2025 Mini-Movies

Mini-Movies are the long form cinematic recaps of every win from the season. As soon as the game ends, a small team (Ben Chairnoff, Steven Howard Jr., and I) focus on gathering assets and drafting the story arc of the game.

View Mini-Movie Playlist on YouTube

Process

Once the clock hits 0:00 after a Chargers win, the Mini-Movie post production process kicks into gear. As the team hurries to wrap up equipment, Ben, Steven, and I are also planning our next steps. Often times, the first task for all of us is annotating both the TV and radio broadcasts in a spreadsheet. We'd tag notable comments that may be useful in the edit and categorize them for easier searching.

After annotations are completed by the next morning, we'd meet as a group, review the game book play-by-play, and delegate portions of the edit. This is where we call out important drives, momentum shifts, and big moments that are worth showcasing in the Mini-Movie. We often try to find a common thread throughout the game and build an arc around that thread in the edit (e.g. if the defense played particularly well, we'd be sure to emphasize sound bites from defensive players and coaches).

To supplement the game footage and broadcast calls, we would also incorporate player interviews and press conference moments throughout the season. Having those interviews ready and strungout meant that we could help drive a particular story if we were lacking natural sound from the broadcast or on the field.

After we all have servicable drafts of our assigned sections (with rough color and sometimes rough SFX), Ben would combine it all into a first assembly. Ideally, this first assembly is completed Tuesday afternoon early enough to allow for approvals before our posting deadline of Wednesday. Once that initial assembly is completed, the rest of Tuesday invovles a lot of color correcting/matching different cameras, and inserting SFX throughout as well as properly mixing voice, music, and anything else.

Once a full version is complete with any revisions requested, we watch it down one last time to catch any mistakes or export errors. Then Jadon Vaz would often come in to help cut a short-form social tease to help drive traffic from X/Twitter and Instagram to the Chargers YouTube channel.

MOGRTs

For the 2025 season, one of my main contributions was streamlining custom graphics for the Mini-Movie series. Previously, all the lower thirds, titles, and other on-screen graphics were done completely in After Effects. While example comps were already made in the After Effects project, creating a Motion Graphics Template (MOGRT) from these comps was the next step in making this process more efficient. These MOGRTs could then be imported into Premiere where anyone could quickly update the text and adjust timing of animations. This completely eliminated the time that was previously required to individually export graphics out of the After Effects project for every instance in the Mini-Movie that required it. There were still some graphics that could not be converted to MOGRTs, but those were often one-off or very specific graphics. Otherwise, the vast majority of lowers, titles, and even the divisional ranking graphics are now MOGRTs that can be adjusted without opening After Effects.

The most complex MOGRT is the score info graphic. It displays two team names, two scores, any score changes, animation timing offsets, game period, the down and distance, and a functional clock that could be static or running. Not to mention, these elements could be toggled on or off if it wasn't relevant. This required JavaScript logic with AE expressions and several carefully placed keyframes. As a result, though, the editors could have access to a compact, information-dense graphic to give the viewer context of the game without ever having to open a different software everytime there was a revision or adjustment to timing.