Class project spurs ISU student’s rising video career

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on the work at Cyclones.tv by Iowa State University student Evan Nielsen of Creston.

AMES — A random conversation, spawned in part out of boredom, changed Evan Nielsen’s life in April.

He had a rapidly approaching deadline for a photography class coming up, but he wanted to “tweak” it by making it a video project. As a manager for the Iowa State University football team, the 2014 graduate of Creston High School was on the sideline while the team went through plays in a spring practice session.

Next to him on that day was a new employee of the ISU football team, brought over from Toledo, Ohio, by new head coach Matt Campbell. He was holding a video camera, getting footage for the coaches to review.

“I was literally holding a chain on the sideline at practice,” said Nielsen, starting his junior year at ISU today. “I was part of the chain gang. Ted Wilhelm, the director of new media, was next to me and I saw him taking pictures and doing video. I just started talking to him, asking him about his camera. I told him I had this project I want to do for a class and asked if he could help. He asked me, ‘Can we use it?’ I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s what I was wanting to happen!’”

Wilhelm helped Nielsen get the players and setup arranged for his class video titled, “A Storm is Brewing” about ISU football.

What transpired during a three-day period during finals week opened huge professional doors for Nielsen. He is now a student assistant in the office of Cyclones.tv and considered a rising star in the mind of John Walters, ISU’s director of broadcasting and 14-year play-by-play announcer for ISU football and basketball.

It was the Cyclones.tv office where Nielsen landed in hopes of getting the video converted to an MP4 file so it could be posted online through social media sites. The video is a mix of players working in drills, “storm” images to go with the Cyclone theme and music background including a subtle piano version of the Cyclone fight song provided by Nielsen’s Creston and ISU classmate Logan Angelo. It’s designed like a movie trailer to entice interest in the upcoming ISU football season.

Instant impression

Employees in the Cyclones.tv office were immediately impressed when they viewed the video. It wasn’t long before Nielsen was a student employee there, and his football managing days were left behind. (Angelo now fields one of those managing positions, and Nielsen’s brother Alex is a volunteer student assistant for the Cyclone football recruiting office.)

“Evan came to Tyler Rutherford, our director of digital media, and said he need a little bit of help finishing up this video project that he was doing,” said Walters, who teams with analyst Eric Heft for another season of Cyclone football broadcasts Sept. 3 against Northern Iowa. “Once Tyler saw the video and just how good it was, he said ‘Holy mackerel, we have to hire this guy!’ We were right in the middle of hiring students for the coming year. He said he was going to reach out to Evan. That’s how it all got started.”

Dani Orris, media production manager, who has done many of the Cyclone “hit tapes” in recent years for ISU football, and Austin Minnihan, media production specialist, were especially impressed with the quality of Nielsen’s class project.

“Dani and Austin, who does our graphics, have a real appreciation for the creative work you can do with video, whereas my role is more as a reporter,” Walters said. “When all of us looked at Evan’s video, we just said, ‘Wow, this is really something great.’ We knew it would go viral, and it did.”

Fans can find that video online on YouTube at http://bit.ly/2brpgKb. His follow-up video on summer workouts is available at http://bit.ly/2b93ay7. A sequel to his first video on the upcoming football season will be released this week.

Once the first video was posted on the ISU athletics website – www.cyclones.com – along with Facebook and Twitter sites for ISU athletics and ISU football, the popularity of the video featuring players Joel Lanning, Mike Warren and Demond Tucker quickly spread. To date, it has been viewed nearly 1 million times worldwide.

“It’s kind of crazy,” Nielsen said. “I owe it all to my class instructor, a graduate assistant, who let me try videography in the photography class. Featuring Cyclone athletics in a video is always something I wanted to do, and he let me go for it. We filmed it in two days and after I got the footage I went back to my house and started editing it. I stayed up all night editing the whole thing. That morning I came up here (ISU athletic offices) and started asking people how to get it converted so it could be posted. The next day, Tyler Rutherford sent me a huge email trying to convince me to come to work for Cyclones.tv.”

Rare network

Iowa State is one of just three universities in the nation with its own athletics television network. The others are Texas and Brigham Young.

Cyclones.tv was launched in 2012 as a subscription-based web channel for Cyclone athletics. Walters, then sports director at WOI-TV and voice of the Cyclones’ broadcasts as Pete Taylor’s successor, was hired as the network’s primary broadcaster.

The web service features live content of game action, press conferences and coaches shows. Several “classic” games from past years are frequently carried. Besides the annual $59.95 subscription fee for online service, the network has been picked up as part of Mediacom’s basic cable television package, with a high definition channel, and this year a partnership was arranged with the Roku streaming service.

“It’s all given us more ways to make our product accessible to fans and easier to get to,” Walters said. “Anybody can get our channel that has an internet connection. It’s nice to hear people like the mother of a softball player from California or a Cyclone football fan in Brazil tell us how they can watch the broadcasts and stay connected to the Cyclones. We have 24/7 programming on the Mediacom channel, so we’re able to work in a lot of the classic stuff. It’s a great way for Evan’s generation to see something about the old Cyclone sports. I can say something about (basketball player) Jeff Grayer, but if he can actually watch him play, he’ll have a new appreciation for him.”

Cyclones.tv has exclusive broadcast rights to the Sept. 3 season opener vs. Northern Iowa and in partnership for the game at Texas with the Longhorn Network.

During the season, Nielsen will be visible on the sidelines, getting footage for video packages.

“On game days, I think Evan will have one of our new cinematic cameras – you can slow-motion with it – so he can do something fun with it,” Walters said. “He’ll have total freedom to use his imagination. He’ll be used in other sports, too. He already has a concept for a basketball video.”

Part two in Tuesday’s edition of the Creston News Advertiser: Nielsen spends his summer producing a new video, “Enter the Storm,” widely released soon online by the university and on social media to spur interest in the start of the 2016 Cyclone football season.