Washington Post Video
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From last to first: The rise of the Washington Nationals
The Washington Post’s Barry Svrluga, Chico Harlan, Adam Kilgore, James Wagner and columnist Thomas Boswell recall the journey of the Washington Nationals since the team moved from Montreal to winning its first division title in 79 years, and all the good and bad moments in between.
The Washington Nationals have had an incredible season, capped by winning the National League East pennant on Monday night. But for a video that covered the history of team, I wanted to show how much making the playoffs is pretty remarkable for the Nats, that had over 100 losses only three seasons ago.
I interviewed current and former Nationals beat writers for The Post, as well as columnist Thomas Boswell about the defining moments in the team’s history. I gathered photos and newspaper pages from the Post’s archive, looking for images and headlines that captured the team’s defining moments through the years. We worked with Major League Baseball to gather footage of the team’s highlights (and lowlights) throughout their 8 seasons, and I can’t say enough about how helpful they were in quickly filling our requests.
The Nationals pennant means a lot to Washingtonians, especially those who were here when the Senators left for Minnesota, or grew up without a team altogether. As a fan of a different NL East team (which, for journalism’s sake, shall remain nameless), I know how much baseball can mean to a city, and I hope the Nationals first playoff appearance can make D.C. a baseball city again.Jayne Orenstein/The Washington Post
You can watch more Nationals video here, or go to washingtonpost.com/video for more visual journalism, and don’t forget to follow the whole team on twitter via @postvideo.
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Departures and Arrivals
Sadly we said goodbye (albeit temporarily) a few weeks ago to Alexandra Garcia. Alex is a driving creative force in our department, but she decided to take that talent elsewhere for a few months, namely to Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship.
But our video department is also fortunate to be growing here at WashingtonPost.com, and a few weeks ago we added multimedia journalist Brad Horn to our videojournalist staff. Right off the bat Brad has been pushing the envelope with video, and below, he talks about two of his favorite he’s done so far:
Modern zoos balance ecological conservation and fun
For this story I was sent to illustrate an article for the Washington Post Magazine - a sprawling piece on the competing forces at modern zoos. Since the topic was kind of cerebral and I knew I would be interviewing an articulate zookeeper who spoke with precision, I decided I needed to lighten things up a bit. So I asked a precocious six-year-old named Mario to give me a tour of the zoo, and he actually wound up illustrating many of the points the zookeeper was making (namely that there’s a constant tension between animal welfare and zoo-goer satisfaction).
Now this next one was a little ridiculous, I admit it. If we ever have a beer together I’ll tell you the whole sordid tale. Getting this story involved getting pretty much booted out of National’s Park and having my press pass revoked. My lawyers have advised me not to comment further on the matter at this time.
Nationals make ‘The Rough Rider’ a hapless loser
But oh campy day! I can tell you a little about the song - “Teddy Roosevelt (The Ballad of)” by The Black Irish Band - and some of the thinking behind how it was used. I knew the piece would be lighthearted since it’s a pretty silly topic, and I wanted to use music to play off that idea. But I didn’t want to use official music (yes, the Nationals’ “President’s Race” has an official theme song) or canned music, since both options seemed predictable and therefore awful. So I found this campy and awesome and altogether perfect song on YouTube and wrote the band to ask for permission. The songwriter literally lived on top of a mountain in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains but through the evil miracle of smartphones he was able to get my email asking for permission to use the song and he agreed. The “song lyric on a card” thing was inspired by a Dylan video for his song Subterranean Homesick Blues and it obviously wasn’t 100% effective because I couldn’t find thick cardstock like Dylan used, and instead had to use flimsy paper.
