GoPro: Professional Freestyle Soccer with Indi Cowie

Freestyle soccer wasn’t always the plan.

In this GoPro Original Story, we wanted to show the world something new. We could have easily just made an exciting video with some incredible shots and cool music, but we had to raise the bar. GoPro was born from authenticity, and that’s the part of Indi we wanted to capture.

Indi Cowie is a professional soccer freestyler, 3x Guinness world record holder, Nike athlete, and so much more. Her excitement, passion and enthusiasm is infectious, and always with a positive attitude. This story was shot by my friend and co-worker, the talented Demitrius Omphroy. Utilizing prototype GoPro Fusion cameras (pre-release) and GoPro Hero 6 cameras with ultra slow motion capabilities gave a lot of creative freedom in editing.

I was responsible for the creative approach in post production. I wanted to create a comprehensive story that was true to Indi’s experiences, while simultaneously keeping a thematic approach that was similar to what Indi describes. After watching you’ll see she talks about it being a sport, and an art-form – ‘you have to let the creative juices flow!’ This served as the inspiration for some unique compositing and graphic opportunities.

After looking through all the footage and listening to Indi’s interview – it was clear there was a great story to tell. I contacted her and asked for archival assets – photos, videos, family, etc. Since many of the photos and video were from the 90’s (before HD) I wanted to figure out a unique way to display it without scaling to HD and seeing nothing but pixel blobs. After playing around in After Effects for a little while I came up with a treatment that I liked. I knew I wanted to play with time. We had some incredible footage shot in a variety of modes and frame rates on the Hero 6. Anything from 4K 60 frames per second to 1080 at 240 frames per second. This meant finding music that was not over-the-top and not driving the story, but supplementing it.

Once the music was decided, the real fun began. This was where everything came together. I had the story structure, the audio bytes, the visuals, the music – now time to work some magic. To do this was a mixture of playing around in Photoshoop, After Effects, and Premiere.

The end result is a fun video that tells the story of a young female athlete, how she has overcome struggle, re-written her dreams and persevered through challenging times.

As always, I’m humbled by the opportunity to tell these stories and have such incredible content to work with.

For more on Indi, checkout her website, and follow on instagram @indicowie

Also be sure to check out the latest videos we’re putting out over here at GoPro.

-Alex