Life After the NFL: Stories of NFL Alumni - ID# 223
South Elgin
Documentary
Entry Description
This mini-doc highlights three former NFL players living in the Chicago area and some of the shared realities of leaving the limelight of the world's largest professional sports league. Produced and Directed by: Ryan Lewin and Sam Dankel
Copyright Info
Recent Teacher Comments
- 4/10 8:56 pm - KEEPERS: Great interview set ups and broll usage overall. You really did a great job of visually layering the stories of these athletes. I loved that you used multiple music cues and use music as an additional emotive tool. Really nice work! IMPROVEMENTS: Your opening title card is misleading. The majority of this piece is about the individual journeys of each player to the NFL and the highlights of their careers. Only the last minute deals with life after the NFL and we never find out what each of them ended up doing post career. Honestly that would have been a more compelling story to me - especially since each of them talked about how hard post career can be. Why? How did they struggle? What did they have to overcome? What are they doing now? Those are fascinating questions for people to learn about and it humanizes these larger than life athletes who reached the absolute pinacle. Overall, the story needed more focus and more of a throughline overall. Because your broll was limited to game footage, your best bet would be to introduce each player with a title card of their name, position and career duration. I realize you have that in a lower third, but having that as title cards coupled with perhaps a a/v broll highlight of one of their major plays would help break up the talking heads and give a more organized structure to the piece.
- 2/24 3:01 pm - STORY: Pretty amazing that you had access to these guys. With any documentary, we have to ask these questions: What is the point of this documentary? Why is this topic or subject engaging? If you did a good job on your documentary, it will be engaging to anyone. I’m not a sports fan, but I love human stories. So, if you made a good documentary about these 3 sports legends, I should be locked in on their stories. PRODUCTION: great interviews and b-roll. Camera, lighting, and audio were all pretty consistent.
Judge 1
Positives: Loved that the interviewees gave anecdotes about their experiences in their respective Super Bowls. Good balance of b-roll and interviews.
Improvements: I feel like the video lacked some foundational exposition. Some of the interviews didn't flow well together.
Judge 2
Positives: Really liked that you had them get real about the pain of the end of their career but ended the video on a note of hope. The interviews looked great. Interesting composition on Rod's. Great lighting on Quintin.
Improvements: Lighting on Jim could have been brighter or increased exposure in post. The audio levels weren't consistent. Voices went up and down a bit. Background music wasn't consistently there or not there.
Judge 3
Positives: Great job finding all these guys to participate in your film! Really well produced film. The amount of coordination work you put in is apparent with tracking all these guys down to tell their stories and finding all the archive footage. Good work finding guys of different generations too. Great directing work. I really like when you asked them about what life was like after the NFL, people don't talk about this very much so it was great you gave some air time to a story/experience not many people think about.
Improvements: The sound on a couple of your interviews is a tad rough, one guy is in a very echoy space that distracted me at times. The film had kind of an abrupt ending. I like his quote that you ended with and that the film ended on an upswing, but I think in the edit if you added a bit of space for the film to fade out, maybe a piece of broll that could sum it up with the music fading out.
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