Thursday night, I was out at Barrett's with some of the video production team, and a couple of guys from Creighton Athletics. They told me that the "Nate Funk Video" was going to make its debut Saturday. I was psyched.
What is the Nate Funk Video, you ask?
During our brainstorming for the tunnelwalk video, we toyed with the idea of shooting footage of players in the Old Gym, lights off, just ambient lighting shining in through the translucent windows of the venerable old building. Tolliver dunking. Funk hitting threes. Good stuff. While this never came to pass for various reasons, one idea of ours did get shot.
In years past, a clip from "Cheers" of Norm tapping his pencil on the bar, followed by the patrons starting a rhythmic clap to the beat of his pencil tap, was often played late in games coming out of a timeout. It was cool, and it worked, but it wasn't Creighton. Our idea was, how can we do something that accomplishes the same thing, but make it our own?
A basketball bouncing on the court is rhythmic. Easy to clap to. And it would excite people. So we brought Funk into the gym, and set up four cameras at varying angles. Funk, standing on the Jays logo at center court, dribbled the ball slowly, side to side, back and forth, speeding up, faster and faster, faster and faster, and finally spikes the ball on the floor and walks away. When it was edited together, it was a fast-cut between the four cameras, from intense zoom on the face to wide view of him dribbling, and back again. And it was presented in stark black-and-white, except for Funk, who was completely blue thanks to a filter we applied in post-production.
I remember well the first time I saw the final edited video on a computer screen in the video booth at Morrison Stadium. My first thought was, "My God, that is the greatest video I've ever seen." Supremely edited by, as ProfessorX calls her, AZ the Video Queen, this video needed to be saved for a big moment in a big game, and it needed to be kept a secret until then.
I had told my brother the video was coming. He wasn't sure it would be as cool as I told him it would be, and to be fair, its kind of hard to describe. I was excited to see what the crowd response would be.
Coming out of the under-eight timeout in a close game against the 24th ranked Xavier Muskateers qualifies for a "big moment" I would think. And there it was. My brother's jaw dropped. He finally understood what I'd been talking about. The crowd was initially shocked. For the first 2-3 seconds, you could see people's jaws drop. Then the entire arena was transfixed with the video board. And finally, they started clapping along with the video, and the place was as loud as I've ever heard it. Proud moment.
I was glad to hear all the folks on the Bluejay Cafe message board echoed those sentiments. We spent an awful lot of time working on this stuff, and to see the fruits of that labor be so well received, well, its pretty damn cool.
You bet.
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