Thank You, Indy

The NCAA's 2021 March Madness thank-you film, with Innovative

The problem

In 2021, the NCAA did something that had never been done. With the pandemic still on, they held the entire March Madness tournament, all 67 games, in a single city, inside a controlled bubble in Indianapolis. It only worked because of an army of people behind the scenes: Indiana Sports Corp staff, local workers, and volunteers who ran testing, logistics, and everything else that kept a national event alive under impossible conditions.

When it was over, those people deserved to be thanked. Not with a generic corporate wrap-up, but with a film that aired on television and actually captured what they'd pulled off.

What we did

Working with Innovative, I was the primary videographer on the project. I captured B-roll before, during, and after the tournament, inside a locked-down event most people never got to see, then edited it into the thank-you film that aired on TV. Danarian Brown carried the voiceover.

The challenge was scale and access. A historic, high-security, month-long event had to be distilled into a short broadcast piece that still felt personal, one that made the volunteers and workers feel individually seen, not lost inside the size of the thing they'd helped run.

The result

A televised thank-you that honored the people behind one of the most unusual sporting events in history, the staff, volunteers, and Indiana Sports Corp team who made the bubble work when almost nothing else in the world was working.