Mark Hoffman: Joga Bonito!
On the Nike soccer site, it’s accessibility to the max. Joga TV has been translated into 20 languages and nine formats (high-res QuickTime, low-res QuickTime, high-res Windows Media, low-res Windows Media, Flash Stream, iPod, PSP, mobile and high-res master) — which means that each video segment is available in a remarkable 180 versions.
Ultimately, of course, Joga TV succeeds not on its breadth of formats but on its chill content. “If it’s interesting, kids will watch it,” notes Lensch. They’ll also make it their own. “If you do a search on Joga Bonito, you’ll see hundreds of the campaign videos posted on sites like You Tube and MySpace,” says Hoffman. “Kids are taking the stuff and re-editing it! They put in their own moves and tricks to share with their friends.”
Guerilla TV
The Joga Bonito concept is loaded with street cred. In a revolutionary-style coup, former Manchester United star Eric Cantona and his guerilla team burst in to take over a German TV station whose dull broadcasts leach the zest from their beloved game. Their radical makeover transforms it into Joga TV: a fun, kinetic, star-fueled paean to beautiful soccer. Cantona serves as cheeky host, admonishing kids on what does — and doesn’t — constitute joga bonito. (“Don’t pull other players’ shirts. Don’t dive. Don’t play like a donkey!”)
One of the website’s most engaging features is the video chain. The clip shows a ball entering from screen left; each player receives it, performs some trick or skill, and kicks it out to the right. As the loop continues, the next player adds his own stylish fillip to the chain. Best of all, site visitors can upload video segments of their own snazzy skills; selected clips are edited into the larger montage.
Look Ma, No Seams
Hoffman’s challenge was to create content that matched the high production values of the agency-produced segments, with their deep budgets and large staffs. “Our work had to be seamless with theirs,” he notes. “That’s where the Apple tools were indispensable. They let us set our standards very high, so there would be no difference between our on-the-fly, two-man operation and the parts that were done by a major advertising agency.”
Hoffman’s 17-inch PowerBook G4, Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, iTunes, and iPod formed his 100-percent made-on-a-Mac editing suite. A 1TB GRaid FireWire 800 hard drive housed gigabytes of content while Hoffman jetted from one soccer-crazed city to the next. “More often than not I found myself editing on airplanes, in terminals and hotel rooms,” recalls Hoffman.
He chose the PowerBook-based edit suite not just for its portability, but to ensure the platform-appropriate quality of his product.
From left: Ean Lensch, Mark Hoffman, Ronaldinho at the Barcelona Camp Nou Stadium.
“I didn’t want to use a big monitor, like I would to edit for TV because Joga TV is a web broadcast,” he explains. “Everything I did had to look good on a laptop, so it made more sense to edit on a smaller screen. You get more accurate color correction, and you avoid having to up-res, then down-res.”
Editing Video and Sound
Hoffman originally trained on Avid; now, he says, “I use Final Cut Pro all the time. It’s such a solid editing system. The color correction is great, and it works so much easier with After Effects and Photoshop. I’m totally for Final Cut Pro; to me, it just feels so much easier.”
For Joga TV’s sound effects and music edits, Hoffman used both Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro. Nothing beats Final Cut Pro, says Hoffman, “when it comes to editing and dealing with layers of sound.” He appreciated the Soundtrack Pro timeline, familiar from Final Cut Pro. “I never read a manual and I never used the help files — I just started using Soundtrack Pro. It was very obvious how to do it.”
Many Hats
As sound and picture editor — not to mention co-concept guy, co-writer, cameraman, and director — Hoffman wore more than the usual number of hats during the production of Joga TV. Thanks to his Apple toolset, he was able to bounce between tasks with an agility not unlike hotshot Ronaldinho’s nimble soccer moves.
“Normally I only touch a project in a very specific way,” reflects Hoffman. “I direct a shoot for a couple of days. Or I’m the editor, cutting footage someone else shot. But on this job, we did most everything ourselves. We came up with many of our own concepts and we executed them in the field to put it all together.”
That, to him, was the game-winning goal. “It was great to be able to see something through, from conception to posting finished QuickTimes on the site,” he says. “It was very demanding, but each day I had this huge sense of accomplishment. It felt less like advertising, and more like filmmaking.”
