To ensure a safe and smooth transition into the next century, people are stocking up on everything from canned food and flashlights to footage. Wait a minute, footage? Yes, footage.
Bicoastal/international Energy Film Library isn’t preparing for major computer crashes and natural disasters. Instead, they’ve been getting ready for the mad rush of requests for Y2K-related footage.
Hours of footage of the people, places and events of
the past century are stocked and ready to go in the Library’s Millennium Collection. There’s even a realistic shot created to depict New Year’s Eve 2000 in Times Square.
But Energy’s preparation for the coming rush of stock footage requests goes beyond the expected New Year’s Eve and turn-of-the-century-related campaigns. Energy, along with bicoastal/international AllSport, a sister company in the Getty Images Group, based in London, has also been gearing up for the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. While AllSport shot the stills, Energy enlisted one of its founders, director Louis Schwartzberg and his company Blacklight Films, based in Studio City, Calif., to shoot the extensive body of sports footage on 35mm film. Depicting such Olympic-related themes as strength, determination, grace, winning and teamwork, the footage focuses on the summer games, mainly swimming, gymnastics, track and field and, the latest Olympic sport, baseball.
"Throughout the world, there is a huge and ever-growing demand for authentic, beautifully shot sports footage, particularly with the Olympics coming up," says Jan Ross, CEO of Energy Film Library. "We saw a need in the marketplace for feature-quality footage of real competition, shot creatively and with the kind of intensity you simply can’t get from [actual] sports footage shot in the heat of the game."
To capture the authenticity of the sports, real athletes were shot in staged moments of competition. "The control enables us to get angles, concepts and lighting we can’t get at actual meets," Schwartzberg says. "You can’t go underwater when swimmers are jumping into the pool, you can’t rim-light a gymnast to form and shape the poetry of her motion and you can’t put a camera under the chin of a runner as he’s leaving the starting post at an actual event."
Ross says they used real athletes instead of actors to make the footage look and feel as authentic as possible. "It’s hard to get the same feeling from actors trying to be athletes," she says. "Plus these athletes really did give it their all as if there was a medal to win in the end."
To help heighten the intense sensations of winning and defeat, Schwartzberg says they actually handed out medals and flowers on the set and had the athletes wave and acknowledge the crowd’s reaction. "It was fun to get the athletes hyped up and psyched," he says. "There was a lot of yelling, screaming and encouragement."
Play Ball!
A good example of this camaraderie comes from the baseball shoot. As the sun was peaking through the bleachers, illuminating the pitcher’s mound, Schwartzberg staged the rush of victory after the last pitch of the game. "We had the players running out to the pitcher’s mound and put the pitcher up on their shoulders. We had to hustle and do it again and again so we wouldn’t lose the shaft of light on the pitcher’s mound. There was a lot of screaming and yelling which heightened the overall intensity of the scene."
That intensity was also felt on the gymnastics shoot. Shooting dismounts, Schwartzberg says he wanted to capture the elation of nailing a routine. "Their arms go up, the crowd roars and the gymnast has a beaming smile on her face as she turns to the judges and the crowd. We shot this just as if it were a real event, only the screaming and yelling was coming from behind the camera," he says.
To evoke the intense emotions captured in the footage, Schwartzberg says he shot the events with the same techniques used on full-scale commercial productions. "We did a lot of extreme slow-motion, we used HMI lights, shallow depth of field, dolly shots and wide-angle lenses," he says. "We also did a lot of shooting in black and white. It adds a certain edge to the footage."
Staging events also allowed Energy to control copyrighting and licensing issues. "The advantage to this footage is that it’s fully released," says Ross. "You don’t have to deal with the International and American Olympic Committees. The footage is authentic in its look and feel without the added bureaucracy of having to get permission from the Olympic Committee."
In the three months or so that the footage has been integrated into and distributed throughout the library’s database, Energy has received several licenses. To name a few, Ross says that Nivea Skin Cream has used some of the woman’s swimming footage, Atlantic Gas has used some baseball shots, Media One has licensed baseball and swimming footage for a Stockton, Calif. cable company, and Avid Technology has purchased shots from all of the sports. "We’ve also had licenses from lesser-known corporations and smaller productions as well," she says.
To find a specific theme, time frame or image in the hours of footage, Ross says the collection is categorized in extreme detail in Energy’s database. "Our state-of-art database allows a client to search for an image by any number of criteria, including type of sport, concept of shot [competition, teamwork, success], even the length of the shot," she says. "Virtually any significant parameter a client needs to make an intelligent choice is recorded in our database."
New setups, styles, lenses and concepts are just a few of the reasons Ross cites as Energy’s reasons to shoot this new collection. Another reason for the collection, Schwartzberg says, is that most Olympic footage is shot on video and lacks the heightened emotion and quality production value that Energy’s clients want and need for their campaigns.
"Our goal was to have the newest, broadest, most beautifully shot 35mm collection of sports imagery available, with a special emphasis on the Olympics," Ross says. "Our clients are hungering for great footage they can use in their Olympics-themed projects, so we shot particular events that would be relevant to their needs."
To complement the Y2K Olympic footage, Ross says Energy also has an Australia 2000 collection, which is full of establishing shots and aerials of the land down under. "Between the Champion Collection, Australia 2000, and the Millennium Collection, we have a wide range of imagery for the coming century."
