How To Film Professional Athletes

Working with a professional athlete provides some exciting opportunity to help share someone’s story in a different way. Often, athletes are used to competing, training and putting in the work to become great but in today’s age of social media, that’s not enough.

Professional athletes now need to be pretty multifaceted. It’s not enough to just be a runner, a mountain biker or a rock climber - you have to be a contact creator, a social media manager, and in-person speaker. Athletes, or at least those hoping to please their sponsors, have to be willing to share their story with large groups of peoples regardless of the platform. For Ryan Petry, this is one of his strengths as a professional mountain biker. With his background in marketing and his generally creative spirit, he’s been such a joy to work with his video projects because he he’s got something to say and a fun way in mind to share it. We’ve done a few videos together now for some of his sponsors such as Canyon, Street Protection, and Pearl Izumi. This video was a bit of a passion project for him, so I stepped in to help bring the creative vision to life…

How We Made The Video

The process for creating Ryan Petry‘s “Why” video is similar to how I structure a lot of my documentary shoots. After an initial brainstorm meeting together, without any cameras present, we thought through the story we wanted to share and some of the elements of Ryan‘s personality that are driving him to be a better father, athlete and community member. After we had a rough story idea together we began to think through what visuals could help tell that story. To show his connection with his newborn son, Rowan, the scene was pretty simple - we just wanted to get shots of Ryan playing with his baby son partnered with a voice over of him talking about his new role as a dad. Since the video was meant to live on social media, we wanted to keep things short and concise so that there was an engaged audience rather than creating a longer form piece on what is driving Ryan forward as he goes into his biking season.

The Production

Video production tends to move pretty quick. When you plan out specific shots and scenes you hope to get, especially in a more documentary style, you can get through quite a bit of filming in a short amount of time. So, I allotted two full days of filming to capture the visuals and voiceover for the film.

I normally like to structure my documentary projects in three stages.
B-Roll … Interview … B-Roll

The first stage revolves around filming the subject of the film in a casual and low stress way. I often achieve this by getting them doing something they are already comfortable with. For example, making dinner, running errands, or pursuing a hobby. This tends to work really well with people that aren’t used to being on camera too often so they can get used to what it feels like having a camera on them and start understand that it may not be a whole lot different than how they live their normal life.

For a professional such as Ryan, who has his own TV show on Outside TV, I tend to skip this stage because they’re used to being on camera already so I don’t need to warm them up to feel comfortable. Since I already knew Ryan and we already talked about what we wanted his story to be I jumped right in the stage two, the interview.

The On-Camera Interview

We decided that an interview and a voiceover for this project made the most sense because there was a lot of information we wanted to provide to the viewer. We filmed at Ryan‘s house in Boulder, Colorado and we set up some lights, the audio, and the cameras for his talking head interview so he could chat about his experiences.

Here’s exactly the gear that I used to shoot his interview

Larger Lights (Used as a key light and fill light)

Small Light (Used as a hair light)

Camera

Microphone

Tripod

I have interviewed a lot of people on camera and have discovered that emphasizing some important points beforehand always makes people more comfortable. Here are the three things I say before I interview somebody…

“We can just chat like friends”

I find that communicating that this isn’t a high stakes interview really allows people to relax. Ultimately, you want the subject to feel comfortable and at ease when they’re talking and I find this can help.

The magic video editing is you can take out anytime they say “um” or if they pause to think through the answer to your question. For this reason, it’s always good to build rapport with your subject before diving into the interview because this allows you to be more authentic and personable in your interview. If you’re interviewing somebody and I’ve never met them with talk to them before it may not feel very authentic.

“I’ll just breeze through all the questions beforehand to give you idea of what we’re going to talk about”

This requires you to actually write out the questions beforehand and think through the answers they are going to provide to help guide your scenes going forward. It also helps your subject to think through their answers a bit before hand if you’re able to send them what you’re going to be talking about a day before you conduct the interview. This will help them not feel totally shocked when a question comes up later and allow them to get some idea of what’s to come.

“Once you’re done talking I’m going to be silent for a few seconds afterwards and that can be an invitation to keep talking or just make it easier for me to edit it later”

Being on camera can be a bit intimidating and when you’re talking to somebody who isn’t verbally responding can sometimes be uncomfortable. So I always try to find these little things to make them understand a bit of the process. Plus, it takes the pressure off of having to nail every response by letting them now it’s pretty laid back.

Taking Cameras into the Outdoors

This is where you take your shot list into the outdoors and go get some footage of your professional athlete in action. When you are heading to the outdoors, grab your bike, strap on your skis, make sure you have all your camera equipment and head to work.

*It’s important to remember that things may move a little bit slower than you’re used to because you’re not just biking for fun or skiing for fun.

Taking the time to pause and set up your shot may feel annoying but is important to create a visual style that is cohesive and beautiful. At the end of the day, you’re there because of the video so make sure you’re prioritizing that.

Outdoor Skills Are Super Important!

As an adventure filmmaker, I pride myself on my ability to do all ranges of outdoor sports. I’m a decent rock climber, surfer, trail runner, backpacker, skier, snowboarder and mountain biker. However, of all of the disciplines I do I find that mountain biking is not my biggest strength so it’s becoming the new discipline I’m putting more time into developing my skills. Being able to keep up, at least slightly, with the athlete you’re filming is arguably the most important aspect of this job that is overlooked.

Regardless of how much planning you do, how great your video skills are, or how competent you feel in the interview process, unless you’re able to go biking with a professional biker (or skiing with a professional skier, etc.) you won’t be able to finish the video so keep that in mind if you’re wanting to make a career out of this that your fitness, health and technical outdoor skills can often be as equally important as you’re experience behind the camera. After my day with Ryan out on the trails I was happy with what I got but realize that if we want to go farther and do bigger projects I do need to practice mountain biking with my cameras a little bit more.

The Final Video + Distribution Strategy

Once we completed the film, we actually sat on it for over a month. We didn’t release it straight away because we wanted to figure out how to make the distribution stage as beneficial as possible. As I wrote earlier in the article, professional athletes have a huge responsibility of sharing their story on social media. For this reason, we wanted to produce as much engagement as possible given the work we had put in. Although the final video here on my website is a few minutes long, we decided to cut it up scene by scene and share the video in segments to maximize the potential for engagement on different posts, Instagram stories, and photos from our session together. If you share one video on social media and gets 1000 views that’s great. However if you share six shorter form videos and each get half the amount of use as your one longer form video, you still get three times the engagement. (6 videos with 500 views vs. 1 video with 1,000 views = 3,000 views vs 1,000 views).

As a filmmaker, my job isn’t just a create video it’s also to figure out what happens to the video after you make it. A big mistake I often made in the beginning of my career was simply making a video and publishing it on YouTube without any publicity or intention on how people would find it and see the video I created. Now, with 7 years of experience releasing my films on the internet, I’ve learned that it’s important to give as much thought into the distribution process as possible to maximize the amount of people that see the work that you created.

When working with professional athletes, this becomes even more important as my job isn’t just to make them look good in the film but to help achieve success on their platforms. The better engagement they get, the more sponsorship opportunities they have, and the better chance you have of getting hired again in the future.

All in all this is a great project to make and I feel really proud of being able to share a part of Ryan’s story - the why behind what he does as a professional mountain biker - and I’m looking forward to more mountain bike related projects in the future.

Chat with Me!

Roo is a commercial/documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Boulder, Colorado but travels all around the world for his filmmaking career. He has produced films for Outside Magazine in Ireland, camera operated for Netflix in the Rocky Mountain West, photographed among indigenous communities in Peru and Ecuador, directed videos with professional climbers in Mexico and has received notable recognition in his hometown of Orcas Island in Washington State for his work telling uplifting stories in the outdoor space.

How to Film Professional Athletes