Mat Kanan, Director of Media Relations for Western Michigan Athletics and a new member of the CoSIDA New Media/Technology Committee, wrote the following on WMU's football video web series "Inside the Lines." He gives a step-by-step approach on setting up the interviews and videos, and discusses reaction to the series from two perspectives - the fan and the media viewpoint.
You can follow Mat via Twitter (
@kananmj) and view the series on
WMU's athletics website and
YouTube channel. The official WMU athletics website is
www.wmubroncos.com.
Spring time in college football is a time of evaluation of the student-athletes returning for the upcoming season and assessing the previous year’s successes and failures. In media relations, the spring is yet another time where we can engage with our fans and alumni by providing unique content on our football program. At
Western Michigan, we decided to use this past spring season to give people a look inside the spring practice season with a video series titled “Inside the Lines.”
The genesis of the series came from football head coach Bill Cubit when he asked if I thought it would be a good idea to put a microphone on a coach during a practice. I asked if I could take that a step further.
Scheduling and shooting the videos
The goal of the video series was to highlight every coach on staff as well as two student-athletes from the offensive and defensive side of the ball. In order to do so correctly, we laid out a schedule that corresponded with each of the 15 spring practices, as well as the annual spring game, and matched a practice with a coach of student-athlete.
We took two days to conduct sit-down interviews with each person with the subject matter focusing on the pros/cons of spring practice, what role the game of football has played in each person’s life and balancing family with the game they have chosen. I decided to save our head coach Bill Cubit’s webisode for the spring game, putting a microphone on him for the first half.
Once the interviews were complete, the task of getting the raw sound of practice was at hand. When focusing on the coaches, it proved best to mic them during individual periods as well as the team stretch portion of practice. That is when fans would get the best view of the interaction of each coach with his respective positional unit. When focusing on the student-athletes, we highlighted the team periods because getting sound of the most competitive times of practice proved to be the most entertaining. Each person wore a small microphone clipped to their jersey or shirt with a battery pack clipped to their shoulder pads or put in their shorts pocket. The biggest risk was the chance our microphone getting crushed during a tackle, but luckily we only lost a couple of shirt clips.
We asked our video crew to shoot the mic’d up portion of the practice so that the video corresponded with the sound we were getting. We shot approximately 45 minutes of practice in order to create 8-10 minute webisodes.
Editing
The editing of each webisode really made the series. Our student video crew did a great job of marrying the footage, both audio and video, of practice with the sit down interview of each subject. We packaged with a title screen and closed each webisode with our department tagline (The Power of Gold), which also has a presence on Twitter with the hash tag of the same name (
#ThePowerofGold).
Launching the online series for two audiences (fans and the media)
The series was launched with an announcement release on our web site, showing the list of people to be highlighted and the corresponding date that person’s video would be unveiled. The goal was to release each video two days after it was shot, allowing us to have a new video available the day of the next practice session.
We obviously wanted to drive people to our official web site (
www.wmubroncos.com) but we also wanted to utilize our social media platforms to promote this series. All of the videos were uploaded to our YouTube channel (
www.youtube.com/wmuathletics) for the mere fact that each webisode would have its own unique url that could be easily sent out through Twitter accounts
@kananmj and
@wmubroncofans, as well as through our official Facebook fan page (
www.facebook.com/wmubroncofans).
In all, the series accounted for 8,307 views on our YouTube channel and 18,697 views on our official web site.
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
Official Web Site
The original audience for this series was our fans, but we are PR practitioners so we also wanted to also garner some attention for our program. In order to do so I sent a brief email to my football media list when each video was unveiled with the YouTube link, as well as tweeted directly to national outlets such as ESPN and Football Scoop. I also sent the links to our coaches and encouraged them to display on their respective Facebook and Twitter accounts.
The response was magnificent. After the series was complete I spoke with our coaching staff and the web series was received very well when they were on the recruiting trail which was an added bonus, plus it’s always nice when your coaches see tangible effects from your office’s efforts.
The biggest response came from Football Scoop (
www.footballscoop.com) as they periodically would embed a webisode from our YouTube channel, boosting our views. With each video launch, the people at Football Scoop would not only post the video but also provide their own comments on the content of the video, the message and give our office a nice shout out for the work being done.
FootballScoop.com
Final Thoughts & Advice to CoSIDA Members
Looking back on the creation of the “Inside the Lines” video series, I feel the success lies within the fact that all of the prep work, interviews, video shoot sessions and editing was able to be handled by myself and two video students without interfering with my day-to-day duties of running the WMU athletic media relations office. It also has sparked the interest of our other sport programs as we plan to create similar web series during the upcoming year.
If I had to provide advice to anyone looking to take on a similar project, I would say the key is to plan everything out ahead of time as you need to work with multiple parties’ schedules as well as come up compelling subject matter for the sit down interview portion of the webisodes.
It was a great project. It showcased an aspect of our football program that fans aren’t privy to on a daily basis and, most importantly, it provided unique and original content for our fans.
If you would like to view any or all of the webisodes in the “Inside the Lines” series click here. Follow me on Twitter
@kananmj, our head coach
@CoachCubit and our department
@wmubroncofans and via our hashtag
#ThePowerofGold.