The Pittsburgh Pirates Have Many Hidden Heroes.
There are the men who play on the field every night, whose jerseys we wear, whose names we chant, whose triumphs we celebrate, whose losses we mourn. They are a special kind of hero – the ones on the baseball cards – they are members of an elite brotherhood just 750 strong who every year captivate our minds and our hearts playing a child’s game on a very grown-up stage. But for every Major League Baseball team that takes the field each night, there is another team working behind the scenes to make sure every game goes off without a hitch – for the players and the fans. They are the Hidden Heroes of baseball – and these are their stories.
For Video Production Company Owner Josh Birt, The Road Less Traveled Leads to Success
Josh Birt was 18 years-old the first time he saw Pittsburgh. The Steel City was a pass through on a cross country bicycle trip he and two of his best friends were taking to celebrate graduating from high school in their native Spokane, Washington. “At the time I thought, ‘Man, why would anyone want to live here?’,” he laughed, while seated behind a conference table in the office of his video production company on McKnight Road. That was in 2000.
Fate brought him to Pittsburgh two more times – once for a national wrestling competition and once for a recruiting trip to the University of Pittsburgh before he acquiesced and decided to make the city his home. “It was kind of this weird thing, sort of like I was destined to come here,” he said.
Birt’s 45-day bike trip, during which he and his friends developed a new level of mental toughness and learned to rely on themselves as well as the kindness of strangers serves a symbol of the unconventional path he’s taken in his successful career. A career that’s led him not just to PNC Park and McKechnie Field, but to the hometowns of Pittsburgh Pirates players in the US and abroad and anywhere else the Pirates video needs sends him.
Birt’s video production company, Josh Birt Productions, contracts with the Pittsburgh Pirates to film, produce and edit commercials and other media for the team. That includes the commercials aired on Root Sports Pittsburgh during the season featuring players, upcoming giveaway items like bobbleheads or t-shirts and special promotional celebrations like Faith Night or Pup Nights. In addition, Josh and his team edit and produce videos and spots shot in-house by Pirates Productions and work on special videos used internally and broadcast television shows.
“The Pittsburgh Pirates have a lot of people to reach out to through varying levels of communication from social media to broad broadcasting,” said Pittsburgh Pirates Media Producer Ken Brown, who heads up all of Pirates Productions work. “Josh is my number one. I funnel everything through him. I don’t have to second guess him, he and I easily click.”
Brown, an industry veteran with close to 40 years of experience in film/video production, has been Birt’s mentor for about 10 years, dating back to a time when Brown ran his own production company and was looking for a freelancer to help with some editing for a client. The two worked together on that project and Brown, seeing Birt’s maturity, work ethic and drive to succeed, began using him regularly for projects. Including work with the Pirates.
“When Josh first started in this business, I met him at McDonald’s and we talked about working with a very high profile client of mine at the time. I realized that this was a guy with an ‘old production soul’,” Brown said. “That may not mean anything to most people, but there’s a certain mindset in the world of production where the young people who are in the business now don’t have the same type of mindset for hard work that the older guys like myself have been through. Josh, even as young as he is, developed an old mindset early on.”
Old Production Soul
An accomplished wrestler who won a national title as a freshman at his junior college in Idaho, Birt soon found himself at Pitt on a full wrestling scholarship. Mid-way through his junior year, he decided to pursue formal education in film.
“I was really interested in film and video stuff,” he said. “Even growing up I really liked movies and we loved making our own little videos.”
He took classes through Pittsburgh Filmmaker’s and graduated from Pitt with a Bachelor of Arts degree and a minor in Film Studies.
[perfectpullquote align=”right” cite=”Ken Brown” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]It is Birt’s ability to work with clients, high profile and not, that makes him the perfect go-to guy for the Pittsburgh Pirates[/perfectpullquote]While still in school, acting upon an introduction from a friend, he started interning with Nick Padezan, owner of NPV Productions.
“I told him I didn’t really know much about the things he was doing, but I wanted to work,” Birt said. “I ended up learning a lot from him and got really excited about video production too.”
From 2005-2009 Birt freelanced for Padezan, Brown and local video producer Vince Sebal, who employed him for about two years to shoot videos for attorneys for a company called Legal Eye LLC. It was when work with that company was winding down that Brown told Birt he was taking a full-time job as Media Producer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. As luck would have it, he needed some help editing commercials, which was Birt’s specialty at the time.
“Josh was my mainstay in my production company, so it would be a natural fit for me to just drag him along when I moved on, too,” Brown said. “For me, I’m all about lifting as I climb.”
And climb they have.
Surprise and Delight
Since Birt’s first formal contract with the Pirates in 2010, he has partnered with Brown, under the direction of Pirates Senior Director, Marketing and Special Events Brian Chiera for some very memorable commercials and videos for the team.
Pittsburgh Pirates fans may remember the series of ‘Surprise and Delight” spots that aired in 2015 featuring Pirates players showing up at various locations throughout Pittsburgh to surprise fans. As fun as they were to watch, Birt revealed that they were tough shoots to pull off.
The spot in which second baseman Josh Harrison served customers through a Dunkin Donuts drive-through took a lot of pre-planning. “With something like that, you have to be prepared for any situation,” he explained.
[mlbvideo id=”380090083″ width=”400″ height=”224″ /]To pull off the shoot, he and Brown scouted the location and talked through every step of the process, from where cameras would be needed to film the customers’ reactions to how long they would have to execute the mission. Birt then put together a crew he was confident could execute their vision and pulled together the necessary equipment.
In an effort to ensure that Pirates fans, who would likely recognize Harrison and be both surprised and delighted he was serving them a cup of coffee and a donut, would show up to the location, the Pirates dropped a little hint on social media to stop by the Wexford Dunkin Donuts that day at noon for a “Special Pirate Donut”.
It ended up being an Instagram post that will go down in Pirates history.
For the 2016 commercials, which featured players on a visible film set in front of a green screen with images projected behind them, the end product was initially a completely different concept.
Brown, who Birt calls “crazy creative,” begins working with his production team and Josh on ideas for spots for the next season at the end of the season at hand. So, by the time PirateFest rolls around in mid-December, they are ready to test out those concepts with players, Birt explained. They get a room at the convention center and set it up for the shoot to determine if they concept is feasible.
“Whatever our concept is, we’ll test it out there first. Then refine it and do the actual shooting in Bradenton during Spring Training,” he said.
As it happened during the test shoot during PirateFest 2015, they had a primarily photo-based concept in mind. Birt’s photographer, Adrian Brown, was snapping images of players as the crew was moving a camera along a dolly track to get it into position for PSAs they were also shooting with players that day.
“The lightbulb kind of went off and Ken and I were both like – That would be a good commercial, just using the photos and shooting video that was kind of behind the scenes showing the set with the player standing in front of the green screen, so things can be projected onto it while he’s getting his photo taken,” Birt said. “And a lot of times that’s how it happens.”
Here now is an Andrew Mccutchen Spot (courtesy of the Pittsburgh Pirates on Vimeo.)
[vimeo 187467218 w=640 h=360]
CLICK HERE for more on Birt and the Pittsburgh Pirates productions.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
