The Hit Squad, professional arm wrestlers (view this story)

Details

Category: Sports
Media: Video
Turnaround time: More than a day but less than a week

Description of story

The Hit Squad are a group of 11 men from Metro Detroit that train & compete nationally in professional arm wrestling tournaments.

Feedback requested

Nat sound, more of it or just right? Friend said should of had better nat sound breaks in between talking. Wanted to do tourney instead of just practice, couldn't work it out. What's missing?

Gear used in production

Panasonic hvx200
GoPro HD
Sennheiser lavs & shotgun mic
Mac
FCP 7

4 comments - Login to comment

Rep: 50
Michael Lloyd Sept. 4, 2010, 11:30 a.m. permalink

Very well shot and edited. Was a little heavy on the narration, though that moved the story along nicely and didn't leave you leaning on interviews that might not have done this as well. Nat sound? Yeah, if you had something better than the heavy breathing. This wasn't a competition so the real sounds of the struggle might not have been there. If they were, it would have helped the pacing of the audio quite a bit.

Rep: 444
Submitter
Eric Seals Sept. 4, 2010, 2:41 p.m. permalink

Thanks for watching it and the feedback Michael and good point about the narration being heavy. I thought it helped but it seems to be a fine line with narration sometimes. I don't know how you go about it but I don't think about narration when I'm shooting (maybe I should?) I'd love to read up on narration decision making, the do's and don'ts of it all.


How much or how little do we use narration in a piece or how do we decide if it needs it at all? Are you saying I should of scaled back a bit more with it? 

With the nat sound I do wish I could of shot an actual competition instead of their practice, you're right the real sounds of the crowd etc from that would have been great. The grunts, heavy breathing was all there was.

Eric

Rep: 8
Mike De Sisti Sept. 7, 2010, 10:35 p.m. permalink

First of all. How did you get Vin Diesel? Just kidding. He does look like Vin Diesel though. Anyway, great photography Eric, as usuall. Love the low angle under their arms. The muscle arm in the forground in the one shot was a little hokey. But, I guess it works since the competiton is a little hokey in itself. I would have been nice to hear a little more from these guys as to WHY they do this. What drives them? What are their day jobs? What do their wives think, etc.

By the way, why do you post all your videos on Vimeo and not direct people to freep.com? Can't you use the page views?   

Rep: 444
Submitter
Eric Seals Sept. 8, 2010, 3:17 a.m. permalink

Thanks Mike.

I asked them why they do this and what drives them kind of questions but the answers were very standard, "because I love it" "for the competition and camaraderie with these guys" and no matter how I played the Q&A game with them on this I was getting variations of the same answer so I just went with one guy in the piece briefly talking about that.

This supposed to be a much longer piece working with a reporter who I do stories with and we were going to follow these guys to the state tournament and would have focused on their day jobs as well (roofer, middle school principal, assembly line worker etc)  but as time went on (this was shot in May) just became hard to revisit plus their state tournament kept getting pushed back so at one point I just made the call to try and make sense of what I had and put it together otherwise it would never see the light of day.  In my mind I know how I wanted the whole piece to look etc just one of those things that became a "it is what it is"

Good call on hokey and as you say that was kind of the point.

As to why Vimeo?  I'd love for all the page views to go to freep.com but the site needs work with its search engine. Trying to finding my videos unless they are really current is really hard and sometimes they aren't there or are clickable. Like my 1st day of kindergarten piece you just reviewed, it's up there but not playing.  Our web team is aware of all that and are suppose to be looking into it so until then I just do it this way.

Thanks for the review :-)


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