PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR

Randy Brown is organizing this fundraiser.

Donation protected

My name is Randy Brown. I'm a bowling coach in suburban Atlanta, and I produce a weekly (or nearly weekly) made-for-YouTube show called PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR. I'm appealing to you today to help me take the show to the next level by improving the equipment I use to record the show. And I very much appreciate you taking the time to read my story.

I've spent my entire adult life in broadcast media (mostly radio). A 2009 inductee in the Texas Radio Hall of Fame, I've programmed some of the biggest Top 40 and Smooth Jazz radio stations in America's top ten markets (Dallas and Houston to name two). In 1997, I moved to the Atlanta area to take a job as the lead play-by-play voice for PGA TOUR Radio Network, and flew around the country each week to walk the fairways with the best golfers in the world like Tiger Woods, Fred Couples and Phil Mickelson, calling the action, live, on network radio. Today, I work from home as a voiceover talent in my own studio. Most of my clients are radio stations, and I serve as the "imaging voice" on those stations. I'm the guy on the radio who says things like, "...the best mix of the '80s, '90s and now..." or "The news watch never stops..." and such. I'm not the disc jockey; I'm the station's "signature voice."

As Bugs Bunny once said, "Eh...it's a living." ;-)

Unfortunately, my work has slowed considerably in recent years, so I am not in a financial position to purchase the gear I need to take PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR to the next level. It has been a joy for me to work on PRODIGY this past year and build it into a near viral sensation. I know with your help, it can grow even more by vastly improving the quality of our "bowlcasts." Hopefully, when you read about PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR in these paragraphs, you'll agree that it's a project well worth pursuing and you'll decide to donate some of your hard-earned money to help me push it forward.

But before you even consider donating to this project, I should at least tell you something about me and how this program called PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR came to be.

While I've had the privilege of a long career in broadcasting, my lifelong passion has been bowling. I started when I was a very young kid. In fact, my dad (God rest his soul) used to tell the story of how, when I was just 3 years old, I would sit in front of the TV set when bowling came on, turn down the sound, and do play-by-play right there in the living room. I jokingly consider it the unofficial start of my broadcasting career. Years later, I bowled in junior leagues from the time I was old enough to hurl that 8-pound, 5-fingered house ball down the lanes at King Louie Ranchmart Lanes in Leawood, Kansas until I graduated high school and left the nest.

Here's a picture of me, at age 12, bowling in the basement on a bowling alley my dad built for me when I was a kid back in the 1960s. The form hasn't really changed much, even if my waistline has:

And here's a video of the bowling alley I built for my son Derek in our garage in Arlington, Texas back in 1980:

In the late 1970s and early '80s, I was a card-carrying member of the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA). I never bowled for a living; I just wanted to satisfy my competitive jones, so I joined the PBA and competed in a number of their tournaments (my best finish was 8th in the 1979 PBA Southwest Regional Texarkana Open).

(Here I am bowling with some friends in 1980, back when I went by my middle name, "Bob," during that brief period when I was a PBA member):

Fast forward to more modern times. Since 2012, I've been coaching kids at my local bowling center, Brunswick Zone Roswell in Roswell, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. Since the Fall of 2015, I've served as Youth Director at that same bowling center, running the junior bowling program. I am not an employee of the bowling center. I do it all strictly as a volunteer.

Here I am a few years ago bowling with one of our junior bowlers and giving him a few pointers:

In recent years, I've pursued furthering my education in the sport of bowling so I could become a United States Bowling Congress Certified Coach. In 2016, I went through the training and became a USBC Bronze Certified Coach. And earlier this year in 2017, I achieved the status of USBC Silver Certified Coach. Last time I checked, there were only 26 USBC Gold Certified Coaches in the world. And I believe there are currently only about 500 of us USBC Silver Certified Coaches in America. I take the game seriously. And I love helping others -- young and old alike -- have more fun by teaching them how to bowl better. Frankly, one of the fringe benefits I receive from being the play-by-play voice of PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR is that I get to sprinkle in a few pointers here and there throughout each show. I've received a lot of comments from the show's viewers about how they've benefitted from some little nugget of wisdom I've dropped in somewhere along the way in some of the shows. I love it when the show both entertains and educates. In the upcoming 2017-18 season, I'm planning on doing more of that.

HOW PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR GOT STARTED

Last year as a way to promote the youth bowling program that I run at Brunswick Zone Roswell, I began filming some of our more actively engaged youth bowlers (with their parents' permission, of course) as they staged their own unofficial, informal and impromptu after-league challenge matches and posted these videos on YouTube. Being the creative type that I am, I gave these videos my own special touches (I am self-taught at video production, having dabbled in it since 2002). Since I had previously worked as a play-by-play announcer doing golf on network radio, I also laid down the play-by-play voice tracks on these junior bowling videos. Then I started adding music. Then graphics. Eventually I spent part of the Christmas break creating some more sophisticated 3D motion graphics to spice up the show's opening sequence (the manhole cover PRODIGY logo rolling down the lane and knocking down the pins).

When we began the season, the show didn't really have a name. It was just generically referred to as "another junior bowling video." Then, in mid November, shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday, I gave the show a name. I called it PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR, which was a tip-of-the-cap to the old, long-running ABC-TV series, "Pro Bowlers Tour," which aired on Saturday afternoons from 1962 thru 1997. I think I saw every episode.

Truth be told, the first time I used the name PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR, it was a few months earlier in June of 2016 when I produced a short mash-up video. In this goofy mash-up, I took some 1981 footage I had shot in 1981 of my 8-year-old son Derek Brown bowling at Golden Triangle Lanes in Irving, Texas, and added audio play-by-play clips that I lifted from ABC-TV's "Pro Bowlers Tour" commentators Chris Schenkel and Nelson Burton, Jr. I have to admit, this mash-up really tickled my funny bone:

But very few viewers seemed all that interested in this silly mash-up (to this day, well over a year after it went up on YouTube, it only has a little over 700 views). But meanwhile, the PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR series that I had created in the Fall of 2016 showcasing our youth league bowlers at Brunswick Zone Roswell started taking on a life of its own, rapidly gaining a surprising number of followers. My little YouTube channel, BrownswickBowling, which was first conceived as a place for me to post videos of me bowling, and was named for that little bowling lane I built for my son in 1981 that had the name "Brownswick" painted on the rake, quickly grew from about 30 subscribers (that's how few people were so bored they were willing to watch ME bowl) to over 1,000 subscribers in just the first couple of months since giving the show a name. Then we passed the 2,000 subscribers threshold. And it just kept on growing. Today, the channel has about 5,300 subs and is still growing in number. That growth will accelerate as soon as we launch Season 2 and new episodes start going up again every week. (We're on hiatus right now.) Each week when a new show goes online, it typically gets around 5,000 views in the first 24 hours. Most episodes top 10,000 views in a week. Some of our episodes have gone over 100,000 views.

And while those may not seem quite like Beyoncé and JayZ kind of viral numbers, the stars of our show are not international pop music superstars -- they're junior bowlers in Roswell, Georgia. Pretty astonishing numbers given who's on our show. And those numbers keep tracking upward.

Oh, and if you think the only people watching PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR are kids, you've got another thing coming. Google Analytics reveals that the show attracts the very demographics that many national advertisers want to reach -- the 18-44 age group, with emphasis on 18-34. We have months when it skews a little higher.

Surprised? Yeah, so was I.

One of the things our viewers and some of our PRODIGY bowlers' parents have told me is that one of the most appealing things about the show is that I switch up the format from week to week. It's not always a four-game stepladder like you see on pro bowling telecasts. Sometimes we mix it up.

For example, here we have an episode with some of our lesser skilled junior bowlers in a single-ball, sudden elimination challenge. This is one of my favorite formats because really, anyone could win it. We'll repeat this format a few times each year that I do PRODIGY:

Around Christmastime last year, we did a goofy episode in which the kids bowled three games. The first game they bowled straight-up, regular bowling. In Game 2, they bowled a quirky format known as Suicide No-Tap, where knocking down 9 pins on the first ball would get you a strike, but if you knocked down all 10 pins on the first ball, it counted as a gutterball, and you'd have to reset all ten pins and knock them all down on your second ball to register a spare. Then in Game 3, the two surviving players decided the week's championship by playing a game called Pinpoint. Based on a 1960s game show (that only I seem to remember), Pinpoint calls for players to knock down a specific, prescribed number of pins each frame. Knock down more or less than the prescribed number, and you score zero in the frame. Knock down the exact prescribed number of pins called for in the frame, and you are awarded a prescribed number of points that are assigned to each frame. You can watch it here, where it's explained in greater detail:

In the 2016-17 bowling season (from September 2016 until July 2017), I produced a total of 30 full-length episodes of PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR (ranging in length from around 40 minutes to 90 minutes and more). As the season wore on, the shows fairly routinely grew closer to 90 minutes in length, with a couple of them going even longer still. As you can see from the examples I've posted here, the production involved in doing these shows amounts to considerably more than merely pointing a camera at a bunch of kids bowling and uploading the video footage to YouTube. The production values are quite high (I wouldn't put my name on the show if they weren't). I routinely spend between 20 and 25 hours each week editing each episode of the show. Do the math. That works out to almost nineteen 40-hour work weeks that I spent editing these videos last season from September to July. I routinely squeezed most of that work into the weekends. I would get home from the bowling center on Saturday afternoons at around 4 PM, ingest the video footage into my computer and start editing. I would stay at it until I was ready to fall asleep, often around 4 or 5 AM. Then I'd sleep for a while, and then get up and start again until I finished the show -- usually by around 2 or 3 AM Sunday night/Monday morning. Or I wouldn't quite finish Sunday night/Monday morning, and I'd just keep working on Monday until I finished the show and was able to encode it and upload the finished show to YouTube.

I'd be lying if I didn't admit it's a lot of work to produce even one of these episodes. But I produced 30 of them, not counting the half dozen or show "PRODIGY SHORTS" that were included at the beginning of the season and the few we added at the end of the season during the Summer, just to keep our viewers engaged between our league seasons. Honestly, producing this show has always been a labor of love. And it still is. I'm a creative guy, and I love doing these shows. I've certainly learned a lot about video editing in the process, too.

But I did all that work in the 2016-17 bowling season without any compensation to speak of. Oh, I monetized the YouTube channel of course, so now when you watch the videos, you'll get the little commercial that runs first. So now I get a check from Google each month, which usually amounts to somewhere around $175. I ain't gonna retire on it.

I've been pretty happy with the quality of the shows. Certainly, as I've done more and more of them, I think I've gotten better at it. If you ask most people who watch the show, they'll tell you that they're extremely loyal followers of PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR.

One gentleman posted a comment to one of the PRODIGY episodes and said, "I've been in sports television for 35 years and this is the best locally produced show I've ever seen."

That blew my mind.

But perhaps the best part of doing these videos (for me, anyway) is showing off both the skills of some of our best junior bowlers, as well as showing how the game is enjoyed by kids of various skill levels.

Many of the kids who bowl on the show are regular tournament bowlers, and their families take them all around the southeast to compete in youth bowling tournaments. Many of our PRODIGY kids have encountered fans of the show while bowling in tournaments away from home. One of our regulars, Charlie, told me of when he was bowling in the Teen Masters even in Richmond, Virginia, about 75 people came up to him -- kids and adults (he said even the bartender at the bowling center came up to him) -- and said, "Hey, you're Charlie from PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR!" Some of these kids are now rock stars!

Here was my favorite episode of the first season -- and one of the very few events we covered that was contested in a handicap format (giving the lesser-skilled bowlers handicap pins to level the playing field against their more skilled rivals). On most of our episodes all year, kids were competing for nothing more than the right to sign "The Coveted Trophy Pin," which was awarded at the end of this video to the player who signed it (and therefore, won) most often during the season. But on this particular episode, the kids were actually bowling for scholarship money, and it produced an entirely different vibe:

As of this writing in late August, we're about to begin Season 2 of PRODIGY, and I really want to step up the quality of the show. Whenever someone comes to a taping of PRODIGY for the first time, they are surprised to discover that the entire show is shot with one camera. And that one camera is nothing more than an iPhone 7 Plus on a tripod. It is what in the TV/Film industry calls a "lock down shot." In other words, the camera is "locked down" and never moves during the filming. All the camera moves you see in the finished video are done in post-production (which is one reason it takes so long to edit the show). The camera is unmanned.

THE BIG ASK

Because I don't really make any money to speak of from the show (at least not yet -- I'd love to if I can ever figure out how), and because my business isn't in quite the shape I'd like it to be, I'm just not in a financial position right now to be able to afford the equipment upgrades that are necessary to increase the quality of the show. So here I am doing something extremely uncomfortable and completely out of character for me: I'm asking you for financial help on GoFundMe.com so I can purchase at least one, and possibly two, camcorders, as well as the necessary accessories and other gear to take this production to the next level.

I have no idea whether fans of PRODIGY and/or people supportive of what I'm doing for these youngsters will be willing to step up and help financially. But I'm going to ask for the moon and see what I get. I did not achieve Hall of fame status in my radio career without giving meticulous attention to detail. If I'm going to do this, I want to do it right.

I've prioritized this request for donations into 4 phases:

PHASE 1 is a new camcorder. This includes the camera and all the accessories it will need (it's all detailed in the budget you'll see below). PRODIGY must be shot in 4K video. I edit it in 720p. That's so I can zoom in on a small portion of the footage in post-production and have enough pixels to throw away without the image pixelating on screen. This is critical to the production. I am currently shooing in 4K on my iPhone. And while it looks okay, the glass on an iPhone just doesn't compare to the glass on an actual video camera, even a consumer-grade camcorder like the one I've identified as the one I want to get.

PHASE 2 is a camera platform. As you'll see from some of the shows I've posted here, I eventually got wise and got the tripod up off the floor so we could see over the heads of the bowlers as they were throwing the ball down the lane. This gave us a much better vantage point from up high so we could see the action without the bowlers bodies and heads from blocking us from seeing the pin action. I simply placed the tripod up on the countertop that sits in the concourse area of the bowling center where the onlookers sit and watch. The problem is, these countertops are not as stable as you might think, even though they're bolted to the floor. So anyone sitting on any of the chairs that are attached to these countertops must sit perfectly still or there is a noticeable camera shake. Plus, some of the bowling centers I'll be taking the show to this year simply don't have those counters in the concourse area. So I want to get this camera platform (which will raise the tripod up off the floor by 32", which is enough to get the camera up around the 8 foot mark when the tripod is fully extended to its maximum height, which is roughly where it was when sitting on the countertop. But on this dedicated camera platform, the camera should be much more stable. Consistent height from bowling center to bowling center, but without the camera shake. A big improvement.

PHASE 3 includes a few items that will help us with audio. One is a hand-held microphone (not for live play-by-play, but for interviews -- I'll still do play-by-play in post-production, but our viewers really enjoy hearing from these kids), and a small, portable hand-held device that will allow me to record the audio from these interviews in a professional format. (Relying on the camera's mic to record interviews makes for really bad audio.) And I included a small charge to purchase a PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR mic flag. Hey, why not?

Finally, PHASE 4 would be the biggest step forward of all that I would love to do. It's a second camera. So it's everything that's in Phase 1, plus a second tripod. We wouldn't want to use my iPhone for one camera and an actual camcorder for the other camera -- the quality of the two would be so different, it would not look right. To add a second camera, we really need matching camcorders. So I've simply added the same package a second time, plus a tripod that we'd need for that second camera.

I've added to the wish list a few other items, including:

- 8% sales tax for the items purchased (it's gotta be paid, and I can't afford it)

- 7.9% charge that GoFundMe takes (ditto above)

- $100 for shipping and handling. If it costs more than that, I'll eat the difference.

That brings the total bill to about $4,250.

That's a lot of money, and I have no idea how close we might get to it with a GoFundMe campaign. But if I'm going to ask, I figure I might as well ask for everything I'd need to do this right.

Certainly a second camera would add a new dimension to the show that we've simply never had before. I'd put it in front of the players, down the catwalk to the right of lane 40 when we're on that end pair of lanes, so we could get some facial shots of our bowlers while they're delivering the ball. Or when we're not on the end pair of lanes, I'd try to position the camera on a spot on the approaches a couple of lanes over to the bowlers' right so we can get a side view of the players, assuming those lanes are not in use. This second camera would also likely serve as the camera we could swing around to do player interviews with. Any way you slice it, a second camera angle would make a huge difference in the production values of the show.

But even if we can't raise quite enough money to swing that purchase of a second camera, just the improvement of having an actual camcorder instead of recording the show with an iPhone, and getting that platform to raise the camera up off the floor, would make a big difference.

I've researched these items thoroughly, and I'm convinced that the choices I've identified are the best ones for the job. Certainly in the case of the camcorders, there are better cameras out there. But for our purposes, they'd just be overkill and would cost more than we need to spend. The specific camera I've identified delivers fantastic picture quality at a price that delivers good value.

=======================================
THE ITEMIZED LIST OF ITEMS
=======================================

So here's the itemized list for those who want to know exactly where the money would be spent:

=== PHASE 1 ===

- Sony FDR AX-53 4K camcorder $848.00
- Sony NPFV100A Battery (large capacity) $135.00
- Sony NPFV100A Battery (large capacity) $135.00
- Sandisk 256 GB SDXC Memory Card $129.50
- Sony AC-L200 AC Adapter $39.99
- Sony TC-TRV Travel Charger $33.75
- Sony TC-TRV Travel Charger $33.75

(Note: Package includes two batteries so there'd be reserve power in case the first battery runs low during a filming. Nothing could be worse than running out of juice right in the middle of the championship match. And I budgeted for two portable chargers so I could charge up both batteries at the same time rather than having to charge one, then wait, then charge the other.)

(Total for PHASE 1: $1,354.99)

Here's the camcorder:

And here's a YouTube video that someone shot using this model camera. As you can plainly see, it shoots gorgeous video:

=== PHASE 2 ===

- Intellistage IS1CAMERA32C $339.99

(Total for PHASE 1 and PHASE 2: $1,694.98)

This is the platform upon which a camera tripod can be positioned, thereby giving us the shot from behind the players. We can get about 8 feet up with the tripod fully extended. Here's a pic of this platform (the bottom legs collapse like an accordian and the top pops off):

=== PHASE 3 ===

- Zoom H4n Pro 4-Channel Handy Recorder $199.99
- Shure SM58-LC Vocal Microphone $99.00
- On Air Mic Flags (1) custom mic flag $50.00

(Total for PHASES 1, 2 and 3: $2,043.97)

Here are these PHASE 3 items...

Zoom H4n Handy (portable) Recorder:

The Zoom H4n can be used with its built-in stero mics to capture ambient room sounds, which might be interesting for our bowling videos. Although frankly, I think stereo on the room sound might be a bit much. I just want to use it to capture player interviews. We'd just plug the Shure SM58 right into it and record.

Shure SM58:

And what, pray tell, is a "mic flag?" you might ask? Oh, you've seen 'em a million times. Now just imagine one with the PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR logo printed on it:

(I'll admit the mic flag is totally unnecessary and a bit of an indulgence. But if the objective here is to make the show as professional looking as possible, why skip this?)

And finally...

=== PHASE 4 ===

- Sony FDR AX-53 4K camcorder $848.00
- Sony NPFV100A Battery (large capacity) $135.00
- Sony NPFV100A Battery (large capacity) $135.00
- Sandisk 256 GB SDXC Memory Card $129.50
- Sony AC-L200 AC Adapter $39.99
- Sony TC-TRV Travel Charger $33.75
- Sony TC-TRV Travel Charger $33.75
- Mefoto Globetrotter Air tripod $225.00

These are the exact same items as in PHASE 1, but with the addition of anotheridentical tripod to add to the one we're already using.

(Total for PHASES 1, 2, 3 and 4: $3,623.96)

8% Sales tax for items ordered: $238.91

7.9% Service Charge collected by GoFundMe (on total of all 4 PHASES): $286.29

Shipping and handling (Estimated) $100.00

Everything together comes to $4,249.16.

That's a lot. I have no idea how much I can raise here or what's even a reasonable expectation. But the list you see here would cover everything. Well, everything except one or two camera bags to haul the cameras, tripods, accessories and mic around in. And I'll probably want to buy a dolly to roll this stuff around. (The Intellistage camera platform alone weighs about 100 pounds.) I may add that to the list.

Anyway, now you know my story, and now you've seen my wish list.

Could you find it in your heart to help me improve the quality of PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR so we can take it to the next level? I truly believe in what we're doing. I know the kids love it. The parents are behind it. And I want to deliver to them the best product I possibly can. It would be better if we had better cameras to shoot with. The iPhone is a remarkable device, and the iPhone camera is a great camera........for a phone. An actual camcorder will yield much better images.

I have prioritized the expenditures. The first $1354.99 would go to a camera and the necessary accessories. If we can raise another $339.99, I'll get the platform. Another $348.99 and I'll add the mic, the portable audio recorder and the mic flag. And if we get all that and the generosity of our supporters flows like hot chocolate syrup off a hot fudge sundae and we get $1579.99 more, then we'll upgrade the show in a really big way by adding a second camera. That would be awesome!

I think if you knew what this show means to our viewers, you might understand why I'm so committed to trying to deliver them a show of professional network quality to the extent that I can on a shoestring budget. Scroll down on this page and read some of the comments our viewers have left:

This much I can promise you: Whether we get any money out of this drive or not, I will continue to pour myself into producing the show and making it the very best I can. I have every intention to keep growing PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR in whatever way is possible and achievable. I would love nothing more than for someone to take notice of the show and give us a platform to really take it to another level -- maybe even the network level. But that's down the road, and honestly, it seems a bit of a fairy tale to me now. For the time being, I just know the show can be better and would benefit immediately from having a better camera (and better yet, better cameras -- plural) to shoot with, and to get the behind-the-bowlers camera up off the floor (and down off the shaky countertop).

Will you help?

I'm not very good at asking others for assistance. I'm just not wired to do that. I'm the kind of guy who likes to get things done without asking others for help. But this is something I just can't do on my own.

I love to showcase the talents of these young athletes and to give something back to the sport that I love. We've got some really talented young bowlers here in the Atlanta area. Plus, we routinely get kids from all over the state to come in and bowl on PRODIGY. I expect we'll start seeing more and more kids travel from far away just to try to qualify one day to make it to the show (just because you show up doesn't mean you're on the show -- you have to survive a qualifying round). This past Summer, we had a kid fly in all the way from Honolulu, Hawaii just to meet me and be on one of our PRODIGY SHORTS. That blew my mind.

So would you help me continue to promote junior bowling by allowing me to improve the production quality of the show?

Season 2 is about to begin in the next couple of weeks and I fully expect to begin the season using the ol' trusty iPhone to record the show. I would love to at least have the money in for PHASE 1 and PHASE 2 (a total of $1,694.98 plus tax on those items) by the end of September so I could at least switch over to a better camera and have that platform. And I have no idea what a reasonable request might be to try to go for the gold and have all four Phase paid for. Let's say the end of October.

I know this -- any donation you might make will bring the show a little closer to taking that next step up in quality.

Thank you so much for reading this and taking the time to learn all about PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR.

One last thing: Rest assured that this equipment will be used for nothing else besides PRODIGY and any other videos I might create to help promote PRODIGY.

As I say at the beginning of each show, "the mission of PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR is to CELEBRATE JUNIOR BOWLING WHILE WE ELEVATE JUNIOR BOWLERS." I'm all in on that mission. The only other thing I would consider using this equipment for would be to film junior bowlers to create recruitment videos for them to help them get into college on a bowling scholarship.

I'm not in the business of shooting other kinds of video. I don't shoot wedding videos or corporate videos or television commercials. (I am sometimes hired to EDIT videos, but nothing that requires SHOOTING video.) This equipment will be used EXCLUSIVELY for PRODIGY BOWLERS TOUR and perhaps to film youth bowlers for the purpose of helping them get into college on a bowling scholarship.

I would be forever grateful for any assistance you could provide in helping me take the show to the next level and continue lifting up these young athletes.

Thank you.