This past weekend, All Star Video Sports was able to be present and help our parent company (DHTV Digital) in the production of their new documentary film, “Town Teams: Bigger than Baseball”, to debut next Spring. This was a great experience for us, as we were able to help coordinate how the athletes looked and played during that specific time period (1900-1930), and we were also able to use some of our video equipment to capture interesting and entertaining scenes for the film.

fansFrom Rossville, KS –

pic 1From 6:30AM-6:30PM this past Sunday, everyone was locked in. 10 production crew members, 18 uniformed players, 12 Model T’s and Model A’s, about 50 fans, and the oldest wood grandstand in the state of Kansas were just a few things involved in the production of this documentary on Kansas baseball teams from the early 1900s.

All Star’s main focus was to help everything move smoothly throughout the day, and to provide an additional source of video through the use of ASVS’s SportCam Game Action System.

In addition to shooting video of players hitting, pitching and fielding, we were able to record two things that do not normally happen on the baseball field: a scary and suspenseful broken bat play and an all out brawl between the two baseball teams.

Surprisingly, the first rare event of the shoot was not choreographed. What started out as an ordinary pitch coming into the batter’s box ended up being a 10 second period of stunned disbelief by everyone in the stadium. Contact was made between the bat and the ball, and a strange wooden clanking sound followed, as the barrel of the bat hurled itself towards the pitcher. The barrel went to the pitcher with enough velocity that evasion was necessary, but proved to be futile. What remained of the bat bounced off of the pitcher’s forearm, and flew broken bat color stillin the air to land a few feet away from the mound. The production crew, players, and fans all stood in amazement and waited to see if the pitcher would be ok. Although the bat did pierce the pitcher’s skin, he proved to be just fine, and an unexpected dramatic scene for the documentary was captured.

brawlThe second event that was captured was an all out fight between the two teams that were being portrayed in the documentary. All Star was able to help coordinate how this scene would really look in that situation. After a tough slide into second base and a push and a shove by the runner, the fight was on. After a few seconds of tussling between the shortstop and the base-runner, the rest of each baseball team came out in a choreographed fight for dominance. It was a fun and exciting scene to capture.

broken bat color still 2With All Star’s expertise in capturing high quality sports video of athletes, we were able to have an active part in the production of this documentary with our knowledge of how sports and video interact. For more information on the documentary or pictures and video on the film, please visit the film’s facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/TownTeamsBaseball?fref=ts .