Before leading the storytelling direction in Yandex. zen, Nikita Belogolovtsev did several sports programs, including basketball (“Brotherhood of the Ring”). Despite working in another field, with three children and a solid age, he still does not change the NBA – runs a basketball TV channel and sometimes updates the blog on Sports.ru.
We talked about the unpopularity of basketball in Russia, the best players in the NBA and even the future without three-pointers.
“Brotherhood of the Ring”
“I did a lot of different programs on different channels, about 20 different projects. And “The Brotherhood of the Ring” is one of the programs that I am incredibly proud of. A little pathetic sound, but there we were responsible for literally every second, which was given on the air, tried to even glue passageway was not.
This program was born three calls – from the idea to do it after the Russian team won bronze at the Olympics in London, and before I got a call from our producer Grigory Kovbasyuk. “Nikita, urgently collect the concept of the program, in two weeks we will start.” “I can’t go on vacation in two weeks.” “Then in three weeks.”
And we’ve assembled a close-to-the-dream team. The program was led by Nikita Koroteev, who grew up on the Tribune. The voice is Dima Materansky, who gave us style. Well, Vova Spivak, there is no other person who would so fanatically love FIBA basketball and European basketball. I heard him comment on the matches of the German championship – I don’t talk about children with such love, as he does about German basketball.
We were doing wild things: once we were taken to the police because of the shooting of a trickshot. The first issue we shot in Riga – a dude scored, throwing a two-story house in the backyard of the cathedral.
But the madness happened in Vilnius: we came to the central square, on the one hand – the cathedral, on the other – the presidential palace, the third – the Ministry of Interior. Between them is a monument to Gediminas, the founder of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
We threw the ball over the pedestal, between the legs of the horse on which Gedimin sat and flew into the ring behind him. We left three balls there: there was snow under the horse, and a few balls stuck in it. When we were filming, we were approached by the local police. “We were called: they say, vandalism and hooliganism. Let’s go.” We have been charged with an administrative offense. The hero of the program was eventually sent a fine of 100 or 200 euros.
The program was released only one season. In part, it closed because it could only be done on such an overpowering, where we were constantly inventing something unique. For example, we agreed with the Mercedes to give us expensive cars and we were chasing Timofey Mozgov. Nikitas Koroteev competed with a player of the youth team Khimok, who more shoots phones at the party of support groups. We approached each issue as something special. It ate a huge amount of time and resources. In this sense, Nikita Sagdaya’s successful program “View from Above” is much more technological, in a good way.
To be honest, there was a sense of artificiality in what we were doing. Talking about the VTB league is not the easiest thing to do. We have to look for intrigue in the Lokomotiv-Kalev match and explain why it should be watched. Or when you have to explain the meaning of being in the league of the club “Donetsk” or “Astana”. It was an attempt to help people see that there is more to it league than it may seem.