Highlight Reel

New York Xtreme: The Lion

This was a celebration of one of Bunkerkings’ sponsored professional paintball teams as well as an opportunity to use a movie quote to reinforce the company slogan “We Kill”.

The short sequence was released as a 90-degree-rotated reel on Instagram. It begins by applying desaturated event footage I recorded of New York Xtreme to a black and white archive photo (the video inside the lens). The video is brought center stage with a slick transition to a set of gameplay snippets.

It includes audio of Christopher Walken’s “The Lion” speech from the movie Poolhall Junkies with added dramatic music over random team highlights periodically interlaced with the progressing slow-motion story sequence: a player working his way up the field in a series of gun battles. The clips of the story sequence are indicated by their signature washed-out color grade to visually separate them from the team highlight clips.

Between random clips, the slow-motion story progresses. Coming full circle at the end with a flashback to where the incident started, the video ends exactly as it began, inviting a re-watch.

This is the type of video I make a mental note to do when I find myself behind the camera capturing one player’s spectacular game. Life imitates art, and another simple throwaway reel might not do justice to a moment in time which was essentially an epic film-worthy happening that everyone forgot about because it ended as quickly as it began.