Final Doc - Nationals

In this short five minute expository and participatory documentary made by Evan Arthur and Steven Cromartie, we follow the men and women’s App State Club Volleyball teams on their trip to the national tournament in Arizona. Hundreds of teams from across the country come together to compete in the tournament that marks the end of the year’s season. This documentary was shot by Steven Cromartie, a member of the men’s volleyball team, and follows the team as they travel to and play in the tournament. For many of the App State players, including Steven, this will be their final tournament and final time playing volleyball at a college level. For this documentary we aimed not just to document the events of the tournament but to make a piece that would be a reflection on the time and energy the players have spent on their sport throughout their time in college. The participatory element of the documentary comes primarily from clips with mic'd up players. While shooting the game footage, lavalier microphones were given to coaches or members of the team to get clear audio of them cheering on their teammates. The input from teammates being the primary part of the audio not only gives a look into the natural reactions of the team but makes the footage feel more suspenseful and each hit important. Footage is all handheld around chest to eye level to maintain the grounded feeling of the documentary. Throughout the weekend team members were also interviewed to get their perspective during the tournament. The interview and game clips with player audio help to keep the documentary feel grounded and like the viewer is there for the tournament with them. The expository element of the documentary comes from Steven’s voiceover. The voiceover is there to add context to the relatively scattered footage, and help inform the audience on things that the interview clips do not cover. In the editing, we went through and tried to find the most valuable clips to the story with the microphones, and b roll that was good quality and showed the players performing at their best. An issue arose in editing that we had so much footage to work with we had to spend a lot of time working on finding the story within the footage. Each day at the tournament was over twelve hours and we had great difficulty going through the footage, finding the good clips, and cutting hours of footage down to a three to five minute format. We compiled the footage in a somewhat linear way, following the team as they travel, practice, play, and travel home.  Due to the time constraints of the video we tried to keep game clips under ten seconds and interview clips in the thirty second range. With this pacing it’s difficult to keep up with exactly what is happening in each game, so we made sure to keep the interview clips frequent and with L cuts to overlap it with the interview footage.