The highlight of any Uni sports award event, including Monday night's basketball ceremony, is the crowd-pleasing video that captures an entire season of athletic achievement in roughly 15 minutes. So who are the students behind the scenes who make the videos happen?

By Alex Zhai

Gargoyle assistant editor

Posted Tuesday, March 6, 2007, The OG, features

IT'S ONLY 7:40 a.m. when sophomore Adam Tiouririne walks into the cramped north side of the Mac lab. Four sleek computers line the peeling wall, but Tiouririne brushes past them to a cabinet in the back.

Adam Tiouririne works on his portion of the video that

would be shown Monday night at Uni's annual basketball

awards ceremony. (photo by Chris Nixon) (click to enlarge)

On the black metal written in chalk is “Snakes in a Cabinet,” a lighthearted attempt to ward off curious passersby.

The label is appropriate, perhaps, as Tiouririne extracts a serpentine coil of cords, a pair of headphones, and an external hard drive, which he plugs into the fourth computer from the entrance.

Soon, two windows pop up on the screen, along with a mixture of purple, blue, and green rectangles scattered along a timeline at the bottom.

It's footage of a recent boys basketball game, diced into tiny fragments highlighting the most impressive plays.

The bell rings, but Tiouririne doesn't get up. Instead, junior Micah Berman, junior Zoë Schein, and sophomore Isaac Chambers quickly join him. Tiouririne is already in his four-person first-hour class: yearbook video.

Although yearbook video is officially a course taught by yearbook adviser Joel Beesley, it's more like an extracurricular activity. Various Uni organizations sometimes enlist their expertise, but the video team's only obligation is to make videos for the fall, winter, and spring sports awards ceremonies. It's a task that sounds deceptively simple.

First, they need to videotape many hours of sporting events in their time after school. The film is later loaded onto the computer, with the telltale “Do not use” sign hanging on the monitor until the process, called capturing, is finished several hours later.

And then the real work begins.

Only a small portion of the loaded footage is actually interesting. Editing the raw film down to the notable parts is by far the most time-consuming stage of video-making.

After synchronizing the action to music, adjusting video speeds, crafting transitions, and adding effects, it takes an estimated 24 hours to perfect a two-minute clip.

Ultimately, the entire season's sports footage must be condensed into one roughly 15-minute-long video complete with mock commercials to add humor and variety. Beesley, who simultaneously teaches the regular yearbook class in the other portion of the Mac lab, provides some ideas but stays mostly hands-off.

Each person on the video crew is responsible for his or her own section of the video, either covering a specific sport or making the interspersed commercials, but they frequently share opinions and suggestions.

“There's a whole lot of interaction,” says Berman, who has been in yearbook video since his freshman year and is the most experienced member of the group.

The hard work of getting it right

During a free period, Chambers and Tiouririne are back in the Mac lab. Tiouririne is wearing the yearbook video class's headphones, of which he is particularly fond. Chambers happens to look over as Tiouririne tries adjusting the opacity of some text.

“No, don't do any opacity,” he protests, beginning to offer a litany of reasons.

“Relax, stop criticizing until I'm done,” exclaims Tiouririne mock-defensively. He decides that changing the text is a bad idea too.

A few minutes later, Tiouririne is creating a zooming transition, but the center of the zoom won't land where he clicks. Noticing the problem, Chambers tells him to zoom out from the picture on the screen.

This time, Chambers' advice is more warmly received. Soon, the transition works correctly and fades to the group picture of the boys basketball team. As if on cue, the song ends: “Push it to the limit.”

The good timing is no accident. The video editor's task is to make everything fall into place perfectly. In fact, a degree of perfectionism is a distinguishing characteristic of the video crew. They are attentive to detail, from the angle and lighting of the initial shooting to the final run-through at the site of the ceremony to make sure there are no problems.

“The basic idea is to get the video playing in your head to match the one on your computer screen,” according to Schein. “You've got to work on it until you reach that point, or it just feels wrong. And yeah, I suppose that takes hours sometimes, but it's not as tedious as it sounds.”

During the week before presentation, Berman is in charge of putting everyone's work together. He spends nearly every spare moment on the final editing, usually pulling at least one all-nighter. The junior/senior lock-in earlier this year, which took place just before the fall sports awards ceremony, qualified as “spare time.”

Berman admits that the job can be repetitive. By the time a sports awards ceremony rolls around, he will have watched some of the same clips hundreds of times. Playing through the same fast break over and over again — forwards, backwards, sometimes in incoherent individual frames — starts to disorient even the casual onlooker.

When it all comes together

But needless to say, the members of the video crew enjoy their work, and they don't really notice the time commitment when they're working. As Chambers describes it, “You're just editing until you realize it's 2 o'clock and you have to go to bed.”

And of course, it isn't all intense work. Even as he edits, Berman sometimes chats with the people around him and plays music. The music is an integral part of not only the video but also the editing process for the video crew members, who periodically break into song as they review a clip they just edited.

The boys basketball players occasionally stop by to watch themselves playing in the unfinished video and to argue over who made the toughest shot.

Junior Austin Rundus, one of the team's top 3-point shooters, wanders into the Mac lab, and Tiouririne takes off his headphones to show him a clip.

The clip is of Rundus shooting a 3-pointer, but it freezes in mid-shot as everything but the player turns to black and white. Then the action resumes, and the ball sinks into the net. Rundus watches and grins.

In the end, the effort that the video crew members put in is rewarding. When asked what the best part of making a video is, Berman offered: “I think it's seeing the audience's reaction. It's really cool when something works.”

Tiouririne responded similarly.

“I like the finished product,” he said. “I like working on things for hours and hours and seeing it and having other people see it.”

As he turned to listen to a selection of music for his video, he added: “Actually I lied. The best thing is the headphones.”

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