Film study

FORT RECOVERY — Have you ever had the urge to relive the glory days?

Do you ever wonder what the team was like when your parents were on the field?

Perhaps you just want to learn more about the school and how the athletic programs got to where they are today?

Now you can do that on the Indians’ YouTube channel.

The Fort Recovery High School athletics department aided by the help of Perry Hull has uploaded footage of games dating back to the 1992 season onto Fort Recovery Film Archive, the school’s YouTube channel.

This project started years ago as former FRHS football coach and athletic director Brent Niekamp started uploading old football footage to the channel. When he moved on from coaching and teaching at Fort Recovery last year, he left the former media with Aimee Pottkotter, the current athletic director.

“When Brent Niekamp moved on to a different district, he brought me this big tub,” Pottkotter said. “I just looked at it and said, ‘Cool, alright.’ I talked to the tech guys to see if there was a good way to streamline from VHS, DVDs and these little CD things, all sorts of different types of media.

“I can slowly get it done because I know how to upload from Hudl to YouTube. That’s where it originally started and I just kind of let it sit there.”

While Niekamp uploaded a lot of old media to the website, Pottkotter was moving more recent games that were already digitized onto the channel.

That’s when Hull came in.

Hull, a 2010 FRHS graduate, has had experience working with a lot of this media after working for WOSN out of Lima, Ohio, before working in the animation industry for over 10 years for a variety of companies including Fox, Netflix, Hulu and Adult Swim.

While Hull has had a plethora of experience handling different forms of media, getting the videos up online wasn’t the fastest process, but he had the time due to starting his teaching career.

“My wife and I had to look for a cheap, but still working VHS player,” Hull said. “Then we have this little analogy to digital, digitizer essentially. So then I had to let the videos play, and that means letting the full thing play. It’s not like what we’re used to now, where you can just download it onto a .mp3 or .mp4 or .mov.”

He described that part of the process as tedious but not particularly hard work. Hull bought two 250 gigabyte SD cards so that one could upload one season of film while having another season ripped from the analogue medium into the digital form.

From there, he would edit the film in Adobe Premier to shorten the videos down to get rid of the timeouts and other major breaks in play and then render the video. Then all he needs to do is create a thumbnail for the video to post it online.

    Pictured is a QR code to navigate to the Fort Recovery Film Archive YouTube channel. The channel will also be the first hit when searching the channel name on the YouTube website. (QR code provided)

“I’d say thanks to Perry again,” Pottkotter said. “It’s a huge endeavor and he made it look easy. If I was doing it, this would take me a lot of years. He just knew how to do it … and he did it pretty much in the matter of the summer.”

Outside of the inherent hurdle from the film largely existing on VHS tapes, Hull and Pottkotter ran into the problem of the amount of videos they could upload in a day. Without being the account’s sole owner or having the channel be verified, he could only upload 10 videos per day. To get verified, Hull needed to consistently upload and that the videos were all compliant with YouTube’s content policy, which means he had to go back and edit out any music that could create an issue with copyrights.

It took Hull about three weeks to get the channel verified and after that he was able to upload at the rate that the videos were ready.

Between varsity football, volleyball, boys and girls basketball, and junior varsity and middle school teams, Hull has uploaded 461 videos to the Fort Recovery Film Archives channel and organized them into playlists by season.

He has also combed the rest of YouTube to find film of Fort Recovery’s games from other channels and organize them into another playlist for fans to view.

Film from the current sports seasons will be uploaded to the channel following the conclusion of the year. For now, fans can visit youtube.com/@fortrecoveryfilmarchive.

The obvious question is why go through all the work?

“Presentation is huge,” Hull said. “If I have the ability to represent Fort Recovery in the best and professional and most interesting way possible, then I’ll do it. That’s how I felt about this archive channel. … I wanted this to be the best archive channel in the MAC.”

While many may want to just relive the 2015 state championship, Hull also has a more personal reason that many may be able to relate to.

“There’s a couple of VHS tapes from 1985 and I’m hoping it’s basketball because that’s my dad’s senior year,” Hull said. “My dad died when I was a senior in high school. I never got to see any videos of him playing any sports, heck, there’s not a lot of videos of him period.

“That would mean so much to me, because I don’t have a lot of stuff of him anymore outside of pictures. … I think a lot of other people would enjoy that too.”