Monon Bell Classic

This audio slideshow story is copyrighted by the National Collegiate Press Association and is used here by permission.

Monon Bell Classic: behind the scenes

By: Denis J. Jiménez

During my one-year internship at the NCAA, which was the first of its kind, I was part of the newly structured Digital Communications department. The main goal was to increase traffic through ncaa.org. Unlike ncaa.com, which is managed by Turner Sports and CBS, ncaa.org focuses only on student-athletes and their stories. The .org site also focuses on the administrative and other facets of the NCAA outside of sporting events – anything from various awareness campaigns, to the NCAA convention, to the organization of tournaments like the Final Four. This very narrow focus makes creating compelling multimedia stories very challenging. When I first pitched this project, it wasn’t as well received as I would have hoped. The question raised was how to do a story about a football game without dwelling too much of what happened in the field. I decided to focus on the history of the rivalry and the game.

I covered the 117^th edition of the Monon Bell Classic. It took me a while to visualize a plan. I decided to focus on three things: the fans, the players, and the bell. Since I’ve never attended any classic before, there wasn’t a whole lot of preparation I could do. From the onset, however, I wanted to do sound and photos. I planned to let photography lead whatever sound I was to record. This seemed to be the best way of building the story since photography would create a simple chronological layout of the day. I planned to record no more than ten minutes at a time. I would shoot for fifteen minutes or so and then record for ten. That way the sound would also have a chronological sequence that would streamline editing.

For this particular edition, the game was held in Crawfordsville, Ind. I studied the layout before I went and, when I got there, I made sure the Wabash Sports Information Director knew what I wanted to do. I shot in the locker rooms for an hour before the game and then just made counter-clockwise laps around the field – counter-clockwise because, for whatever reason, people tend go around the field clockwise. I also made sure I would be on the side of whoever was defending at any particular point. Defeat makes great drama.

Equipment-wise, I had a Canon 1D with a 70-200mm, a 5D Mark II with a Tamron 19-35mm, and 7D with a 50mm f/1.4. I carried an Olympus LS-10 with a Seenheiser mic and a Zoom H4N. I planned on setting the LS-10 somewhere on the sidelines capturing nat-sound. When I got there, however, there were at least 3,000 people there. No sideline mic. I also quickly realized that, unlike my plan, sound was going to drive production because of one factor: the damn bell. The bell is going off almost continually. And since you never know when someone is going to score, I had to record almost continually for the whole game. I taped the shotgun mic to one of the shoulder straps of my Think Tank shoulder harness and left the LS-10 in one of my Think Tank multimedia pouches – think of the gun on a Predator’s shoulder and you’ll get the idea. Since it was raining, I was worried about the noise cause by rain hitting the plastic cover on the mic. It turned out that, while you could hear drops, they were all almost on the same frequency. I had no problem editing them out using Soundbooth. I would only use my H4N when I need it specific audio. For example, at 2:16 some dude is blowing on a horn. Since I framed him from the left, I put his audio on the right channel. That way your brain doesn’t get freaked out.

Since I had the LS-10 recording full-time, I just focused on photos for most of the time. The mic was facing the direction I was shooting. Editing, thus, was relatively simple. There were no interviews or explanations of what was happening by anyone. I did it this way because it makes you feel you were there. If you go to a football game, there isn’t anyone narrating what’s happening.

By the time I left, I was soaked. But I knew exactly what the project was going to look like. The hardest decision was the length. I don’t like Soundslide projects to go past four or five minutes. I figure that if I get bored after four minutes, then most people will probably get bored too. I got lucky that it rained and was overcast. Editing photos was the easiest, and thus the first, thing I edited. Most of my time editing was spent listening and cutting audio. After I had my cuts, I created a master timeline in Soundbooth with 3 layers. The first was just nat-sound of cheers. I would alternate channels with the other two layers. Since people turn their heads constantly, doing it like this further reinforces the illusion you’re there; turning to the right and hearing less on your left ear and viceversa.

One of the things I learned doing this is that projects that might be hard to visualize at the planning stages, end up being really good. For whatever reason, struggling to create a storyboard in the planning process prepares your brain to look and hear things that you wouldn’t have otherwise seen or heard.