Highlight Reels & Sports Broadcasting

Video Transcript

"I'm Jamal Spencer for Expert Village, here at ABC 3 here in Lansing, and we're going to talk about how to be a successful sports broadcaster. This clip is all about highlights. The most important thing to do when you're doing a highlight is if possible, you want to view the highlight ahead of time. Sometimes, your script might be shorter than the actual video of the highlight and then you have to improvise. You can always tell when an anchor is improvising because he'll throw something crazy in there like, "Yeah, he was red hot. He hit so many 3's." And they're just waiting for the highlight to catch up to them. So, you want to make sure that the script is either as long as the highlight and if it's shorter you know where to improv at. You also want to know who does what so you know how to pronounce names. You don't want to say Kobe is doing this, but in that shot, Derek Fisher has the ball. So you want to know what's going on. But the best thing about it is, how much time do you have? If you have a minute and thirty like some stations do, you can be a little more detailed. Chauncey hit the three. He hit three of six threes on a night he finished with twenty seven points. But if you've got to do a quick fifty or thirty second video, you've got to fly through it. Chauncey hits the three and then moving onto Rip, next highlight, now Rip coming down the court, he hits the lay up. Coming down, the Lakers do this. You've got to learn how to move. You've got to be quick. You've got to be able to think quick and read just as quickly. You have to follow the teleprompter but still watch the video so you'll know where you are. It's very tricky to go from prompter to video, back and forth. But it's something that you learn with repetition. So when you're doing a VO or highlight, you want to make sure that you can do it quickly, clearly, try not to mess up names, but we're all human, it happens. I did one once where Vladimir Radmonovich became Vladamir Radovich, you know, radish. Reddish. Lettuce. You mess up. It happens. But when you do a VO, you want to learn to go through it quickly, poised, get the names right, you know where you have to ad lib at, you want to be comfortable enough that you can ad lib it. If it?s a sport you know nothing about, how are you going to ad lib on it? But, if you have some familiar knowledge on it, then it's very easy to say, "Hey, this is what this guy did last year, or back in college, he was the man, look at him now." So, when you're doing a highlight, remember be a little bit knowledge of your subject, go with the script, know when to ad lib, have fun doing it, be energetic, make the audience feel like they are watching the whole game, not just the best parts."