Welcome to Wrexham

On Art of the Cut today, editors Michael Anthony Brown and Michael Oliver talk about their Emmy-winning work on Welcome to Wrexham.

Brown also won an Emmy for his work on Wrexham last year. Other work includes the TV series, Mr. McMahon, Action, and Losers.

Oliver won a Sports Emmy 2011 for HBO’s 24/7 Penguins/Capitols. He’s also edited projects like Being Liverpool, We Are LAFC and Messi’s World Cup: The Rise of a Legend.

Gentlemen, congratulations on your Emmy win for Welcome to Wrexham. One of the things that I wanted to talk about, which I almost always do with documentary type work, is the opening image or the opening sequence of the documentary. There’s a beautiful little montage at the beginning before the title. What were you trying to accomplish with that? It seems to be much more about the town than the ball club.

BROWN: When we were looking at putting together this final episode for the season, it was very much a completion of a two year journey for this club. Last season they barely missed out on their last game of the season. It saw them not moving up the ranks once again for their 15th year.

This last episode was really the culmination of all of the hopes and the aspirations that this team and this town and the townspeople in general had had for 15 years since they had been knocked out of the football league. 

I found this clip of this man crying in the streets and his admiration for the club, and I said, “This has to be the last piece of our cold open before we go to the main title. There was something in his voice that screamed of the desperation, the hope, the joy, and the pain of the 15 years previous.

I’ve always been a fan of the work that editor Dylan Tichenor had done on Magnolia and the Amy Mann sequence where all of the characters are singing the Amy Mann song together in this sort of a choir of despair.

There were all of these moments that our camera crew had captured throughout the town that day of people singing in bars. Children singing in the schools, holding up flags and this real sense of togetherness.

They weren’t all necessarily singing the same song, so it was pretty impossible to do some sort of sing along, but I just think it’s such an effective way to rally and corral this feeling of togetherness for the town. 

The inspiration for the series for Rob and Ryan had always been that they fell in love with the town and the townspeople first when they decided to buy this club, so for us this project has been a love letter to this community.

I initially built the opening sequence hearing some of these songs and chants and we had some of the radio announcer setting up the day and what these last 15 years had meant. There was a decision at one point to just drop out all of the sound and let it play without sound.

The lyrics really were descriptive about flying your flag. Usually, our main title that we use has lyrics of, “don’t forget to sing when you win,” but on this episode, the song we chose sort of served that purpose. They’re singing and they’re rallying together.

I feel like it really set the tone for the kind of heart and the journey that we were gonna take on the rest of the episode.

OLIVER: We’ve known from the start that we wanted to highlight the townspeople. When you have a football club like Wrexham, the team is just not the team, it’s also the entire city - the people around it. We wanted to see not only the team change throughout the years from before Rob and Ryan bought it, to seeing the change with Rob and Ryan making all the changes and seeing them succeed. It’s the townspeople that make the team.

The players come in and play - they come and go - but the town always stays, so we knew right from the get-go, the townspeople are more important and we wanted to have that in our show as much as possible: their love, their emotion. No player can copy what they do because the townspeople have been there since they were born pretty much, where the players might be only there for a year or two.

BROWN: Mike and I have both worked on lots and lots of sports documentaries through the years with all the networks, and in those stories you’re always telling the story about the athlete. You’re telling the story about how they got there and the perseverance and what it took.

If you’re following a team or if you’re following any particular person, it’s about them and maybe their families. So you’re getting that heart and soul story of the actual player and the grit and the determination. For me, this was the first time doing a project like this where we were able to expand the radius into that fan zone.

That’s something that we found that is a really beautiful companion to the traditional sports storytelling of success and perseverance and trying to win the league or win that award.

It really added richness and depth to the storytelling. Give it up to Milos, our field producer for meeting these people and forming a connection that really translated. This is a small town in Wales that had cameras descend upon their town out of nowhere, especially right after Covid.

They came out from being locked in their houses and not being able to go to the football matches, to literally a camera on every corner of the town. What was really remarkable was just how open these people were: their availability to talk about their fears and the things that they persevere through individually as just humans living life.

I couldn’t have asked for better material to work with and the interviews were just incredible.

This episode had a pretty straightforward story to it: Does the team move on? Do they win this big final match or do they not? Also there was a little bit of “How can we have played so well and it’s still so close?” So you’ve got that through-line and then you’ve got all these “B stories” that hang off of that. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you structured that or how and when you chose to branch off of the main story?

BROWN: One of the things that we came up with last season in the finale was something that we tried to replicate here. What we were playing around with when we discovered this last year was that that you can tell a traditional story of just watching the game play out, but we had spent so much time with these characters and some of the players throughout the whole season that you really wanted to create a feeling of “where are they now?”

There’s a sense of anticipation that I think we found that we could build throughout the match as well by adding the “B stories.”

If you follow the news you’re gonna know what happened in the match. You’ll know the outcome. But as a story device, I think it was really effective at being able to build a little bit of tension throughout the match so you’re not purely just living in the match.

What are the players saying in these individual “character pods” in the middle of a match. You have some thought, you have some introspection and maybe it leans one way or another to an audience wondering how the match is gonna gonna end up.

You have people questioning: is it all worth it? Is everything we’ve done this year worth it? Those types of statements add a little bit of drama and intrigue throughout a match.

With this particular match, it was sort of a foregone conclusion. Wrexham scored a lot of goals. There was a lot of time left in the match and it wasn’t close. It wasn’t a back-and-forth buzzer-beater situation where we can really hang on the drama of the game.

So the really effective thing was being able to touch back on our characters that we had been following all season and how they were watching the match. We relied a lot on the storytelling of our characters that weren’t on the field.

Diving into each of their worlds and stylistically being able to shape and touch on who they are and who they represent for our show.

Did you work on any of those character pods and do they get created separately, then later on someone decides where they’re gonna go? Or do you know where in the show they’re gonna go while you’re cutting them?

OLIVER: I started off with the Notts County section at the very beginning of our episodes. We wanted to start slow. One of my producers I worked with gave me some great advice: “When you start something, let the audience get into their seats. Let them relax. Let ’em smooth in. You don’t wanna go “boom” right away.”

I wanted to come in with something artsy. How do we get into Notts County but still lead off with something with Xrexham? I remembered we had Mark Griffith at his home. I worked on that scene before. I thought, “We didn’t use that one shot in that feature, but it would work perfect here” ‘cause I needed to segue from Wrexham into Notts County.

Mark Griffiths is driving to Notts County and that’s how we introduced Notts County. The reason we picked Notts County is because they were one of our biggest rivals and they were actually with us in the standings all the way to the end, so we wanted to get their story in right away ‘cause it kind of fits the whole rest of the episode, with them on our heels.

Also we wanna get that part done because we had our big game and we wanted to tell our stories of our fans too. We had to set up “this is who we’re coming up against.” I did that as a pod at first but I think we knew right off the bat that that was gonna be the first section to introduce them and set up the rest of the episode.

Is that typical when you’re building these shows that you maybe know, “This is a character pod that I have to do, but we don’t know where it’s gonna go, but I might as well get something done.” 

BROWN: Right. For example, one of the stories that we’ve been following is Jordan Davies and his partner Kelsey, who were having a baby, and we had been following their journey from last season. They had a mishap with their first pregnancy and that was a very emotional ending to the finale of last season.

We’d been following their journey and knew that we needed to bring them full circle. They were on their second pregnancy and it really was a piece that we knew we wanted to get in before they had their baby the day of the parade at the very end of the episode.

Jordan wasn’t really a part of that final match. We usually try to find a place to introduce characters with a bit of action or at a place where they’re making a mark on the game. We find a way to cut into that and do these transitions to get back to the game.

We knew we had to tell Jordan’s story so we just found a spot near the end of the match that was - if we get a little heady about it - this idea of birthing a new generation of Wrexham as well. That piece was built and we were trying to find a way to put it somewhere in the episode and it just felt like the right moment to put it.

We use a lot of tools when we’re building a match to try to create this sense of suspense and lulls in the game. We’re taking a 90 minute realtime sporting event and condensing it down into maybe five minutes, when it’s all said and done.

So how do you build that same excitement for the actual gameplay as you do for the story itself and trying to ride those waves? We try to to amp up those moments and make it feel really intense in the match itself.

When a player scores or they make a big impact on the game the “character pods” are very much a way for them to look back about their career or their season and see how it’s gone for them.

But that moment at the end was really our final moment of quietness or stillness before the finish to that match, which was exciting and everybody rushes the field.

It really was an excuse to really slow down the pace of everything and just exist in this beautiful moment between these two people and the future of their family before we realized that the future of Wrexham is going to be taking off and onto new horizons as well.

Michael Anthony Brown

How do you watch dailies? How do you watch the match and find those moments of drama and kinetic interest and all that stuff? What are you doing? Putting markers or building select reels?

OLIVER: We have eight or nine cameras per game on season two. We had two announcers. We had our announcer from Wrexham and the broadcast announcer, and then we have the fan cams and then we have some random media. It really takes about two days to go through all the footage and listen to everything.

I know the outcome of the game, but what I’m looking for is that audience reactions. Does anybody say anything on the fan cams? I go through and make selects of everything - shots of the game or anything the announcers say - and I keep it in a sync timeline so I know  it’s all in order.

Then we talk to each other and ask, “Okay, what are the moments?” What can we do? Is this an important game? Is this a game that we just blow through? You look for those tiny moments - those heartwarming or those action moments. It’s like you’re watching a car chase in a movie.

Those fast cuts, those action movement, everything has to move. We’re always looking for those kinds of shots - things that move. Then also there’s the storytelling part aspect of it. It takes a quite a long time to edit a game. It’s actually the longest thing that takes to edit of all of our shows.

It’s come down to a point where it’s fun - I love doing it - and that’s where we can be creative. How can we make it different or how can we do things unexpected, something outside of the box? It’s just a lot of selects, then soaking it all in and finding the right time and movements, then pick your battles,

BROWN: That first pass is finding the “tent poles.” There’s five scores in the game. Those moments are gonna be in… maybe they won’t… maybe we’ll condense if it was a blowout. Then you would find the ones that are most active.

But when you’re editing footage that is being shot live, if it’s not on camera, then it didn’t happen. You could watch the broadcast and think, “Oh my gosh. This moment right here! We have to be able to put that in!” But if OUR cameras didn’t shoot it, then we don’t have it. Watching everything is definitely key.

Michael Oliver

And if no one comments on something, how do we make it that way? We always have the announcer to lean back on, but one of the things that I think is really cool about the beginning of this match is that there’s about two minutes of uninterrupted gameplay.

It’s cut just like you’d be watching the match. We want people to fall in love, not just with the series, but also with the sport of football - soccer in the States. What better way than to just show the action. Show what it’s like to experience the game. It’s edited in a way that you wouldn’t be able to see it on TV if you’re just watching the match in that high angle and seeing the play play out.

We’re cutting to fans, but it’s just this experiential thing that pulls people into the game. Before we start doing our cutaways to these “player pods.” That’s something that we really leaned on in this finale: just experiencing the different moments that have happened and the worry if players get injured.

There’s a lot of collision moments and that’s really fun to play around with as an editor because yes, the stuff’s happening in real time, but if we ramp to a slowmo on a big hit, maybe we’re anticipating something to come out of that and everybody looks around. Is he okay?

Is it gonna stop play? Are we gonna lose that player? For people who have been following along during the season, we can sort of play around with those emotions a little bit too by using that slo-mo and wondering if they’re gonna make the shot and the near misses and all of that.

So it becomes really fun to be able to tell the story of a match through those isolated incidents.

Is there a ticking clock for how early in the episode you guys are trying to get Ryan Reynolds on screen?

OLIVER: There is no ticking clock. There’s nothing like that. There are interviews with him and we put them wherever they work. We don’t have to go to him or Rob. They just care about the story. What fits the story?

If there are times where they’re barely in the episode. We were never told get them in more. They understand the storytelling and they want the most impactful thing. It’s very refreshing knowing that we don’t have a clock and we don’t have anybody breathing down our necks.

If anything it’s totally the opposite. They always say, “Bring creativity! Bring what you want! Think outside of the box! If you’ve got an idea, bring it.” Lately in our industry you don’t hear that, so it’s amazing that Rob and Ryan and all them allow us to be creative.

They always allow us to do anything. They will take a chance. “Let’s see what you got.” So that’s probably the most special part about working Welcome to Wrexham is it’s not unlike any other show I’ve ever worked on. Be creative! Do what you want! How do you feel it? Then later when we  put the entire show together, we’ll see what works and what doesn’t.

Talk about music a little bit: the choice of when to put stuff in. Is music driving stuff a lot of the editing? Do you find there are moments where you’re trying to keep music out for one emotional reason or another?

BROWN: I love the dynamics of sound. High contrast for me is always really exciting. You’re balancing these quiet stories and the action of the game. I think it’s really important, but it’s also really effective at making things interesting from a viewing perspective.

After that piece that Mike was talking about - the Notts County section in this episode and setting them up as sort of the nemesis that that keeps following Wrexham around - there’s a moment where we go to Robin and Ryan.

It is one of the first times that we see them in the episode and it’s just them riding in a car, quiet. Just them having an intimate conversation about how nervous they are for this day. It’s really where we set up the entry point into our game day and the chaos of everything that is to come.

Ryan and Rob have this offbeat sense together always with their comedy and the way they talk with each other. It’s very punchy naturally ‘cause that’s who they are.

Obviously sometimes it’s tempting to want to score that or give it extra emotion, but they are such masters and aware of their conversations together and what they’re getting and describing in a scene that it felt great to just let it play and just be in the car with them.

I feel like that’s a very isolating moment where - as a viewer - you really feel like you’re getting a glimpse of behind-the-scenes. As soon as they’re done with the conversation we kick into this not full-out all-out music, but it’s this symphonic piece. I always really liked that type of piece for pulling together the group as a whole - that creates this symphony that is sports entertainment that we all know and love. 

How do you tell that story in a way that is fun and exciting and maybe not a little untraditional when it comes to sports storytelling? You would think you would go with like a rock track or something that’s heavier or a hip hop track or something.

I like finding music that makes you look at the images differently - when you might tune out otherwise and think, “Here’s your standard sports intro track to a match. So, having people turn their heads a little bit and say, “Oh, this is different” always makes me happy.

Speaking of looking at things differently, there’s a little bit of footage from 2022 of some football matches. Obviously in 2022 cameras were great. Colors were great, but you guys mute it a little bit. First of all, did you do that in your picture cut? And second of all why?

OLIVER: We did a temporary map in our edit just to show the color corrector, “Hey, this is what we’re going for.” Then they matched it to what we have. The reason why we do that is to just show people “This is in the past.

This is not from this season.” Any footage that we’ve seen in the past, we always make it unsaturated. We bring the saturation down a lot to remind people “This is not from this season.” Everything in the moment from this season is brighter colors but anything from the past we always mute the colors.

When you were talking about using that piece of music to play against the idea of the typical sports intro music, were you talking about when the fans gathered for game day?

BROWN: It’s a wide shot of the stadium. We’re pushing in. We go to sprinklers and the sprinklers are going off and it feels like all these events in sequence that are happening as the game’s moving on. That piece of music was really fun to work with because it had a lot of breaks and a lot of edit points in the stems.

So being able to break for comedy when Rob and Ryan get out of the car saying how nervous they were to Ryan Reynolds the first time he’s looking at the pitch and he’s rubbing his hands together. All of his nerves were peaking at that point.

There’s this symphonic piece and instruments get added and it becomes a much larger piece by the end. It’s one of those building tracks, but not overwhelming and not overpowering the moment. Everyone’s on pins and needles wondering what’s gonna happen and waiting for this moment before we really land on some really hard hits when the match starts and we go to this huge wide aerial that kind of set up: “Now the gladiators are about to go.”

It is really effective. You start soft so it gives you someplace to go. There’s always breaking the rules at different times, but generally speaking, that’s an effective way to build anticipation for something that you’ve been waiting two years for. You’ve waited all season to see how this thing is gonna shake out.

That was definitely the sense I got from that: a great sense of anticipation. When you were building the music tracks, did you have stems? Were you actually building the stems or were you just cutting to a different part of the song?

BROWN: It’s 50/50 whether we get stems from the library. If we’re using a library track or something that had been composed. A lot of times we’ll have stems available and be able to isolate certain instruments, which is super helpful.

A lot of times - with the speed of schedules these days - we don’t always have the time to really execute that. I have a background in music, as a percussionist, so I really enjoy getting under the hood and kind of breaking down songs rhythmically and melodically and playing around with things because, after working in this industry so long, I could watch TV for a couple of hours and hear library tracks that I’ve used before in the past.

The tracks are everywhere. So I try not to use anything I’ve heard before. If there’s something that that sounds familiar, I’ll try to break it down and maybe deliver something a little bit more personalized to the scene.

OLIVER: We do have a composer for our series. He does an amazing job. He watches our cuts and sometimes we’ll temp his old music into it to say, “This is kind of where we’re going.” Then he composes something new.

Does he ever watch any of the things that you don’t think he should score and say, “I want to take that song out or take that track out and make it my own?”

BROWN: Definitely, yeah. Geo is such a wonderful composer. He really captured the heart and soul of Wrexham. You hear a lot of woodwinds and drumbeats and he really sort of dissolved himself into the Welsh culture and really developed the sound that I think added to so many of the stories, especially when we were telling stories of people’s loss and hope and it was a heart and soul that I think hasn’t gotten recognized enough on Wrexham to be honest.

Switching from music to visuals, you mentioned how many cameras there are and there’s a camera on every corner and all the cameras at the games. When you’re watching footage, do you also - in addition to looking for performance or moments on camera - are you also looking for the camera movement itself? I noticed a lot of little zoom shifts or quick camera pans. Are you thinking that will add energy?

OLIVER: All the time! In order to make it feel more documentary. I’m not looking for the still shots. The most beautiful shots when we’re in a game or walking in, you wanna make the audience feel like they’re there as well.

So  we’re looking for the bumps, the zooms, the whips. It’s like that documentary feel. You want it to be kind of rough. The other thing we’re looking for - which is totally different from what Michael Brown and I have done past in the sports documentaries - when fans would look at the camera and say stuff into the camera like we had always been told never to use that, but on Welcome to Wrexham, it’s different. We look for that stuff ‘cause we want to make the audience feel like they’re there.

Then for the fan cams, when a goal is scored, I want the fan cam to be jumping up. I don’t care if you don’t understand what’s going on. That’s what we want. That’s what makes you feel like you’re in the stands.

That’s all the stuff we look for. I’m marking it all the time. Footage like when the ball’s moving and the camera swipes real quick. I’m always marking that stuff because I use natural transitions, but it also just gives you that documentary feel. I don’t want all the beautiful steady shots. You want the rough and tough stuff.

BROWN: Every time you have a shot that has that kinetic movement to it - the whip pans - that edit has to be sweet. That edit has to work as well. Your eyes are moving left to right and so there is that bit of art. Mike is so great at cutting matches and naturally having a feel for that.

You’re tracking the ball, you’re tracking the player’s feet, you have tilts up to their heads and tilts down. There’s a real form of lyricism through images - especially in sports - there’s a language of visual storytelling depending on what type of sport it is that we’re all used to seeing at home.

But when you’re doing it live and trying to feel things out real time. It’s a joy and a pain sometimes because you have so many great shots. Not everybody’s focusing on the ball at the same time with the same sort of tight closeup shot. We do have a variety of shots to choose from on every play.

Talk to me about doing something the transitions that are a little energetic, a little sound-designy to get you back into the action of the game from the character pods.

BROWN: That was something we developed in season one. We were going to take such a hard left turn into a different pace and a different style and rather than just using a reverse cymbal crescendo or a whoosh or letting a song sort of come to an end and then transitioning, it was just a really fun way.

We were encouraged to do it by John Henion, the series one show runner who asked for something funky. I just started to do this stuttery kind of almost whimsical transition into the person and trying to use match cuts and similar sort of action.

For example, in this one we go to Paul Mullen with his son and he goes and visits an autism center. In the match, he just scores a goal, another player comes up to hug him and we start doing these flash frames and he’s picking up his son in the interview and is holding him.

So we try to borrow from our fantastic heroes in the cinema world and try to bring a little bit of that cinematic art. It’s really effective and didn’t seem to discombobulated anybody who watched the series, so I think we, we did something pretty cool.

I wanted to talk about that specific character pod because I really loved a moment in it where the player says basically, “I’m nobody special. I’m just a guy.” And at the moment that he says that in the interview, there’s this great shot of him in the locker room, but it’s not up on his face, it’s back, it’s far away, it’s wider kind of showing that he’s just every man. Can you talk about the use of shot size to convey part of a story or an emotion?

BROWN: Obviously it’s something we look for and look out for. There is a bit of truth in the fact that we don’t always have all of the shots. We’re always trying to find those matches of shots to what’s in the interview to really communicate effectively what’s being said.

When I was coming up I’ve learned is it really is an effective way of communicating if you can really truly match words to exactly what you’re seeing on the screen - not in a “this is a red apple” then you see a red apple - but if they’re saying “I’m just like anybody else,” you wanna see them sitting amongst the rest of the group.

A tight compressed shot could work as well if we were rack focusing to communicate that effectively as well. But, that shot is definitely one that says exactly what he’s saying and he’s the best player on the team! He scores the most goals in the league, so he is a very humble guy.

OLIVER: We’re always putting together a 3000 piece puzzle with about 700 pieces missing and we really need to make it look like it’s finished with all 3000 pieces, so that’s where the creative comes into play and that’s where our experience comes in.

We make do with what we have, always thinking outside the box. How can I get into this differently? How can I do this? So you just sit there and you look at everything that you have. So it’s just becoming creative of showing them audience who they are and the shot selections of how can we make it all work.

Talk to me about using slow-mo. Is there a trick to it? Is there a decision either emotionally or some other reason of when you go to slow-mo?

OLIVER: We try to use slow-mo to make a big impact. Especially in matches. Those big moments that you’re anticipating. It brings up the anticipation. Sometimes we go to a slow-mo shot, then we’ll go to slow-mo of the fans standing up like, “Oh my God! it, It’s gonna be a goal. It’s gonna be a goal!” Then it missed.

So you’re trying to make the audience guess, “Is it gonna go in ever?” I’m playing a game with the audience. I’m gonna make ’em feel like they’re gonna score. They’re about to jump out of their seats, then “Oh wait… no.”

You can literally look up the score before you see our episode. That’s a hard part for us ‘cause our audience already knows the score. They know the outcome, but they don’t see everything that we see. So you want to retell the story of the game that keeps every fan at the edge of their seats, even though they were either at the game or they already know the outcome of the game.

But the thing that they don’t get to see during the broadcast is the behind-the-scenes stuff like the locker room talk or Rob and Ryan in the owner’s box. You don’t get to see those moments in a broadcast. You bring the slow-mo anticipation and you bring them to the edge of their seats all the time.

BROWN: The first goal in the game that was scored by Elliot Lee we had these beautiful slow-mo shots of the actual score of him heading the ball. The camera was right there, right behind the goal. Then we cut to this huge wide shot where you see the fans stand up in slow motion.

Sometimes we work backwards. Sometimes we know we’re gonna use these slow-mo shots, so if we always use slow-mo every time there was a goal, people would start to anticipate that, right?

So if you only use slow-mo for a replay or a very specific thing, then people are gonna anticipate and feel the rhythm of that, so it really is this game of playing with the audience and teasing out moments that are the ups and downs of the match.

But knowing that we were going to use those slow-mo shots of Elliot scoring we knew there are all these little moments leading up to that where you wonder: “Is this gonna be the moment? Is this the part where the music changes?”

Then there’s another point in the match that just plays in real time and we’re not making a big deal out of it, but it also is just that part of experience in the game and wanting to feel that emotion that’s raw of being scored against and how the air gets deflated out of the room, and if we were to go to slow-mo and show them scoring in Slowmo, then it feels like a larger-than-life thing.

There is just something great about staying in that moment. The stadium gets quiet. We turn to Rob and Ryan and they make a comment about it. It’s another great opportunity in choosing when not to use music and to just let that air get sucked out. That’s one of the things we love and about sports television is creating that dynamism.

Let’s talk about building the story of the game using the sound bites that you have. How are you finding and editing that found sound that tells the story?

OLIVER: Part of the storytelling that we do is: Where does the found sound make sense and how does it become impactful? So while cutting the games, I might move things around of the fans and their emotion for what works best but a lot of times - like after a goal or whatnot - I cannot move it to another spot.

It’s those moments that bring the townspeople in. It brings the audience in more because we’re not hearing somebody from the team.

We’re not hearing a professional football player or soccer player or the coach. We’re hearing from an actual fan. That’s how they really feel. It gives us another voice without going to an interview setup because that will take you out of the game.

Those fan soundbites  keep you in the game, you’re still part of the fans watching the game. We’re trying to include that so our audience at home feels like they’re there talking to their neighbor at the stadium.

BROWN: With the announced track, we’re able to describe in ways that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to. If we’re compressing time in a match, we’re cutting out 10 minutes and during that 10 minutes the team might have looked sluggish or there might be a sequence of injuries.

So if we’re compressing what happened between the 60th and 70th minute we’re gonna show three players get injured. I’m looking for that soundbite where someone says, “These guys were looking really tough after this.”

That helps us compress time because we can show all of those shots in sequence of a bunch of players looking tired and tell that in five seconds as opposed to having to experience that through watching the match in real time.

The approach that you took in the show to the game is not the same approach you would take if you were editing it for a news story or for SportsCentral or something like that. It’s not a straight reading of the game. It’s more emotional.

OLIVER: When you go to news or highlights, the cameras that they always take are the high angle cameras. That kind of takes you away from everything. I do not like using those. The close-up shots from our camera guys make you feel like you’re on the field.

Those are the moments that make it different. Those are the camera shots that sits your audience on the edge of their seat. It makes them feel like they’re there. If we have to go to a wide shot because we didn’t capture that moment in real time, I try to use it in a way where I’m still can keep the audience in.

How do you feel about picking a piece of music that you know will cost a fortune? I ask because the season-ending song is Queen, and I would not have the guts to put that piece of music under a montage!

BROWN: Luckily we didn’t have to make that decision! That came straight from the top. Both that and the Rocky theme. George Dewey, who is partners with Ryan Reynolds at Maximum Effort suggested that that be the closing song for the episode under the parade. It’s great. Anytime we can get that straight from the top, that’s perfect.

We have been very blessed on the series to have a lot of support, giving us the tools to use - having a decent music budget. It really adds a lot. If everybody can sing along at home at the same time, then it becomes a party for everybody and not just who’s in the parade route.

OLIVER: I was so happy to be in the meeting where those music choices were made. George Dewey and Rob just kind of started laughing, “Oh, we’re gonna pick the most expensive song there is.” As long as the story works, as long as the theme, the feel of it works, that’s all they care about.

I remember talking to the Beckham editor and they used an Oasis song and he said, “I know this is gonna cost a fortune, but it’s the best song to use.”

OLIVER: As long as it works, you know?

BROWN: Yeah. If you can sell it. I’ve been on other shows where if you can really sell the piece and then no other track is gonna match that somebody somewhere is gonna say, “It’s gotta be that.”

Gentlemen, congratulations on your work.

BROWN: Thank you so much. 

OLIVER: Thank you very much for having us.