Basketball Trick Shots in Silver Spring

I do live just a five-minute walk away from Downtown Silver Spring, but I didn't really want to film myself going into the movie theater, eating a Chipotle burrito, etc. because I thought there would be plenty of videos of that kind. Instead, I put together a collage of basketball trick shots. While I don't spend much time doing shots of that sort, I do really like to play basketball. This is my hoop but it has been a popular attraction throughout the neighborhood since we got it about eight years ago.

My brother filmed this for me using a Flip Video. I recognize it isn't in widescreen, I will try to fix that for future videos. I tried iMovies '07 for my recent video for English and had a terrible experience. I felt helpless at times: clips would change lengths at will, it crashed frequently, the transitions were not good, so I went back to iMovie '06. I found this upbeat song and thought it fit well in my video.

I had some shots planned out, and many of them took a while. The bike one was difficult for me because I had to maintain an acceptable velocity to make the shot look decent, I had to stay under control (I crashed into the curb several times), and I had to catch the ball and make the shot keeping one hand on the bike. This shot took quite a while. Then there were some other tough ones like the one where I juggled a soccer ball then kicked it into the hoop. I actually made it on the first try when I was demonstrating what I would to do. Then it took five minutes to do it again. In addition to the challenging shots, the cold was another factor. We broke the filming over three days because while I might have been in a t-shirt and shorts, my hands were freezing.

Other shots were improvised. I had a stretch where I did as much and I could. That's when I did the 360-layup and some other shots.

Dialogue never factored into the video. My brother was had some funny comments from behind the camera because he understandably got quite bored. I might upload some of his comments as well as some of my bloopers for a weekly post soon. Sorry my dialogue was not a little more creative.