Springfield Volleyball workouts with fitness trainer Nick Beakus

SHSVB Workout 1 from Mark Davidson on Vimeo.

For most of this week, walking down a set of stairs was a difficult task.

That's because on Monday I worked out with the Springfield Volleyball program at Nick Beakus Personal Training in Perrysburg, Ohio–a small gym located a few miles from my house. For this workout, Nick decided to turn up the intensity for the team, who has been training there since last summer.

When Lori King, my professor for Teaching Multimedia at Kent, assigned us a video project and urged our class to find a story that has to been seen to be told, I wasn't sure exactly what to do. Then I went to a Monday workout, and I knew that this was my story.

These girls work extremely hard in the off season to train for their sport, and going off campus to train at a gym such as Nick Beakus Personal Training is not something every sports team does. Beakus creates a circuit of cardiovascular and strength-building exercises that offer unique challenges each week.

When I showed up in my khakis instead of my gym shorts, and I was toting a camera in my hand, the girls were a little nervous, and some of them couldn't help but stare into the lens. I decided I wanted to give my story a tighter focus, and being a senior in this program is a very serious role, so I focused on next year's seniors.

I tried to capture various angles while the girls rotated around the circuit, and the different movements allowed me to shoot a good deal of action. That was the easy part. Recording the interviews proved to be more difficult.

The seniors were visibly not comfortable talking in front of the camera. I interviewed for of them, and the best sound clip came from a girl who will be a senior, but was not on the team last year. Nick had already started his next class a few minutes after we finished, and with busy schedules (she was preparing more than 80 students to take the AP psychology test and planning a birthday party and I was finishing the yearbook supplement and putting a newspaper to bed), the coach and I couldn't find an evening we both had free.

Subsequently, I had to make due with the few clips from the seniors, finding their best sound bites, and using them to introduce the players at the start of the video.

Editing came much more easily because I had a definite idea of how I wanted the video to look. I scoured the internet for music I could use legally, and found a song I liked on incompetech.com. Once I found the music, the editing went by quickly.

Creating this video was a fun experience: I shot video using my DSLR for the first time, and I was able to refresh my skills using the video editing software.

I'm looking forward to developing a program at my school that incorporates more video/broadcasting into my curriculum.