How our athletes prepared the story for the TV channel

This summer, one of Ukraine’s top TV channels aired a feature about our teams’ performance at the World Beach Ultimate Championship:

In my opinion, the story behind this feature is both interesting and unique. Few people know, but all the video material shown in the feature was filmed in France by the athletes themselves, along with the support team that accompanied them at the tournament.

It all started with a Facebook comment from Alena Zavora:

I called Alena, and we began brainstorming how we could organize a story for Inter TV on our own. At that point, everything seemed too risky and adventurous. The tournament was just a few days away. Everyone was already busy, and now we needed to gather a team, equipment, and plan everything. We began calling people who could potentially handle the technical side of the project in France. To my surprise, everyone we contacted quickly responded with something like, “Cool, I’m in.” The team of 12 people was assembled within a couple of hours. The problem was that only Alena Zavora had experience filming such reports for TV, as she works as a correspondent, and Nikita Hubar had some experience as a cameraman. The rest had to learn on the go.

Despite everything being seemingly planned, when we arrived in France, things quickly got complicated. There were a lot of technical problems. The main issue was communication. We were without the internet for several days. The travel SIM cards we brought for communication didn’t connect. As a result, most issues had to be resolved in person. We had to find each other at the tournament fields, which stretched across a 1.5 km beach.

Still, everyone worked together to keep the project moving. Nikita Hubar, in between his games, ran around the fields with a camera, filming interviews and B-roll. Alena, who had to look after her young child, would dash between fields during breaks, take interviews, write texts for Inter, and upload material. I ran around the beach right after my games, gathering the right people. Oksana Kravets sat in the heat filming the games. Roma Chernyshov and Dima Babich worked late into the night, editing photos and writing texts.

We were also helped by friends from WFDF. Thanks to Patrick van der Valk, Tim Rockwood, and Robert McLeod, we had beautiful slow-motion footage shot with professional equipment at the championship. You can see these shots in the final feature.

In the end, after a lot of effort, we managed to gather the necessary game footage, shoot the syncs, prepare texts, and upload all the material for Inter’s editorial team. The very next morning, everything was edited, and the feature was aired to a massive audience:http://inter.ua/ru/video/episode/faces_utro/2017/06/23/frisby

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to this work: Alena Zavora, Nikita Hubar, Oksana Kravets, Dima Babich, Roma Chernyshov, Markiyan Kuzmovych, Yulia Petrova, Lera Strelchina, Sergey Bondarenko, Tanya Kolombet, Sasha Stakhovsky, Anya Slenzak, and the dedicated editorial team at Inter: Yegor Vysotsky, Andrey Chernyshkov.

In the photo: the editorial team at Inter who worked on the story. The disk was signed and handed over by the team.

I’ve always liked that Ultimate Frisbee attracts people with a proactive mindset. People who, instead of waiting or demanding from others, take the initiative and do it themselves. The state doesn’t provide funding? No problem! We’ll earn it ourselves and go to the tournaments. There aren’t enough stories about our sport on TV? No worries. We’ll film everything and send it. No one owes us anything. We’re responsible for everything ourselves.