MANCHESTER, NH — Big Brick Productions (https://bigbrickproductions.com) recently created a package of social media content Red Bull starring NBA All-Star Anthony Davis and featuring a prank orchestrated by NBA legend Karl “The Mailman” Malone. In the pranks video, which runs just under five minutes, Malone takes on the role of a maintenance man at a basketball arena, where Davis is shooting an interview. As the shoot progresses, Malone is constantly inturrupting things as he goes about his janitorial duties. In the end, he reveals himself to Davis to many laughs.
The project represents a continuing collaboration between director/EP Matt Doyle and senior editor/technical director Josh Drake
“Josh and I have been working together for nearly 15 years now,” says Doyle. “We initially teamed up at ESPN, where we worked on a variety of projects, from Sunday NFL Countdown to Kenny Mayne’s Wider World of Sports. And, we stuck together when we moved on from ESPN to start up Big Brick Productions as a new shop. Needless to say, we spend a lot of time together. Too much time probably. But, it works. We’re in constant communication from pre- to post production, and we eat a lot of snacks together.”
The Red Bull project starring Davis was right up their alley.
“We come from a sports background, so this was a bit of a sweet spot for us,” Doyle continues. “The project included a bunch of different videos that were deployed via a variety of different channels. Our favorite part was probably getting basketball Hall of Famer Karl Malone to prank Anthony Davis in the middle of our shoot.”
The Davis video was shot using three Red cameras: the Helium 8K, Epic Weapon 8K and Scarlet-W on a Freefly Mōvi Pro rig. Five GoPro Hero 5 Black cameras were also used throughout the shoot, along with one iPhone X.
“We shot our main cams between 4 and 8K depending on the scene we were capturing,” notes Doyle. “We had two primary cameras capturing our staged setups, with our Mōvi op Tom floating around, catching various footage with Karl to fill in the actual prank.”
The crew shot Davis for approximately five hours in order to create several pieces of social content, all the while setting up the prank with Malone.
Editor Drake was presented with 2.4TBs of footage at the end of the one-day shoot.
“We had tons of stuff to sift through because again, we were kind of pulling off two shoots at the same time,” notes Doyle. “We had our various pieces of social content with AD, in addition to the main focus of the shoot being the Malone prank.”
Project was edited in Big Brick Productions’ Adobe Creative suite, primarily using Premiere Pro and After Effects. The team had about one week between wrapping the shoot and the first cut.
“With rounds of review and revisions, [I] believe the entire prank got turned around in approximately three weeks,” recalls Doyle.