Toyota High School Football Videos Utilize Panasonic P2 Cameras

This year, during NBC Sunday Night
Football telecasts, Toyota is profiling high school football teams in
America in a program that is being shot with Panasonic AJ-HPX2000 P2 HD
camcorders. Over the course of the season, The Line of Scrimmage will
travel in a Toyota Tundra truck to visit eight different schools from
around the country.

Forty-five second documentary shorts are airing each
week during the NBC Sunday Night Football Halftime Show. Each of the
eight teams is featured for two successive broadcasts, the first
episode introducing viewers to the team and their community, the second
covering team practices and their Friday night game.

Toyota
created The Line of Scrimmage to celebrate high school football, the
fans and the local communities. The Line of Scrimmage is airing in HD,
and the videos can be found on YouTube and MySpace, and at
www.toyota.com/lineofscrimmage. The Line of Scrimmage campaign is in
its third year and is produced by Saatchi & Saatchi LA, using
production company Untitled.

Previous seasons of The
Line of Scrimmage were shot with Panasonic’s AG-HVX200 P2 HD handheld
camcorder, and while the Saatchi LA team, headed by producer Amanda
Miller, was committed to a tapeless workflow, she and director Matt
Ogens wanted to increase the campaign’s production values. The Director
of Photography Anthony Hardwick was well acquainted with Panasonic HD
cinema cameras and wanted to work with a larger, shoulder-mounted
camera with interchangeable lenses.

The production
team rented two HPX2000s from Abel Cine LA. Hardwick equipped each
camera with a Canon 11 x 4.7 ENG HD wide zoom lens and Canon 21 x 7.5
ENG HD long lens. Hardwick is shooting both in 720/24pN and 720/60p
DVCPRO HD and each camera is outfitted with five 16GB P2 cards. On each
five-slot camera, he assigns three slots to 24pN shooting and two to
60p to facilitate media management. While he has a media manager on
location to offload and back up duplicate files to 120GB hard drives,
Hardwick said that the only occasions the production comes close to
filling up the five cards per camera is on the game days, when he and
his crew shoot a full game in addition to other interviews and b-roll.

The
typical shooting schedule includes a series of interviews with local
townspeople that are shot with one camera, followed by team meetings,
practices and games shot with the two HPX2000s. The Line of Scrimmage
is being edited in Final Cut Pro 6 at Beast Editorial in Santa Monica,
CA.

“In general, I’m using the HPX2000’s standard HD
curve with a .45 slope, which is punchier and more contrasty than the
film-like gamma curve I’ve used in the past, and works well to preserve
detail in the shadows,” says Hardwick. “We typically shoot wide open at
1/250th shutter in 24pN, and with the half shutter setting in 60p.”

“The
look of Panasonic cameras, whether tape-based or tapeless, is fairly
cohesive throughout, and it’s a color palette I’ve come to love and
appreciate working with,” added Hardwick.

“P2 production
has worked out great. The workflow is easy and the quality outstanding.
Not incidentally, working in solid-state has put us in good shape when
the production staff has to deal with the same challenges as the
football team, namely extremes of heat and cold,” says unit production
manager/line producer Jay Kelman.