Przyborski Productions

1991 Pittsburgh Penguins The Penguins won their first Stanley Cup in 1991. Back then, KDKA-TV exclusively aired many of the team’s games. The station needed footage of featured players for use in on-air promotions as well as the open & close of the telecast.
Przyborski Productions was contacted by Drew Moniot, KDKA’s Creative Development Manager to shoot a stylized video of the team’s players. Drew’s original concept was to capture the action and interaction inside the Penguin’s locker room, between periods of play. The video would be a rough, tough, stylized look at team members preparing to hit the ice for the game’s final period. Our player-liaison, Phil Bourque helped us plan specific action cutaways that were unique to each player. Tinsy Labrie, former Marketing Director of the Pittsburgh Penguins, scheduled the shoot on a team “personal day”, so players had to be assured that their on-camera segment would take no longer than 30 minutes to film. Makeup stylist, Patti Bell enjoyed creating a realistic, hot, sweaty look for each guy. We never had more than two Penguins on-set at a time, so uniformed extras filled-in the foreground and background.

I shot all the footage on Kodak 5298 stock using my Arri 35BL4 and Zeiss Super-Speed lenses. Everything was shot from a Fisher 10 crab dolly. Film processing was handled by Producer’s Color in Detroit. The stylized “blue-bleach” treatment and enhanced grain were added to the locker room footage during the 35mm film-to-tape transfer at Postique in Detroit. After the winning ’91 season, we filmed our Stanley Cup scenes after-hours at KDKA, then transferred it as clean 35mm.