Whatever Happened to Tyrell Biggs? is not only a great sports biopic, but a film that will shine a light on the importance of after-school programs and community engagement needed to help inner city youth succeed. West Philadelphia and the Shepard Recreation Center are bursting with good stories but lack the resources to tell their own tale. Help give them a voice. http://www.tyrellbiggs.com/#!teambiggs-donors/c12us
I have been working on this documentary since 2012. The website http://www.tyrellbiggs.com sums up the story the best. how I wanted to talk a little bit about the process. Originally I was brought on as the Director and DP by Leilani Goode and D&D management. Now with the availability of DSLRS to shoot high quality HD and a low cost, we had a lot of cameras. 5d mk2, 7d, 60d everybody on the crew had at least one. Typically I prefer working with Red cameras when ever possible epic,red one, scarlet and so on. But this micro budget did not have the funds for that, so we used what we had access to. I was able to barrow a Epic for the slow mo work, and an epic & scarlet on some of the interviews on those shoots I would bring the HDSLR's for alternate angle work. Also to save time we would break up in to a couple of crews to capture b-roll in multiple spots. We shot mostly in working boxing gyms or a least I tried to as much as possible. I had some great young shooters on the team Geoff Morris, Casey David Johnson, Zafer Ulkucu, and Nicholas Mann. Later we added Kevin Hacknberg, Claire Mchale, Paul Harpel, and Gabe Weiner. The production team stayed pretty tight over time but the producers changed half way through on the project, and we gained access to more interviewees. This had started out as a little piece on Tyrell grew to be about Tyrell and the 84 Olympians with a sharper focus on the final story. This happened with time and a lot of investment by the producing team Dafna Yachin, and Molly Brennan.