Posting Michael Jordan's The Last
Dance — before and during lockdown
By Craig Ellenport

One thing viewers learned from watching The Last Dance — ESPN’s 10-part documentary series about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls — is
that Jordan might be the most competitive person on the planet. Even the slightest challenge led him to raise his game to new heights.

Jordan’s competitive nature may have rubbed off on Sim NY, the post facility that worked on the docuseries. Since they were only able to post the first three episodes at Sim before the COVID-19 shutdown, the post house had to manage a work-from-home plan in addition to dealing with an accelerated timeline that pushed up the deadline a full two months.

The Last Dance, which chronicles Jordan’s rise to superstardom and the Bulls’ six NBA title runs in the 1990s, was originally set to air on ESPN after this year’s NBA Finals ended in June. With the sports world starved for content during the pandemic, ESPN made the decision to begin the show on April 19 — airing two episodes a night on five consecutive Sunday nights.

Sim’s New York facility offers edit suites, edit systems and finishing services. Projects that rent these rooms will then rely on Sim’s artists for color correction and sound editing, ADR and mixing. Sim was involved with The Last Dance for two years, with ESPN’s editors working on Avid Media Composer systems at Sim.

When it became known that the 1997-98 season was going to be Jordan’s last, the NBA gave a film crew unprecedented access to the team. They compiled 500 hours of 16mm film from the ‘97-’98 season, which was scanned at 2K for mastering. The Last Dance used a combination of the rescanned 16mm footage, other archival footage and interviews shot with Red and Sony cameras.

“The primary challenge posed in working with different video formats is conforming the older standard definition picture to the high definition 16:9 frame,” says editor Chad Beck. “The mixing of formats required us to resize and reposition the older footage so that it fit the frame in the ideal composition.”

One of the issues with positioning the archival footage was making sure that viewers could focus when shifting their attention between the ball and the score graphics.

Read More >

Behind the Title: Gretel animator Johannes Geier

Quantum StorNext file
system upgraded to v6.4

Unit9 signs trilingual
director Maya Albanese

Adobe CC updates: ProRes
Raw support for Premiere, AE

Dell redesigns Precision
mobile workstation line

Arch platform launches for cloud-based visual effects