Creating the Opening Credits

I have been asked a few times about shooting the opening credits, so I will explain it here. My inspiration came from the beginning of Friday Night Lights where they film shots from a moving car and use handheld cameras without an expensive gimbal to give it a shaky, real-life, documentary feel. My vision was to start at a more rural high school and then travel from outside of Austin into the city, and then to my suburban high school before finishing inside my school in a bathroom with kids vaping.

The first shot is of the old football stadium that was actually used as the Panther’s home field in Friday Night Lights outside of Austin, so that is an Easter Egg for fans of the show. Then we shot a ton of footage out of the window of a car over several days to get just enough usable footage of traveling from that field to my suburb of Austin. Then we shot driving by my old middle school and finally my high school. Because of the pandemic I had to replace my idea of shooting in a crowded hallway leading into a school bathroom. Instead I decided to end similar to how I began with a shot of our stadium, but then panning to a group of actors huddling together next to the bleachers and pretending to buy vape pods. Of course the actors were wearing face masks, so we tried to angle everything so that you do not see their masks, and then the video blurs out to reveal the title.

Another Easter Egg was that the actor in the middle brought her backpack from BSA National Youth Leadership Training without thinking that it might not be cool to show a Scouting backpack in the shot with her pretending to deal vape pods. Instead, she used it as the bag they are huddling around, so I guess you could call that a very well hidden Easter Egg for my BSA friends.