> @DC408dxtr / @DC408dxnow
As the Summer of Sports enters August, about now something will grab hold of the attention of fans in the world's most coveted media, entertainment & sports market and never let go for at least part of the next seven months. Of course, it's the National Football League and the 32 teams are now in the early stages of training camp, with preseason games to begin shortly being scheduled around those two-a-days and of course kickoff in less than 50 days. And this weekend, the NFL begins its 2015 campaign with the Hall of Fame Game and the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremony in Canton, OH.
All summer long here on DCBLOG, we have covered summer's big sporting events during what has been a very momentous summer. And in proof of our Aussie Rules post last week, we're also putting a spotlight on sports that, in such a broad but somewhat picky country like the U.S., would otherwise not be given the kind of proper coverage and respect they deserve due to the dominance of the four major pro sports and a few other things. But now, we present this site's first post relating to this national passion sports fans have...but since everyone knows about the game of football, we'll focus in on a treasure of the sports media world.
Just a 16-mile, half-hour's drive from Philadelphia brings you east across the Delaware River to Mount Laurel, NJ, and there lies the home of its best-known employer. It's been 53 years since a company that started out as just a weekend hobby began to architect the way many of us experience America's most-popular sport. A slogan on a wall inside its 200,000 sq. ft. headquarters reads, "Keepers of the Flame," and in this rapidly-growing sports media landscape, one thing has stood the test of time over the course of the past five decades.
Since its formation in the early '60s, NFL Films has become the gold standard in sports filmmaking, and one of sports media's most renowned storytellers. With a formula established by the Sabol family that has worked for them ever since even before there was even a Super Bowl, they have created an art form in mixing great cinematography of a fast-moving sport with perfect narration, a well-timed musical soundtrack, and a touch of ballet and opera. They have also been the backbone of the NFL's ancillary programming efforts outside of game telecasts and even of its own 24/7 network, and have done so much to help bring a new audience to a sport now America's most popular.
The history of NFL Films takes football fans back to a time back when baseball was far and away the most popular sport, when college football was more popular than the professional game, and when sold out home games weren't even shown on live TV in local markets. And of course, this was during the early years of the American Football League that successfully battled the establishment for players, money and fan attention before their landmark merger that changed everything.
Ed Sabol was a World War II vet who, by week, was selling topcoats after returning home from the front lines in a life after he was a top swimmer. By weekend, he grabbed a motion picture camera given to him as a wedding gift to film the high school football games of his son, Steve. His work got him to form a small film company called Blair Motion Pictures, bearing the name of his daughter, Blair. For the rights to film the 1962 NFL Championship Game in the pre-Super Bowl era, Sabol's $5,000 offer, double the bid of the '61 affair, landed him the deal.
And once Commissioner Pete Rozelle saw the film and asked NFL owners to buy out BMP, the first roots of a company now the standard bearers in a form of sports media defined by words, pictures & sound were planted. And when he received $20,000 in seed funding from each of the 14 NFL team owners, which in turn would help the company shoot all NFL games and produce a highlight film for each team, NFL Films would be on its way to a spot all by itself.
While it was that Packer win over the Giants in the Yankee Stadium cold that was the baptism of fire for NFL Films, it was in 1967 where they had their graduation day with a film that's considered "the Citizen Kane of sports films." The film They Call It Pro Football was the company's first full-length presentation, featuring the hybrid of the elements that would later define a style of filmmaking they can simply call their own: sweeping scenes of stadium pageantry, a stirring musical soundtrack, sync-sound footage, and dramatic script lines narrated greatly. To those in Philadelphia, John Facenda was the Delaware Valley's first TV news anchor at then-CBS O&O WCAU. NFL Films chose him to narrate that film to a national audience, and "the voice of God" would be the voice of NFL Films for 20 years.
The style of NFL Films is so unique, even a Salon.com writer calls them "the greatest in-house P.R. machine in pro sports history," and rightfully so. It's often referred to as "tight on the spiral," reason being the most-often used shot in slow motion of a spinning football traveling from the hand of a quarterback to the hands of a receiver, which began far before technology with that capability made it into our iPhones.
While it was that Packer win over the Giants in the Yankee Stadium cold that was the baptism of fire for NFL Films, it was in 1967 where they had their graduation day with a film that's considered "the Citizen Kane of sports films." The film They Call It Pro Football was the company's first full-length presentation, featuring the hybrid of the elements that would later define a style of filmmaking they can simply call their own: sweeping scenes of stadium pageantry, a stirring musical soundtrack, sync-sound footage, and dramatic script lines narrated greatly. To those in Philadelphia, John Facenda was the Delaware Valley's first TV news anchor at then-CBS O&O WCAU. NFL Films chose him to narrate that film to a national audience, and "the voice of God" would be the voice of NFL Films for 20 years.
The style of NFL Films is so unique, even a Salon.com writer calls them "the greatest in-house P.R. machine in pro sports history," and rightfully so. It's often referred to as "tight on the spiral," reason being the most-often used shot in slow motion of a spinning football traveling from the hand of a quarterback to the hands of a receiver, which began far before technology with that capability made it into our iPhones.
The formula is simple: many cameras are placed around the stadium like its network counterparts, with one of them being devoted to slow-motion shots. Multiple angles are used also, just like on TV, but with great emphasis on real-time close-ups which are used only during replays on-air. Microphones are deployed on the sidelines and near the field to capture game sound, and also on players and coaches for their always interesting sideline dialogue. And crews are in the locker rooms after the game to capture that winning speech from the coach in an exuberant locker room or the silence after a loss.
Of course, there's the voices, and NFL Films prefers deep, powerful baritone voices which are added in post-production to mix action with poetry. And it seems as if they have sort of a Philly bias when it comes to narrators: after John Facenda's passing in 1984, the primary voice role has been filled by Jeff Kaye, the late Harry Kalas, Jim Birdsall and current voice Scott Graham. But other people are occasionally used as well: Charlton Heston, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris and Orson Wells to name a few. And during all films, local radio calls are used more often than the TV broadcasts as they are more of the homer and enthusiastic variety than their national, neutral counterparts.
And then, there's that music. In the sports film world, NFL Films was the first to score its own original music and edit sports cinema footage to popular music well before there was even music videos. Muscular, Hollywood-style scores have been scored by a prestigious group of musicians, the most notable of which is Sam Spence, whose themes have been used by all media despite not receiving a royalty check after the years, and whose magna de cum is The Autumn Wind, aka the fight song of the Raiders. That aside, the company has a long relationship with production music form KPM Music for non-original soundtrack music too.
Nowadays, of course, there's an endless array of NFL programming outside of the game-casts on Sundays and Monday & Thursday nights to help fill that airtime with analysis, league news and more on many networks, regardless of whether they hold a piece of the rights pie. As part of NFL Media, NFL Films represents the backbone of NFL Network in offering much of its programming output, daily shows and daily shows, including the America's Game series focusing at every SB champion team, A Football Life, hour-long portraits of those in the NFL world; Playbook and Top 10.
NFL highlights have long been the bread & butter of cable's longest-running show, Inside the NFL, which, along with boxing, has been a staple of premium TV for 40 years, first on HBO and now on Showtime. The former also helped develop sports TV's first reality-based docu-series, Hard Knocks, which has granted unrestricted all-access to training camp of many NFL teams since its 2001 debut, becoming the most-honored and most-watched series of its kind. And there's also NFL Films Presents - on-air since the '70s; NFL Matchup on ESPN, and NFL Turning Point on NBCSN; and the annual Road to the Super Bowl special that airs the weekend of Super Sunday.
When the season is about to be done and dusted, it's an annual ritual for NFL Films to produce an annual highlight film for each team every season. And aside from the great moments of victory showcased by every team, every film is edited to make sure that every team is show in a positive light by editing out losses and bad play, and provide optimism for the next season ahead. what would any sports media outlet's resume be without fun? The answer comes in Football Follies with bloopers and more, all part of the league's home video and DVD slate.
NFL highlights have long been the bread & butter of cable's longest-running show, Inside the NFL, which, along with boxing, has been a staple of premium TV for 40 years, first on HBO and now on Showtime. The former also helped develop sports TV's first reality-based docu-series, Hard Knocks, which has granted unrestricted all-access to training camp of many NFL teams since its 2001 debut, becoming the most-honored and most-watched series of its kind. And there's also NFL Films Presents - on-air since the '70s; NFL Matchup on ESPN, and NFL Turning Point on NBCSN; and the annual Road to the Super Bowl special that airs the weekend of Super Sunday.
When the season is about to be done and dusted, it's an annual ritual for NFL Films to produce an annual highlight film for each team every season. And aside from the great moments of victory showcased by every team, every film is edited to make sure that every team is show in a positive light by editing out losses and bad play, and provide optimism for the next season ahead. what would any sports media outlet's resume be without fun? The answer comes in Football Follies with bloopers and more, all part of the league's home video and DVD slate.
And their expertise in the sports filmmaking field has also seen its team being utilized outside the NFL ranks in other non-football documentary films long before it became a renowned sports TV genre. NBC Olympics have collaborated with them on projects since a 20th anniversary retrospective on the Munich tragedy in 1992, while NFL Films have provided supplementary film crews to their major sports league cousins for the World Series, NBA Finals and Stanley Cup, among others. And they've been utilized by Hollywood on just about every football-related feature film, including Jerry Maguire, Rudy, The Waterboy and Brian's Song, as well as When Harry Met Sally.
What goes into covering an NFL game from the standpoint of its own film division? Until converting to all-digital prior to last season, film shot from each game was rushed back to Mt. Laurel for immediate processing and to allow the production team as much time as they can to produce its weekly programming. NFL Films operates an in-house processing lab that's open to the public to develop both its own productions and for long- and short-form material for films shot on location in the Delaware Valley, even servicing local universities too.
The Lab has also been progressive in archiving and maintaining a vault as prestigious as any film archive, containing over 100 million square feet of football footage in 50,000 cans...the largest sports film library on earth. The archive also includes video footage of NFL broadcasts dating back to the '60s as well, especially when videotape back then was limited in the early days before VHS. And along with its digital transition, all archival footage has also been transferred to HD format while preserving the original film copies for posterity. This includes the oldest known piece of their archive: an 1894 Princeton-Rutgers rivalry game shot by Thomas Edison.
The short turnarounds of game footage being later shown on TV also made possible an early staple of ABC's Monday Night Football: highlight segments of all Sunday games being shown at halftime, narrated by the great Howard Cosell. Before there was SportsCenter and Inside the NFL, Howard's halftime highlights were the only place that a national TV audience could see highlights of all NFL games, all made possible by the NFL Films crews. Today, all footage is shot on memory cards, then sent back via the ISDN network at all NFL venues and facilities to Mt. Laurel, where they're edited and color-corrected and ready to be put on-air quicker than ever before.
The growth of NFL Films mirrors that of football's immense growth that has seen it surpass baseball to become America's most popular sport. Consider these numbers...
- Only 102 games were filmed in 1965 when there were only 14 teams and divided into eastern and western conferences. Now every game from the Kickoff game to the Super Bowl are filmed...267 in all, regular season and postseason, not counting preseason games. Total number of games filmed since 1962 now are approaching the 10,000 mark.
- If you take all the 16mm film shot during the 2013 season and put them all in a line, that would be a 1,000 miles, or the distance from the Mt. Laurel NFL Films headquarters to Orlando, FL.
- The annual programming slate produced by the firm numbers at over 600 hours, along with hundreds more outside of football. It includes, of course, the Thursday Night Football slate which since last season has been co-produced with its heritage broadcast partner CBS Sports.
- As the first to wire them for sound, NFL Films have put microphones on over 600 players and coaches during games, capturing their actions, reactions and interactions of one of TV's greatest dramas.
- And for the biggest day in American sports, nearly 150 employees are deployed at the Super Bowl, with nearly 30 camera & audio crews in 30 fixed or handheld positions.
And aside from the aforementioned pioneering role in mixing sports, music and sound, NFL Films has also been a pioneer in sports filmmaking and production as well in providing these firsts:
- use reverse angle replays (sometimes called the Renfro because of officials botching a missed call that would have reversed potential game-winning TD for the Oilers in '79 AFC Championship)
- produce "Follies" bloopers films
- use graphics to analyze game tactics and strategy
- be granted unrestricted access to NFL training camp
- use montage editing in sports, and ground-level slow motion
- use 600mm lenses in sports cinematography
- hire a woman executive in the NFL
- use reverse angle replays (sometimes called the Renfro because of officials botching a missed call that would have reversed potential game-winning TD for the Oilers in '79 AFC Championship)
- produce "Follies" bloopers films
- use graphics to analyze game tactics and strategy
- be granted unrestricted access to NFL training camp
- use montage editing in sports, and ground-level slow motion
- use 600mm lenses in sports cinematography
- hire a woman executive in the NFL
In all, NFL Films has become one of sports media's most-respected companies and its most-honored filmmaker, amassing nearly 110 Sports Emmy Awards since it won its first in 1979. It has set a lofty standard in a field of sports media that's been rapidly increasing in recent times, a testament to the great body it has produced over nearly three generations of NFL fans. And even after the passings of its patriarchs of Ed and Steve Sabol within three years of each other, the company has become stronger than ever with a programming slate as large as ever before. As it is filming in Houston the comings & goings of Texans training camp, and prepping for a huge season ahead, NFL Films have maintained their position as "Keepers of the Flame"...the most prominent filmmaker in sports.
Before we wrap things up, all summer we've been focusing on the Summer of Sports, but shortly we'll be turning our attention here to a new cycle of the MTV Trifecta. In case you don't know, it's Are You The One? and The Challenge/Real World franchise, and it's the equivalent of the NFL to DCBLOG: the very thing that this site devotes the lion's share of coverage to. The majority of this site's blog traffic is driven by these three shows, and of course we'll have week-by-week, wall-to-wall coverage when the buzz for Season 3 of the dating social experiment commences in short order.
And to whet your appetite for what's going to take over very soon, posted this week was a interview by entertainment blog site Talk Nerdy With Us with AYTO's master of ceremonies, host Ryan Devlin. They chatted about how he got the chance to return to where he earned his stripes early in his career, what goes on behind the scenes, and what we can expect to see on Season 3. Plus, they talked about R-Dev's energy bar business venture, This Bar Saves Lives. Check it out here: http://talknerdywithus.com/2015/08/06/exclusive-interview-with-are-you-the-one-host-ryan-devlin.
This season will take place not far from where the original Season 1 cast had their run to the $1M jackpot, on the big island of Hawaii. And our Trifecta preseason coverage will have both a season 3 preview of the entire cast, plus a look back at last season in Puerto Rico, where Team 21 pulled off a miraculous late season comeback to snatch the cash in their 10th and last try. Our coverage of AYTO Season 3 begins just as soon as the buzz for it begins...should be very soon.
As for the time being, sports remains the prominent focus on DCBLOG, and as make sure to follow my social media platforms below:
- First, follow my dedicated live tweet hub, DCNOW at Twitter @DC408DxNow. All summer, we've seen a whole plethora of big events and championship moments in hoops, hockey, horse racing, soccer, fight sports and more. Coming here this weekend is week 1 of the English Premier League and the NFL Hall of Fame Game & induction ceremony, and we'll be covering both along with golf, fight sports, NASCAR and international swimming, just as we reach 1 year to Rio 2016.
- DCBLOG has complemented my live tweets by taking you beyond the headlines and highlights for a unique look at sports from my POV. Soccer, golf, boxing, tennis and more have been covered here during the summer, and if you haven't checked out those posts be sure check them out here. Next week, we'll continue our football theme as we focus in on the Canadian game, and a reflection on soccer's growth in America in the aftermath of Team USA's Women's World Cup win.
- First, follow my dedicated live tweet hub, DCNOW at Twitter @DC408DxNow. All summer, we've seen a whole plethora of big events and championship moments in hoops, hockey, horse racing, soccer, fight sports and more. Coming here this weekend is week 1 of the English Premier League and the NFL Hall of Fame Game & induction ceremony, and we'll be covering both along with golf, fight sports, NASCAR and international swimming, just as we reach 1 year to Rio 2016.
- DCBLOG has complemented my live tweets by taking you beyond the headlines and highlights for a unique look at sports from my POV. Soccer, golf, boxing, tennis and more have been covered here during the summer, and if you haven't checked out those posts be sure check them out here. Next week, we'll continue our football theme as we focus in on the Canadian game, and a reflection on soccer's growth in America in the aftermath of Team USA's Women's World Cup win.
- Of course, there's also a packed live tweet TV slate, which on Tuesday will see me add HBO's aforementioned Hard Knocks to the slate as the Texans prep for their new season. There's also Catfish, America's Best Dance Crew and Teen Mom, plus just announced I'll be adding my first non-MTV cable show, CMT's new docu-series Gainesville, which chronicles a group of seven best friends as they adjust to new life as young adults in one of America's greatest college towns.
- And my fellow sports/MTV fan, webcast host and recent college grad Andrew Kirk should have a special Big Time Reality TV webcast on his YouTube soon where he'll offering his thoughts on the recent Trifecta cycle, answering questions asked by myself. Be sure to follow the both of us, Brian Cohen, Ali Lasher and Reality Radio as our webcasts and blogs will be all over the MTV Trifecta, plus for right now, Big Brother 17 as well.
- And my fellow sports/MTV fan, webcast host and recent college grad Andrew Kirk should have a special Big Time Reality TV webcast on his YouTube soon where he'll offering his thoughts on the recent Trifecta cycle, answering questions asked by myself. Be sure to follow the both of us, Brian Cohen, Ali Lasher and Reality Radio as our webcasts and blogs will be all over the MTV Trifecta, plus for right now, Big Brother 17 as well.
- And as always, don't forget to follow my primary Twitter handle @DC408Dxtr, my Instagram account also at the same handle, and at Tumblr at dc408dxtr.tumblr.com. I'm open for you to chat with me anytime on Twitter, so if you want to talk sports, MTV or pop culture, I'm here for you.
Again, thanks for joining us for this look at NFL Films, part of our Summer of Sports as the 2015 NFL campaign kicks off. Make sure to join me on DCNOW for Hall of Fame Weekend and much more this weekend, and follow me at my social media platforms above. Until we talk again here next week, thanks for reading, have fun and Welcome Back to Football.
- I AM DC
Acknowledgements: NFLFilms.com, Wikipedia - NFL Films, Sports Video Group Hall of Fame
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