Rochester Red Wings Manager Stan Cliburn pitches in for batting practice. (Photos: Campbell Media Group.)
Up close and personal with the Red Wings
John Campbell is going to spring training to start filming a 13-part documentary series about the Rochester Red Wings, a AAA minor-league baseball team.
Campbell, an independent producer based in town, expects to have the camera running when the team’s general manager tells each player where they’ll play ball this season — moving up to the major-league Minnesota Twins, or down to a AA minor-league team in Connecticut that feeds players to the Red Wings.
Campbell has scheduled shoots for 50 or 60 days with the team. Though he’s not planning to take the team bus to “away” games, he’ll be counting on the access granted by the Red Wings.
Perhaps because baseball has suffered so many allegations of steroid-taking and recruit-abusing lately, Campbell distanced the film from that kind of bad news when he announced the project last month.
Fans come to the field for Red Wings
players' autographs.
“The one thing I did say at the press conference is that it’s not our intent to make an exposé,” Campbell told Current. “Our intent is to make a reality ‘feel-good’ program.”
But he won’t avert his lens from scandal, he adds. “If it turns out to be exposé stuff, that’s what it turns into.”
With plans for 13 half-hour episodes and local broadcast next February, Campbell will be editing episodes in between treks to the ballpark.
Hometown station WXXI will be the presenting station, and Campbell hasn’t decided which national distributor he’ll take it to.
Campbell insists that he isn’t following the Red Wings because they aren’t conveniently based in the city where he lives.
Though the Red Wings aren’t a world-beating team, they made a good run at the Governor's Cup, the league championship, last year, Campbell says.
But what attracted him to the team, he says, was something about the Red Wing’s parent team in the major leagues, the Minnesota Twins.
“The Twins are virtually the only major-league team that has a strong philosophy of recruiting from within” its own family of minor-league teams, he says.
He also notes that the Red Wings are the longest-running minor-league professional U.S. team in any sport, established as the Rochester Bronchos in 1899.
Campbell put in years as a producer and development exec at pubTV stations in New York (Syracuse, Plattsburgh and Albany) and Pennsylvania (Scranton). He just shot a performance special with the rock band Kansas (“Dust in the Wind”) for fall pledging.
The producer usually works with cinematographer Paul Frederick, who was a co-worker when they were at WMHT in Albany/Schenectady, N.Y., but Frederick will be busy with other work during the baseball shoots.
Campbell and Frederick worked together on projects including the eight-part Hidden Adirondacks travel series and Reach for the Sky: Inside the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds.
Web page posted April 20, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
