![]() But for “The History of the Minnesota Vikings,” he finally broke down and used Final Cut Pro. In the past, Bois stuck to the most lo-fi option possible, editing feature-length docs on iMovie. Once Bois and Rubenstein built the main chart that acts kind of like a Christmas tree on which they hang all other Vikings games, stats, graphs, images, and news quotes from the series’ subjects, Bois brought it into a non-linear editing program to time how everything unfolds and pair the visuals with voiceover. That theme was the one thing we knew for sure, and we were like, ‘OK, so what is the chart that is going to convey that in the most simple way, and the one that won’t come back to bite us six months from now if we find some other theme?’” “The History of the Minnesota Vikings” Screenshot/YouTube “We actually built first, before we ever started writing anything, before we even finished outlining the project, because we knew our central theme was going to be illustrating the Vikings as a team that has this eternal, endless, mountainous weight toward a Super Bowl, but has just never gotten there. “We want to make our charts as big and loud and weird as possible while also conveying the information that we want them to convey and not leaving anybody out,” Bois said. The Vikings series is an ambitious step up for “Dorktown” both in its length (the series clocks in closer to nine hours in total than the seven Bois expected it would take) and how Bois plays with the show’s main “boss” chart: a graph of the Vikings’ cumulative regular season win differential in the Super Bowl era. Bois sets up basic patterns of color, height, depth, and width and then edits additions, subtractions, and camera movements with razor precision. The lessons he’s learned in doing this, for everything from franchise histories of the Atlanta Falcons and Seattle Mariners to the rise of MMA fighting and the deeds of players named Bob across all modern sports, has given Bois and Rubenstein a keen sense of how to imbue all those polygons with emotion. “I turn off all the terrain layers, make it completely flat, get a PNG file that’s solid black, 100 by 100 pixels, and stretch it out over the entire planet, and then all of a sudden we’ve got this blank canvas, and on that canvas the software lets you drop image files, build polygons, and turn those polygons into more sophisticated polygons,” Bois said. “The History of the Minnesota Vikings” Screenshot/YouTube And the deliberately constrained look of Bois’ work pushes Google Earth to the limits of its functionality. However, he uses the same visual language to capture all aspects of the Vikings’ history seeing the team’s quest for a championship rendered as a purple bar that stretches into the thermosphere contains more pathos in an image than any talking head or game footage could articulate. “And I think people are kind of along for the ride.” “It looks incredibly cheap, which is a joke I think we play into,” Bois told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. ![]() ![]() Bois doesn’t have to give Stonebreaker’s stunt the dignity of more than a few basic polygons with a lot of Z-fighting (a phenomenon that can make CG objects look jittery or flickering). It’s something that Secret Base, an evolution of SB Nation’s YouTube channel into a number of shows that explore the limits of sports documentaries including “Beef History,” “Weird Rules” and Bois’ own “Dorktown” project, has been doing for years now. Rendering football, that most corporate-packaged of American sports, without any of its usual bombastic orchestral intro music or heroic quarterback tropes, allows Bois to emphasize the weirdness, wonder, folly, and humanity in his subjects. ![]() Angelica Ross Alleges Ryan Murphy Ignored Her After All-Black ‘American Horror Story’ Season Idea
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