Are you a fan of sports films? Then you know that training montages are a crucial element in these movies. But have you ever wondered what goes into shooting a great one? In this video tutorial, we explore just that.
We were fortunate enough to have Olympian Steven Benedict as our test subject. We used the gym where he trains in Culver City to figure out the best way to approach a training montage. And boy, did we learn a lot!
The first film to set the standard for training montages was Rocky in 1976. It inspired countless other sequences because it tapped into something primal. It uses a central motif to show the hero progressing physically and metaphorically. In Rocky’s case, it was his running, from his humble, working-class origins to the top of the world, represented by the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For our training montage, we chose five exercises to juxtapose against a tracking shot of Steven running. We learned not to get too caught up in any one setup, but to get coverage of each one from a variety of angles and shot sizes. We also tried to get progression, from beginning an exercise to struggling with it and finally perfecting it. We shot a blend of wide-angle shots that show the exercise, as well as tighter shots that show the athlete’s face and what’s going through their mind as they struggle.
We shot for two and a half hours and ended up with a total of ninety-six usable shots from our A Cam, the Canon C200, and B cam, the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K. Once we had the shots we needed, we made subedits in Premiere of each exercise, then intercut these with the main edit of Steven running.
Then, we added music and tweaked the cut so that big moments coincided with key moments in the music. The end result was a training montage with impact and dynamism that tells a story in just over a minute.
But our tutorial doesn’t stop there. We encourage filmmakers to analyze the same kind of scene in multiple movies to see what works and what doesn’t. And then try it out for yourself!
Looking for more tutorials on film and video production? Check out our other resources on formatting screenplays, stabilizing GoPro footage, sorting footage, and color grading.
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