The Cathedral Catholic High School student body watched in awe as the varsity football team’s highlight video premiered during the fall rally. This video, shot and edited by students Alex Tavares ‘20 and Matthew Kirven ‘20, has become viral within the CCHS community, gaining almost 2,000 views on the football’s Instagram page.

“The football coach asked a couple of us to film and help with the media for the football team,” Kirven said. “Alex and I undertook this project and throughout this season we have created several videos for the CCHS instagram account, leading us to create the video for the rally.”

Tavares and Kirven, film enthusiasts, create videos and spend countless hours editing their clips. Kirven got into filmmaking when he was younger after he viewed a YouTube video, and he now enjoys the filmmaking class at CCHS. Kirven hopes to balance school and make videos with the ultimate goal to create a blockbuster movie.

Tavares films with his GoPro and experiments with various ways to create clips. His previous experience of making videos for his lacrosse team helped him transition to creating videos for the CCHS football team.

“We were never really asked about our videos, but it all started last year when I had to sit for half a season during lacrosse because I was a transfer student,” Tavares said. “So I took that time to film some games and make a lacrosse edit. For the spring rally ASB got the idea to start showing little shots of each sporting event, and they reached out to the spring teams.

“My video ended up blowing up and doing a lot better than I expected, and soon after the football guys were asking me to make them an edit for the upcoming season.”

The process of producing the final video was grueling and required an exceptional amount of time, according to Kirven.

“I went to almost every game and filmed them,” Kirven said. “I then sifted through hours of footage and cut it down to the good shots for each game, and it took around 10 hours to edit everything else.”

Tavares and Kirven had the difficult decision of what to cut and what to keep when editing the video. The plethora of footage recorded needed to be trimmed to a few minutes for the final product.

“We had over 900 clips by the time we started the rally edit, and Matthew was able to go through all of them, color code them based on play, and delete the bad videos,” Tavares said. “Then we put in touchdowns and big plays and matched it with the music and finalized it.”

The video impressed CCHS varsity kicker Ian Hawkins ‘20, who is interested in seeing similar videos.

“I think it was a very well-edited video done by Alex and Matthew,” Hawkins said. “Everyone was talking about the video and saying how good it was.”

The videos promotes school spirit and CCHS could really benefit by having students make similar videos, Hawkins said.

“I would like to see more of these videos,” Hawkins said. “They are cool to watch, and I feel like it makes people want to come watch our games.”

Although Tavares and Kirven spent a tremendous amount of time and effort creating the video, the elated reactions of the video by the CCHS students and the football players justified its production, Tavares said.

“[Video editing] is not an easy task,” Tavares said. “The process was time consuming, and I am glad everyone enjoyed the final product. The appreciation was a nice payoff.”