Anyone who has ever watched baseball or looked at the MLB schedule from year to year knows that it is a huge daunting thing. 32 teams playing 162 games a piece from early April until Early October, someone has to schedule them. This story is about Holly and Henry Stephenson who from the early 1980s to 2004 scheduled the MLB season each and every year.
What I loved about this piece is that is that it is not one that relies on any real type of action to move the story along. At the beginning of the story I loved the juxtaposition of the baseball radio calls over an empty stadium that then seemingly matches up with the amateur level game that the Stephenson’s were watching. Throughout the video we have these medium shots of the couple at their work deck pouring over the paper of the schedules that they used to make. What I really enjoyed however was the use of the outdoor and indoor interviews with the Stephenson’s. The use of the natural light made the interview really feel more alive and helped connect it with the game of baseball, which should always be played outside.
This is an interesting story, although I found the length to be somewhat off. I feel it could have worked better if it had either been cut down to 5-6 minutes, or stretched out to 20-25. It seems there’s a bigger story lying underneath about what’s lost by taking out the human element of the scheduling process, and I would have liked to have seen that expanded on. In contrast, I feel a more succinct piece could have been composed eleimianting that big story all together and just focusing on the “mom and pop” creation story.
Either way, I do have to agree that the lighting is spectacular in this piece. Not only is it a great use of natural lighting, but it’s also a wonderful display of keeping a common tone throughout the project. Be it inside, in a shaded backyard, or on a sunny ball field, the level of lighting seems to flow throughout the piece. I wonder how much of this was done in post-production color matching.