Interview: "Roller Warriors" Producer Charlie Parker

Parker:  Another producer and I wanted to produce our own show, and we were brainstorming ideas back and forth, but we didn't really come up with anything we thought was good enough to pitch to our managers. Finally, I stumbled across the Kansas City Roller Warriors' website. It was not only sports, which was perfect for the station, but it was sports from a completely different point of view. 

Normally, in professional sports, they play football their entire lives. They play football in the NFL and their life revolves around football and there's nothing else. But with roller derby, they didn't start playing until they were 30 or 26, and they do other things - full time jobs...there's just so much more story to tell, and more interesting people. Looking around the website and seeing all their different personalities from their bios...

Parker:  Originally I thought the girls were going to be much more crude, and they were much nicer and more down to earth and fun. I mean, really, they are the nicest people I've ever met. It's pretty much the same concept we went in wanting to produce, I think we just expected a little more cussing?

Parker:  I think it stayed on target for the most part. There's a lot of things we thought about exploring that we couldn't do. I think we thought it was going to take a lot less time than it ended up taking. A lot of the things we thought we were going to do that we didn't were because we didn't have enough time to keep shooting. There's so many different girls, and in their lives- so many different aspects, not even including the sports aspect of it.

Parker:  We watched a bunch of YouTube clips, and it was kind of weird, because during research we stumbled on the Hell On Wheels website (link), and that was at the point where it wasn't on dvd yet, so we couldn't watch the whole thing. Then two weeks later on my NetFlix Roller Girls (the A&E series) came up and I watched a little of that. Obviously that's way different than what we came up with, and Kansas City Bomber, I enjoyed that. Then Hell On Wheels came out on dvd, and we watched that, too. 

Parker:  It was mainly two of us, me and Jim Kim, my co-producer on this, and then we had a couple of extra camera guys for a couple of games.

Parker:  DVC Pro, we edited on Final Cut Pro.

Parker:  For the most part two [cameras], we had three at a couple games. When we shot two [cameras] it was at the end of each straightaway. At one bout we had the third camera behind the jammer line, and we also had one [third camera] up top, dead center at another bout. We were both handheld on the floor, and the third camera was on sticks [tripod] the couple of times we used them.

Parker:  We didn't really do anything, we just took the ambient light. I think that's just the difference in the quality of the camera, compared to your standard miniDV that you buy at Best Buy for $800, rather than a $30,000 DVC Pro.

Parker:  We matched later in post. With Final Cut, with the multi-camera editor, which is what I used most of the time, it makes it alot easier. We used version 6. The multi camera thing, I'd just line it up at the end of a jam and cut through the next one, back and forth, and take out some of the bad cuts.

Parker:  Just not having enough manpower. It was just two of us, and we were still doing other things. We took great care in shooting off the track. That way, it looks like there were more cameras.

Parker:  I wish I would've added it up - if I were to guess... we had at least 100, 60 minute tapes, which weren't all full. Probably 60-70 hours?

Parker:  It was right around a year, if you counted the dvd as well. 

Parker:  It was pretty difficult. It was hard for them to get past the idea of Raquel Welch in spandex. It took us awhile to convince them that it actually was a real sport. But once that happened, they came around. In February [2008] we went and shot the game against Denver and took it back to our managers.

Parker:  Yeah.

Parker:  I haven't heard anything but positive reviews. I think it's been good for the company, in that it's brought in a different crowd than we normally get. They've told me that anyone they've talked to about it has only said positive things.

Parker:  A lot of what I do at Metro Sports is game highlights, so showing the story of a game is something I'm used to - just normally in 40 seconds to a minute. What I wanted to see from start to finish, and what I wanted to see at halftime and before the game didn't take long at all. The other aspects of the show were more difficult than the game play.

Parker:  A lot of it was organic. We went in with a lot of ideas that we completely scrapped, and most of it came from our conversations with them [skaters]. 

Parker:  I think just going out on the shoots - when they went fishing, and fliering on First Fridays, and of course going to games. The sport is fun on its own, but it's also different. I've been to, watched and edited a million football games in my life, a million basketball games. If you go to a professional football game, it's a media circus - that just isn't fun. 

Most of the time at roller derby games there might be a couple of shooters, a couple of photographers, but it's not swarming with media. A lot better access [at roller derby]. Being able to go into the locker rooms, out on the bench, and mic 'em up [skaters], those kind of things you're just not able to do [in sports] unless you're ESPN.

Parker:  The intro sequence was originally inspired by the opening sequence for Open Windows, on Current TV, a short documentary about Death Cab for Cutie releasing their newest album, but it doesn't look anything like that original concept now.

I think most of it came from the song. We spent a long time trying to find the right song, and even though I'm a huge The Sounds fan, the song [Riot] didn't jump out at me right away. Once I found that song, we didn't really look for any other ones. It took a long time for us to get the permission to use it but...it was worth it.

DNN:  Have you entered Roller Warriors in any broadcast competitions?

Parker:  It's in for the Tellys as well as Emmy. Emmy nominations come out in August, and Tellys should be soon. Typically Metro Sports does really well at the Emmys, last year we had 20 entries.

DNN:  What do you think will make the difference in sports networks carrying full-length broadcast games? Are we there yet? Are we close?

Parker:  I think ultimately it's convincing someone that they can make money off of it. We actually broadcast one of Kansas City's home games last year on Metro Sports, and that's because we have a separate live truck department... that one engineer was interested. I don't think it's near - term, I think at least for regular season games. I could see someone picking up [WFTDA] Regionals, or someone else picking up [WFTDA] Nationals. 

I don't think ESPN or Fox Sports is the way to go...if I was in charge of WFTDA I think I would be more focused on just getting highlights in shows. Either on local news, or [ESPN] Sports Center, or the final scores - just getting 30 seconds of video on the screen where the anchor is treating it like the football game they just showed. I think that will lead to actual games, full-length games, being shown. Rather than trying to convince some network heads to do it. 

I think one very important thing that can be done is moving Nationals and Regionals to the summer. With Nationals in November, you're running into pro football, college football, college basketball, NBA, NHL. Basically, any sport that can be played is being played except for baseball. This means that there aren't any spare production trucks to cover roller derby games and it means Sports Center and local sports anchors/reporters have more than enough content so they aren't going to experiment with putting an unknown sport's highlights in their show. 

But, in mid-late summer, the only sport being played is baseball. Now, the situation is reversed and Sports Center/anchors/reporters don't have enough content to fill their time, so I think they'd be much more likely to spend some time showing roller derby highlights.