All-Access is a Commodity, Storytelling is Treasure

When you surf the web and click on a collegiate sports website “All-Access” page, what do you get? Sometimes it is exclusive content behind a pay wall. Most of the time, it is some kind of “behind the scenes” video shot at closed practices, in the lockeroom, where perhaps you can watch a coach addressing his team. In the days before the Internet, this kind of video was considered gold. During my tenure as the Senior Producer for NBC’s syndicated George Michael Sports Machine, we’d give anything for it. But today, it has become a commodity. It begs the question, how can “all-access” content become more valuable and give a university a chance to have its story resonate with recruits and a passionate fan base. Providing “all-access” video to engage an audience is not enough to satisfy an audience on the web that is voracious for premium content or prospective recruits who need to be persuaded to choose one university over another. What’s needed is a sustained approach to document the meaningful moments in collegiate sports programs, put them in context, and incorporates them into a compelling ongoing narrative that engages an audience. The filmmakers at 3 Penny Films are experienced storytellers who embed within a program to capture the moments that can make a great story come to life on the web, television or the silver screen. We’ve learned that just showing a coach’s pre-game speech or teaching moment in practice is no longer enough. In fact, any collegiate sports information director can hand a camera to an intern and tell that person to shoot those moments. The real challenge becomes identifying the context for those moments, knowing what to look for, what you have, and how it relates to a compelling story and the longer narrative of the team. Quite frankly, I learned this the hard way. Once we had the privilege of being hired by universities to document their programs, we captured plenty of authentic unscripted moments, but context was needed. That’s when I realized that all of the experience learned from 23 years of telling stories on the Sports Machine can really pay off as well as the partnership with my colleagues at 3 Penny Films. As a member of the media at NBC I was on the outside looking in as teams prepared for games. But 3 Penny Films co-founder and friend Jess Atkinson, a former NFL player (and fellow broadcaster) had been part of many teams, including the 1987 Super Bowl Champion Washington Redskins. Jess’ perspective is our gift, a keen sense and understanding of what the players and coaches are experiencing, and what those moments mean to a story. How do those stories fit in with the overall brand the university is trying to communicate? That’s when we get to lean on 3 Penny Films co-founder, Bill Kraus, the marketing executive who helped fuel the explosive growth of Under Armor. Bill understands how to build a brand, and that experience has proven valuable to our university partners. Above all, we are students of filmmaking and storytelling. Robert McKee’s book Story is like a bible to us. The works of great filmmakers inspires us. When when we are at work documenting a football season for a team like Notre Dame, Miami and the University of Maryland we share the vision of director Andrew Stanton who wrote all of the works of the Toy Story franchise: “Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.”