Livestrong Sporting Park

Wednesday June 15th, 2011

Our photographer Austin Walsh recently spent the day hanging out with the pro soccer team, Sporting Kansas City. It wasn’t all fun and games though, he was filming the team for a project and was under an incredibly tight deadline. Austin was shooting the players to promote their state of the art new stadium, LIVESTRONG Sporting Park. The stadium, which opened last Thursday, cost $200 million dollars and is considered one of the best stadiums in North America, combining attributes of top of the line soccer stadiums in Europe and South America.

Austin got this project by getting coffee…sort of. His studio is across the street from Sporting KC’s corporate office. Aside from his frequent coffee runs, Austin caught the eye of the Sporting creative team by winning a Best of Broadcast award at the Kansas City ADDY show. They approached Austin about creating a fun promotional video for the stadium. Once Austin was on board, they decided to premier the video at First Fridays, a popular Kansas City event in the Crossroads Arts District. The short film would then also play at a few Sporting KC away games and on the jumbo trons at the actual opening of the stadium.

The kicker was that they wanted the entire video done and ready to air at the next First Friday event, which was coming up fast. Austin went for it, excited by the challenge. However, the morning of the shoot day, only four days before the video premier, Austin checked the weather and saw tornadoes in the forecast. Frantically calling around between the Sporting people and the production crew, they decided to go for it anyway since it was the one day that the team was available. Luckily, no tornadoes showed up and they actually had some sun.

Everything happened very quickly from there, the video was shot on Tuesday, edited on Wednesday and Thursday, and then premiered on Friday. Austin pulled in some friends to help finish the job in time, such as the 77 Jefferson crew to create original music, his studio team and the film production company T2 + Back Alley.

You can view the final video here:

Austin had a great time working on the shoot,

The players were great to work with. They were mildly impressed with my soccer skills, but really got excited with the VW Bus showed up. Anyone of us would love to own that bus!

And the best part, the players dig it. They were in Toronto for an away game the night we premiered it, but we sent them a link so they
could see it and all night they were blowing me up on Twitter.

According to Austin, even though it was quite the whirlwind of a project, his great crew helped it go as smoothly as any other project they’ve produced. Now Austin’s just looking forward relaxing a bit and cheering on the Sporting KC team at their stadium.

- Maria