Production Notes
Colin Sprigg’s short film was self financed, augmented by a 10% contribution from Kickstarter friends. The film was shot with the RED One digital 4K camera by cinematographer Deland Nuse. Deland is an adjunct professor at UCLA film studies program. His prior experience filming an award winning baseball short film called The Showdown caught Colin’s eye very early on. Thankfully, Deland was the first member to join Colin’s production team for The Pitch.
The producers of the film included Colin Sprigg, Marti Perhach, San-San Onglatco, Kate Rees Davies, and Colin’s parents Bill and Deanna Sprigg. Marti was essential for all the pre-production and production details leading through the first half of filming. San-San, as the line producer, was responsible for planning all aspects of crew and equipment. Kate helped with pre-production and production details, and lead the casting of the wonderful lead Belinda Gosbee as ‘Mom’, and the two young ‘Madisons’ (Illone and Ane Hansen). The Hansen's uncanny timing of joining the cast a couple of days before filming, and their resemblance to Madelyn Sprigg was surreal. Bill and Deanna Sprigg coordinated the production details for the second half of production, and took care of in-house catering for three days of filming. The extraordinary amount of work completed by all of these producers made for a strong team and the high quality embedded within The Pitch.
The Pitch was inspired by experiences co-mingled at the right time and place in the life of writer and director Colin Sprigg. First, Colin’s direct experiences as softball manger of his daughters’ All-Star teams were paramount. All of the young girls in the film came directly from Colin’s real teams. Coupled with experiences gained from the ebb and flow of married life with four children, this fictional story took hold. While not autobiographical, its fair to say enough truth gleaned from sports and family relationships found its way into the magical story of The Pitch.
The Pitch is a story about a father and “Coach” played by Patrick Mulderigg. Coach is the father of young Pitcher Madison Halley, and manager of her championship team The Comets. Writer/Director Colin Sprigg’s daughter, Madelyn Sprigg, played the young protagonist Madison Halley. She was ten years of age at the time of the filming.
Colin says that he did not intend to cast his daughter in the lead role because his film program's caution was the downfall of many student films is the “acting.” With that in mind, Colin planned to tryout real actors for the young lead. However, realizing the odds of any actor being a real softball pitcher, Colin reconsidered Madelyn. Colin says he told Madelyn, “If you’d like to try-out for the part you can, but you will have to study for the part, take lessons and practice. I can’t give you the part if you can’t act.” Madelyn agreed to work hard to learn. Both Patrick Mulderigg and Belinda Gosbee, the professional lead actors in The Pitch, were gracious to provide lessons to Madelyn prior to the shoot. Because the film’s underlying subject matter touched elements of Madelyn’s real experiences on and off the field, Madelyn found she could really just be herself. Madelyn’s performance came through just as Colin had envisioned. Colin is very proud of his daughter’s accomplishment and blessed of the special time spent with each other throughout the making of The Pitch.
Making a film is an unbelievable tax on everyone’s time and effort. This is especially true for the main filmmaker who must handhold their film through every phase of its development with persistence, focus and commitment. As a result, a lot of time is taken that would be otherwise given to the family. Colin said his film production efforts is named Madlon Peremni Co which represents the first few letters of each family member’s first name. Everyone sacrificed to make this film happen, either directly or indirectly. It was not easy to fit the making of this film into our busy lives.
Surprisingly, a major influence on Colin’s vision for The Pitch was the 1976 baseball classic The Bad News Bears. Colin says that this film, like the Pitch, is a story about a father (like)-daughter relationship that plays out on the baseball field. Do you remember the climatic scene when Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) rejected Amanda (Tatum O’Neil) in the dugout? That moment directly influenced the climatic scene between Madison and Coach in The Pitch.
The Bad News Bears inspired the imagery within The Pitch. Colin studied each edit of the Bears film to learn how the camera could be situated to capture various baseball sequences. After months of weekly study at UCLA in Westwood and being engrossed in this classic film, Colin learned something special about the Bad News Bears. There is a community baseball field in plain view that Colin fondly observed each week he traveled to UCLA at the 405 Freeway and Wilshire exit. Colin learned the name of that field was The Bad News Bears Field. The writer of the Bad News Bears, Bill Lancaster the son of Burt Lancaster, actually played baseball there as a child, which in turn inspired his dead-on insights for the script he wrote for the Bears film. The synchronicity of it all lead Colin to pay homage to Bill Lancaster in The Pitch. At the end of The Pitch the old-time baseball legend says to Madison and Coach, “Little Billy Lancaster is scheduled to Bear some Bad News next week and could use a little help staying in the strike zone.” The audience of course does not know who Bill Lancaster is (until now), but Madison Halley did, as she said to her father, “He’s a pitcher, like me.” For Madison, Billy Lancaster was another kid like herself that the baseball legend was going to help in some special magical way.
The final selection of Patrick Mulderigg as Madison’s father was also influenced, to a degree, by his resemblance to Walter Matthau. Colin originally envisioned Madison’s father to have similar hair and eye color. Patrick’s talent as an actor though quickly changed Colin’s thinking. Colin met Patrick as a fellow student at UCLA’s advanced film program. When the professor of those classes frequently asked for volunteers to “act out a scene” Patrick’s was the first hand to rise. Over time, Colin came to see this former Navy Seal with a penchant for tough and shoot’em up type roles, as the perfect person to be play Madison’s father “coach” tough on his child and in sports, which accentuated the tender moments that Patrick gave at the end of the film.
Colin says that sometimes as coaches of youth sports, us fathers get too wrapped up in the outcome of the game. We can forget about the bigger picture of our players just having a positive life enhancing experience, win or lose. As a coach, I’ve been there. We can take the outcome of our efforts very personal. Also, as most fathers of softball pitchers know, hundreds of hours of practice are required outside of the normal schedule of games and team practices in order to emerge as a viable pitcher. As parents who put those hours into their children’s efforts it’s easy to become wrapped up in the games’ outcome and in the success of our children on the field. Coach represents that kind of parent. Patrick did an excellent job with the whole environment and mind-set of the very competitive coach.
The artistic efforts behind The Pitch are noteworthy. A lot of effort went into the color palette throughout the film. The film is a blue and yellow accented film set on a backdrop of green grass and brown baseball dirt. Colin painted the interior walls of his home shades of yellow and green, the sport’s announcer booth shades of green, his home’s exterior was already green (thank god), and so was his SUV. All the character’s clothing were some shade of blue or yellow. The mother’s assigned color was blue throughout the film, and the father’s yellow. As scenes become increasing intense between the mother and father, so did the darkening shades of their clothing.
The field located in Diamond Bar California (Pantera Park) was a gorgeous backdrop of green hills and grass. The uniforms for Madison’s team, The Comets, were UCLA blue, with yellow accents. Yes, this was in part a plug for my school. But more than anything, the blue just looked awesome against the backdrop of green grass as evidenced by the film’s movie poster. All of the artwork was a collaboration between Colin and Paulette Sorahaindo, a professional artist who lives next-door and working on establishing herself as an animator in Hollywood.
The uniforms were the most expensive props in the film. Each uniform was custom made for each player. The teams’ logos were designed by a graphic artist and embroidered on the jersey fronts. The Comet’s logo included an unfurling tail with the words “Destiny Calls” within. Destiny Calls is also found on the film’s poster under the title The Pitch. There are a few meanings of “Destiny Calls.” First, the question exists about the destiny of protagonist Madison Halley. The problems that confront Madison in the film are to be life-altering one way or the other, and thus Madison’s destiny is in the balance. The second meaning relates to the Comet’s second baseman named Destiny. She has not spoken in public since kindergarten, and at the climax of the film she is confronted with a need to “speak up” or “call” in order to save the game. The third meaning surrounds Coach’s own destiny that Madison ends up shaping at the end of the film.
A very close observer, with some experience in astronomy, will probably pick-up on the fact that protagonist Madison Halley shares the same last name as the famous “Halley’s Comet.” In fact, Madison’s jersey number is 76 and represents the number of years its takes Halley’s Comet to return to the earth. There is no specific meaning to her last name within the film other than the effort to augment the magical theme interwoven in the film. Producer Marti Perhach and her daughter Amie had a lot to do with the Comet’s becoming the name of Madison’s team. Before the invention of the telescope, “Comets” that appeared out of nowhere were usually considered bad omens, or of a coming catastrophe.
Each player on the Comet’s was given the last name of other famous comets. They took jersey numbers of their respective comet’s orbital periods. The various comet names were embroidered on the back of each Comet’s jersey for the film. It’s a bit of the fun we had making the film that most people will probably need a little help from these production notes to become aware. It’s a subtle effort by design to add to the mystic of the film and the character of the old baseball legend that, like a Comet, came to visit Madison Halley.
Colin Sprigg completed the film's music over a seven-month period. Colin says the most difficult part of the film making process was the creation of the film’s score. He admits he severely under estimated the time required to create the kind of score he desired. There were twelve cues in the film. To write and record a single cue, it took about a complete weekend that started immediately upon his return home from work on Friday evening and into the early morning hours, at sun-up again and till very late each subsequent night, before it was time to go to work on Monday morning. After seven months, two screen test periods, and several cue rewrites, the music was finally composed and recorded on the piano, and ready for orchestration for strings and brass.
Colin’s plan from the beginning was to orchestrate the cues for a real orchestra in the style of Thomas Newman. Colin’s first Kickstarter campaign was specific to this effort, but it failed early on. The lack of funds, and Colin’s inexperience in orchestrating slowed his effort considerably. Colin engaged in orchestration courses at home and purchased professional sample libraries to complete the job himself.
Luck had it, that one evening a friend associated Colin's wife Geni, came over with her family for dinner. The husband and wife were both musicians: the wife a violinist in a local orchestra, and her husband a musical doctoral student and the Director of Bands at Long Beach State, CA. After showing the film to the music Director, and without prompting, his first words to Colin were, "You know, you might think about not orchestrating the music." The music Director went on to explain the piano music was very good on its own, intimate and lonely, and that it best matched the journey of the film’s young protagonist Madison Halley. Colin thought about these words for many days and decided that he agreed that the solo piano does best tell the story of Madison Halley.
Colin’s vision of integrating a cinematic orchestral music score was hard to let go, but it was in the the best decision of the film. In light of the fact that many of the current top 40 hits today are simply voice and piano, without the other pop instruments getting in the way, Colin thought maybe the time was right to feature the solo piano in a film designed to be cinematic like The Pitch. "We’ll have to see what festival judges think going forward.", says Colin. Musical influences for the score of The Pitch were mainly the music of Thomas Newman and included the study on songs such as Finding Nemo, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, The Unfortunate Events of Lemony Snicket, among others. Many of the Newman songs shared a time meter of ¾ which Colin attempted to also maintain throughout The Pitch.
The producers of the film included Colin Sprigg, Marti Perhach, San-San Onglatco, Kate Rees Davies, and Colin’s parents Bill and Deanna Sprigg. Marti was essential for all the pre-production and production details leading through the first half of filming. San-San, as the line producer, was responsible for planning all aspects of crew and equipment. Kate helped with pre-production and production details, and lead the casting of the wonderful lead Belinda Gosbee as ‘Mom’, and the two young ‘Madisons’ (Illone and Ane Hansen). The Hansen's uncanny timing of joining the cast a couple of days before filming, and their resemblance to Madelyn Sprigg was surreal. Bill and Deanna Sprigg coordinated the production details for the second half of production, and took care of in-house catering for three days of filming. The extraordinary amount of work completed by all of these producers made for a strong team and the high quality embedded within The Pitch.
The Pitch was inspired by experiences co-mingled at the right time and place in the life of writer and director Colin Sprigg. First, Colin’s direct experiences as softball manger of his daughters’ All-Star teams were paramount. All of the young girls in the film came directly from Colin’s real teams. Coupled with experiences gained from the ebb and flow of married life with four children, this fictional story took hold. While not autobiographical, its fair to say enough truth gleaned from sports and family relationships found its way into the magical story of The Pitch.
The Pitch is a story about a father and “Coach” played by Patrick Mulderigg. Coach is the father of young Pitcher Madison Halley, and manager of her championship team The Comets. Writer/Director Colin Sprigg’s daughter, Madelyn Sprigg, played the young protagonist Madison Halley. She was ten years of age at the time of the filming.
Colin says that he did not intend to cast his daughter in the lead role because his film program's caution was the downfall of many student films is the “acting.” With that in mind, Colin planned to tryout real actors for the young lead. However, realizing the odds of any actor being a real softball pitcher, Colin reconsidered Madelyn. Colin says he told Madelyn, “If you’d like to try-out for the part you can, but you will have to study for the part, take lessons and practice. I can’t give you the part if you can’t act.” Madelyn agreed to work hard to learn. Both Patrick Mulderigg and Belinda Gosbee, the professional lead actors in The Pitch, were gracious to provide lessons to Madelyn prior to the shoot. Because the film’s underlying subject matter touched elements of Madelyn’s real experiences on and off the field, Madelyn found she could really just be herself. Madelyn’s performance came through just as Colin had envisioned. Colin is very proud of his daughter’s accomplishment and blessed of the special time spent with each other throughout the making of The Pitch.
Making a film is an unbelievable tax on everyone’s time and effort. This is especially true for the main filmmaker who must handhold their film through every phase of its development with persistence, focus and commitment. As a result, a lot of time is taken that would be otherwise given to the family. Colin said his film production efforts is named Madlon Peremni Co which represents the first few letters of each family member’s first name. Everyone sacrificed to make this film happen, either directly or indirectly. It was not easy to fit the making of this film into our busy lives.
Surprisingly, a major influence on Colin’s vision for The Pitch was the 1976 baseball classic The Bad News Bears. Colin says that this film, like the Pitch, is a story about a father (like)-daughter relationship that plays out on the baseball field. Do you remember the climatic scene when Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) rejected Amanda (Tatum O’Neil) in the dugout? That moment directly influenced the climatic scene between Madison and Coach in The Pitch.
The Bad News Bears inspired the imagery within The Pitch. Colin studied each edit of the Bears film to learn how the camera could be situated to capture various baseball sequences. After months of weekly study at UCLA in Westwood and being engrossed in this classic film, Colin learned something special about the Bad News Bears. There is a community baseball field in plain view that Colin fondly observed each week he traveled to UCLA at the 405 Freeway and Wilshire exit. Colin learned the name of that field was The Bad News Bears Field. The writer of the Bad News Bears, Bill Lancaster the son of Burt Lancaster, actually played baseball there as a child, which in turn inspired his dead-on insights for the script he wrote for the Bears film. The synchronicity of it all lead Colin to pay homage to Bill Lancaster in The Pitch. At the end of The Pitch the old-time baseball legend says to Madison and Coach, “Little Billy Lancaster is scheduled to Bear some Bad News next week and could use a little help staying in the strike zone.” The audience of course does not know who Bill Lancaster is (until now), but Madison Halley did, as she said to her father, “He’s a pitcher, like me.” For Madison, Billy Lancaster was another kid like herself that the baseball legend was going to help in some special magical way.
The final selection of Patrick Mulderigg as Madison’s father was also influenced, to a degree, by his resemblance to Walter Matthau. Colin originally envisioned Madison’s father to have similar hair and eye color. Patrick’s talent as an actor though quickly changed Colin’s thinking. Colin met Patrick as a fellow student at UCLA’s advanced film program. When the professor of those classes frequently asked for volunteers to “act out a scene” Patrick’s was the first hand to rise. Over time, Colin came to see this former Navy Seal with a penchant for tough and shoot’em up type roles, as the perfect person to be play Madison’s father “coach” tough on his child and in sports, which accentuated the tender moments that Patrick gave at the end of the film.
Colin says that sometimes as coaches of youth sports, us fathers get too wrapped up in the outcome of the game. We can forget about the bigger picture of our players just having a positive life enhancing experience, win or lose. As a coach, I’ve been there. We can take the outcome of our efforts very personal. Also, as most fathers of softball pitchers know, hundreds of hours of practice are required outside of the normal schedule of games and team practices in order to emerge as a viable pitcher. As parents who put those hours into their children’s efforts it’s easy to become wrapped up in the games’ outcome and in the success of our children on the field. Coach represents that kind of parent. Patrick did an excellent job with the whole environment and mind-set of the very competitive coach.
The artistic efforts behind The Pitch are noteworthy. A lot of effort went into the color palette throughout the film. The film is a blue and yellow accented film set on a backdrop of green grass and brown baseball dirt. Colin painted the interior walls of his home shades of yellow and green, the sport’s announcer booth shades of green, his home’s exterior was already green (thank god), and so was his SUV. All the character’s clothing were some shade of blue or yellow. The mother’s assigned color was blue throughout the film, and the father’s yellow. As scenes become increasing intense between the mother and father, so did the darkening shades of their clothing.
The field located in Diamond Bar California (Pantera Park) was a gorgeous backdrop of green hills and grass. The uniforms for Madison’s team, The Comets, were UCLA blue, with yellow accents. Yes, this was in part a plug for my school. But more than anything, the blue just looked awesome against the backdrop of green grass as evidenced by the film’s movie poster. All of the artwork was a collaboration between Colin and Paulette Sorahaindo, a professional artist who lives next-door and working on establishing herself as an animator in Hollywood.
The uniforms were the most expensive props in the film. Each uniform was custom made for each player. The teams’ logos were designed by a graphic artist and embroidered on the jersey fronts. The Comet’s logo included an unfurling tail with the words “Destiny Calls” within. Destiny Calls is also found on the film’s poster under the title The Pitch. There are a few meanings of “Destiny Calls.” First, the question exists about the destiny of protagonist Madison Halley. The problems that confront Madison in the film are to be life-altering one way or the other, and thus Madison’s destiny is in the balance. The second meaning relates to the Comet’s second baseman named Destiny. She has not spoken in public since kindergarten, and at the climax of the film she is confronted with a need to “speak up” or “call” in order to save the game. The third meaning surrounds Coach’s own destiny that Madison ends up shaping at the end of the film.
A very close observer, with some experience in astronomy, will probably pick-up on the fact that protagonist Madison Halley shares the same last name as the famous “Halley’s Comet.” In fact, Madison’s jersey number is 76 and represents the number of years its takes Halley’s Comet to return to the earth. There is no specific meaning to her last name within the film other than the effort to augment the magical theme interwoven in the film. Producer Marti Perhach and her daughter Amie had a lot to do with the Comet’s becoming the name of Madison’s team. Before the invention of the telescope, “Comets” that appeared out of nowhere were usually considered bad omens, or of a coming catastrophe.
Each player on the Comet’s was given the last name of other famous comets. They took jersey numbers of their respective comet’s orbital periods. The various comet names were embroidered on the back of each Comet’s jersey for the film. It’s a bit of the fun we had making the film that most people will probably need a little help from these production notes to become aware. It’s a subtle effort by design to add to the mystic of the film and the character of the old baseball legend that, like a Comet, came to visit Madison Halley.
Colin Sprigg completed the film's music over a seven-month period. Colin says the most difficult part of the film making process was the creation of the film’s score. He admits he severely under estimated the time required to create the kind of score he desired. There were twelve cues in the film. To write and record a single cue, it took about a complete weekend that started immediately upon his return home from work on Friday evening and into the early morning hours, at sun-up again and till very late each subsequent night, before it was time to go to work on Monday morning. After seven months, two screen test periods, and several cue rewrites, the music was finally composed and recorded on the piano, and ready for orchestration for strings and brass.
Colin’s plan from the beginning was to orchestrate the cues for a real orchestra in the style of Thomas Newman. Colin’s first Kickstarter campaign was specific to this effort, but it failed early on. The lack of funds, and Colin’s inexperience in orchestrating slowed his effort considerably. Colin engaged in orchestration courses at home and purchased professional sample libraries to complete the job himself.
Luck had it, that one evening a friend associated Colin's wife Geni, came over with her family for dinner. The husband and wife were both musicians: the wife a violinist in a local orchestra, and her husband a musical doctoral student and the Director of Bands at Long Beach State, CA. After showing the film to the music Director, and without prompting, his first words to Colin were, "You know, you might think about not orchestrating the music." The music Director went on to explain the piano music was very good on its own, intimate and lonely, and that it best matched the journey of the film’s young protagonist Madison Halley. Colin thought about these words for many days and decided that he agreed that the solo piano does best tell the story of Madison Halley.
Colin’s vision of integrating a cinematic orchestral music score was hard to let go, but it was in the the best decision of the film. In light of the fact that many of the current top 40 hits today are simply voice and piano, without the other pop instruments getting in the way, Colin thought maybe the time was right to feature the solo piano in a film designed to be cinematic like The Pitch. "We’ll have to see what festival judges think going forward.", says Colin. Musical influences for the score of The Pitch were mainly the music of Thomas Newman and included the study on songs such as Finding Nemo, The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, The Unfortunate Events of Lemony Snicket, among others. Many of the Newman songs shared a time meter of ¾ which Colin attempted to also maintain throughout The Pitch.
