The NFL Films Model

Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.
January 2004

The editors at NFL Films are masters of the art of film editing and have changed the way that TV, film and video crews cover sports. To understand the significance of NFL Films and its 40-year history, it helps to view a football highlight film from before the company's inception. Inevitably, you'll see black and white photography, endless long shots, few close-ups, run-on Walter Winchell-style narration, college band "rah-rah" music and plays presented from start to finish, instead of just their focal points. These highlight films typically revealed little or none of the personalities of the colorful and idiosyncratic men who played in the NFL. NFL Films changed all that with advanced film editing techniques and innovative approaches to telling the story behind the scoreboard.

If the sports documentaries, team yearbook videos, highlight reels or even the home movies of the annual family touch football game that you produce are more like the old model, a close study of the details of the NFL Films editing technique may pay very large dividends.

In 1962, Ed Sabol, a 45-year-old clothing salesman and budding filmmaker, won a bid to shoot the highlight film of the league's championship game. Pete Rozelle, the NFL's commissioner, so loved the finished product, that he eventually appointed Sabol as the NFL's official documentarian.

Ed, his son Steve and their editor-in-chief Bob Ryan (among others) introduced numerous techniques to the art of sports documentary filmmaking. This includes the use of very long and very wide lenses; the use of wireless microphones on coaches and players; cutting to the apex of each play and super slow motion. Indeed their style of film editing uses slow motion of a sort is used on virtually every play, since NFL Films shoots all non-synched sound coverage at 32 frames per second.

The icing on the cake was their distinctive use of narration, beginning with "the voice of God," John Facenda, a Philadelphia television news anchorman who was the mythic voice of the NFL until his death in 1984. Early on, the NFL Films' producers and film editors made a conscious choice to use less narration, which made Facenda's style even more important and dramatic. Steve Sabol, now the president of NFL Films, says, "I felt that in order to make our films memorable and different, the script was going to be decreased, which meant that the voice that was used to read the script would be even more important."

As highlighted in their Inside The Vault series on ESPN, it took a while for NFL Films to put all these techniques together. Eventually, in 1965, they all meshed in a documentary titled They Call It Pro Football. Pete Rozelle screened the film, and then pulled out a piece of paper with the Neilson television ratings, which indicated that baseball was number one, college football was number two and the NFL was number three. "And Pete said, 'for the NFL to prosper, it has to succeed on television. And in order for the NFL to succeed on television, it needs a mystique. It needs a certain style. It needs an image. And the film that I just saw will help us create that image'", Sabol recollects. "And that was also as close to a mission statement as we ever got."

Generally, NFL Films only uses three cameras on a regular season game, which Sabol describes as the tree, the mole and the weasel. "A tree is the top camera," he explains. "He's on a tripod rooted into a position on the 50 yard line in the press box and he doesn't move. A mole is a handheld, mobile, ground cameraman, with a 12 to 240mm lens and he moves all around the field and gives you the eyeball-to-eyeball perspective. A weasel is the cameraman who pops up in unexpected places, to get you the telling storytelling shot the bench, the crowd, all the details."

And it's those details that were among the first standout elements of NFL Films. "I was an art major in college, and Paul Cézanne once said that 'All art is selected detail'. And I felt that the one thing missing in sports films were the details." So, when Sabol began shooting for NFL Films, he was the weasel. "I filmed the first fifteen Super Bowls and never saw a play. But I could tell you what kind of hat Tom Landry was wearing, how Vince Lombardi was standing in the fourth quarter, if Bob Lilly had a cut on the bridge of his nose. Those were the things that I remember in the Super Bowl."

And it's those little things that everyone remembers about each Super Bowl, largely thanks to NFL Films, whose highlight films are rerun endlessly on ESPN during playoff season.

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