Basketball on Film

According to the guys in The Factory Youth Zone Basketball team , ‘Coach Carter’ is one of the best films about basketball. Do you agree?

Jim and Sue met with members of the team to discuss the project and start the practical sessions. We used screen shots from ‘Coach Carter’ to look at the literacy of the film-making i.e. how the Director and Director of Photography (DoP) choose to frame a particular shot in a particular way. The group identified that long shots can tell us, the viewer, where the story is set . No glamorous uniform for this team, and their body language tells a story.

A close up can be a powerful tool to convey emotion! We didn’t fancy being on the end of this team talk!

 

Filming begins

Work on the mini films starts in earnest. Each person having written their own piece, they then had to work in small teams to become film crews for each other’s’ pieces. The roles in our film crew are: Camera Operator, Sound Operator and Director – as well as the ‘talent’, of course, in front of camera; some people made natural Directors.

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Alex Lawler joined Jim as our other artist on the project. Alex is an ex footballer and now an actor and filmmaker, he was in ‘Mike Bassett: England Manager’, lucky we had already said it was one of our favourite football films!

 

Team bonding

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A physical team bonding event… gave us the opportunity to work off all the food from the party the day before! Here’s Jake and Zak leading the way.

Here’s the team lifting up Paul and Chucks the coaches…careful not to drop them!

We even all survived the climbing and high ropes work – easy!

 

Storyboards & seasonal attire

The session was on the same day as the Christmas party and everyone was sporting very tasteful seasonal attire!

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Writing storyboards for individual mini films was a chance for the group to put the new film making skills into practice. Everyone is making a one minute film, introducing ourselves and saying something about why football is important to us…..but first the Christmas buffet!