The Pittsburgh Penguins are battling for their 4th Stanley Cup !

The Penguins won their first in 1991. Back then, KDKA-TV aired many of their games. The station needed footage of featured players for use in on-air promotions as well as the open & close of the telecast. (There was no ROOT Sports, FOX Sports or NBC sn in the early 90's)

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. Penguins' former Marketing Director, Tinsy Labrie scheduled the shoot on a team "personal day", so players had to be assured that their on-camera segment would only take 30 minutes to film. Makeup stylist, Patty Bell enjoyed creating a realistic, hot, sweaty look for each guy. We only had two Penguins on-set at a time, so extras were used for background action.

The stylized "blue-bleach" treatment and enhanced grain were added to the footage during 35mm film-to-tape transfer at Producer's Color in Detroit. After the successful '91 season, we filmed the Stanley Cup beauty shots and transferred those scenes as clean 35mm.

Check out the video... Everyone will recognize a young Mario Lemieux, but let us know how many other Penguin players you can identify from a quarter century ago...  GO PENS!

NOTE: some company servers block Vimeo...  Here's a direct link to the video on our server:
http://przyborski.com/Penguins/penguins-1280x720_H264.mov