A few years ago, there was a brand new national TV channel starting out, and they needed programming. We ended up having talks, and one thing led to another. Before we knew it, we were producing two different series for them with SLAM! Wrestling Entertainment, each worth 6 episodes.
With just our own people and production gear, we were able to pull it off in a short amount of time. It was tons of work, but we did it. They were titled ‘SLAM! Boot Camp’ and ‘Painin Otteessa’, mostly in Finnish.
The Boot Camp one was easy; it was all about diving into pro wrestling holds and training. The idea was to share a glimpse of what goes into training and developing pro wrestling talent. This required very little scripting, especially with the direction of StarBuck, our head coach.
For me, it was taking care of lighting, audio, shooting the footage, and finally, editing the episodes to be broadcast-ready. The workflow was pretty much 1-2-3 and done.
At the end of this series, I shot a wrestling match bell-to-bell with one camera, from inside the ring, in one take. We didn’t plan anything, just ran with it. I noticed it can be reasonably done when you’re working with people you know well, and they know you. We were able to move and position ourselves smoothly, so that I was out of their way and they were able to perform to the camera. This was in our smaller ring, roughly 14×14 ft.
I have no idea if anyone has done that before, but at that particular moment, it felt unique.
Painin Otteessa, which roughly might translate to ‘In the grip of wrestling’, was a more detailed presentation of pro wrestling around the world. We did some research on wrestling history, wrote a script for each episode, planned the segments, and were soon ready for production. For this series, we had the help of our producer, Tuukka Kouri, which proved highly valuable.
The editing part was a painstaking process. The episodes included plenty of smaller parts that didn’t seem to mesh together. Trying to fit them smoothly into a predetermined amount of minutes was something that almost had me punching my fist through my computer monitor. And that’s no joke, I was clenching my fist on numerous occasions, literally screaming out loud.
If there was a lesson in there, I sure don’t know what it was.
Of course, my duties also included the logos, graphics, and promotional trailers. The series proved to be popular on the station, which we were very happy about.
Later on, we also sent them one of our recent events for broadcast, which just happened to include a barbed wire death match. Turns out, the viewers were not expecting anything of the sort. The TV station got plenty of angry phone calls and emails after the first airing, and that was the end of that.