From a Tongue-in-Cheek Lament to a Music Video Concept: TNT Sports NHL Opening Night
For TNT Sports NHL Opening Night, director of photography Brian Schulz built a music-video concept around commentator Paul Bissonnette's tongue-in-cheek lament. Music-video pacing, choreography and performance shaped the cinematography around Bissonnette's personality.
By Brian Schulz · Director of Photography · Hot Fuss Films
The line nobody was supposed to build a concept around
Paul Bissonnette, a commentator for TNT Sports, dropped a simple, tongue-in-cheek lament — the kind of line built to be heard once and forgotten. Nobody scripted it to be a concept. That's precisely what made it one. Part of my job is not generating ideas from a blank page. It's listening for the one that's already there.
Borrowing a different genre's grammar
The idea I landed on was to treat this like a music video, not a sports package: visual language, pacing, choreography, performance and cinematic style pulled directly from that genre and applied to a hockey story. Borrow a genre and you borrow its whole grammar, or you end up with a sports promo in a costume.
brand and sports films for networks and agencies
Working with Paul Bissonnette on camera
None of that means anything without a performer who can carry it, and Bissonnette's personality and comedic timing were the centerpiece. On camera, the job was protecting what makes him funny on a broadcast, the timing, the delivery: authenticity that still delivers highly produced entertainment, not smoothing Paul into something generic, but giving his personality a frame built to hold it.
Letting a real storyline do cultural work
Underneath the humor, the piece is anchored to something actually happening in the league in real time: Mitch Marner leaving Toronto for Vegas. A commentator's joke is funny for a day. Wired into a storyline fans were already following, it becomes part of the conversation: participating in a moment as it unfolds, not reporting on it after the fact.
Applying music-video cinematography to network sports features
What I brought to this piece was the same thing I bring to a documentary or a commercial: I'm not simply executing coverage. I'm identifying the central idea of a story, here a throwaway line that had a whole visual world hiding inside it, and building the cinematography around that idea rather than the format the assignment arrived in.
the character-driven documentary work
If you're a network, a brand or an agency with talent whose personality is the actual asset, a commentator, an athlete, anyone with a voice worth building something around, this is the register I work in: original, character-driven content with its own visual identity.