd to put a face to a derby name.
Check out the Bombshells first video from their March game and the Hellcats video from their April game.