Shooting Go Tigers!

Sunday, February 29th, 2004

I caught a bit of Go Tigers!, the high-school football documentary, on IFC the other day. Shooting Go Tigers! explains how it was made:

The documentary film Go Tigers! takes the viewer on a journey to Massillon, OH, a small town where football means everything to its residents.The behind-the-scenes chronicle follows three star high school football players through a season. The film captures the town’s enormous infatuation with the Massillon Tigers high school foot-ball team. Roughly 80 percent of Go Tigers! was shot on HDCAM, 15 percent on miniDV, with the remaining 5 percent on Super 16mm film. The resulting 300 hours of footage was eventually edited into a 103-minute motion picture.Go Tigers! screened at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, where IFC Films picked it up.

To be honest, it did not look like 80 percent of Go Tigers! was shot on HDCAM. It didn’t look high-def at all. It looked like a typical documentary.

Like other documentaries, however, Go Tigers! was burdened with a limited budget — roughly $350,000.

I guess a third of a mil doesn’t go as far as it used to…

To obtain personal perspectives from the football players themselves, team stars Dave Irwin, Ellery Moore, and Danny Studer were given a Sony DV-6 one-chip miniDV camera to shoot practically anything they wanted, anytime they wanted. They ended up delivering a great deal of fascinating personal footage that furthered storylines.The Sony miniDV cameras were set to their built-in 16:9 aspect ratios to maintain consistency with the HD widescreen footage. Although it wasn’t the best 16:9 image the producers had seen, they felt the quality compromise was worth it to get the personal footage. In fact, the Go Tigers! crew added a DV-6 camera to their own kit and used it extensively throughout the shoot. Much of the players’ footage made it into the finished film.

Maybe I just caught a lot of the cheap DV-6 footage when I tuned in.

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