COM Students Star in NESN Next Producer Monday

If you’re watching the Red Sox play the Baltimore Orioles on local cable sports network NESN on Marathon Monday, be sure to stay tuned when the game ends. Three College of Communication students will be featured on the network’s new reality show, NESN Next Producer, immediately after the game. They are among the 10 finalists on the seven-episode series, and if they win, the women will be $20,000 wealthier, and more important, will secure jobs at NESN.

Amateur filmmakers Christina Beiene (COM’17), Brittney Badduke (COM’17), and Kaley Roberts (COM’17) and their film On the Mic: The Connor Lenahan Story will face off against student filmmakers from Boston College on episode three of the show. The Eagles filmmakers profiled a player on the BC women’s hockey team.

The series, which premiered earlier this month, gives a behind-the-scenes look at New England college filmmakers creating short sports films. Two films are shown on each episode, along with backstories about the student filmmakers and reviews of their work by Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr. Judging the show’s offerings are Tom Werner, chairman of the Red Sox, and Brad Falchuk, cocreator and executive producer of Glee and American Horror Story.

Beiene, Badduke, and Roberts teamed up after learning about the competition from Jay Atkinson, a COM journalism lecturer. They had to submit their treatment, or story pitch, to NESN by October to be considered for the show.

It was Badduke who came up with the idea of profiling Connor Lenahan (COM’17), familiar to Terriers fans as the announcer at men’s and women’s basketball games. Lenahan has a rare, incurable congenital bone disease called osteogenesis imperfecta that causes weak bones, which can break easily. He needs to spend most of his time in a wheelchair as a safeguard against falling and injury.

“We wanted to profile Connor because he is all over BU,” Roberts says. “Everyone knows him. But we wanted to take a different angle and not make his osteogenesis imperfecta the focus of our story.” Because Lenahan is “someone who announces for sports, but can’t participate in the traditional sense,” Badduke says, she was drawn to his story instead.

The team began interviewing Lenahan, BU Athletics staff, and members of the men’s basketball team in the fall, augmenting the interviews with footage of Lenahan wheeling around campus and announcing at games. Despite an early start, Roberts says, the December 31 deadline snuck up on them—they submitted their finished piece just hours before it was due.

“We were laid back at first, shooting interviews every two weeks,” she says. “But my parents will tell you, I took the film home over Christmas break and didn’t talk to anyone because I was so busy. I would wake up, edit, and go to bed. Then I’d send the film to Christina and Brittney for more edits.”

Badduke says the experience gave her an appreciation for how much work goes into producing a narrative documentary and how much advance planning is required before shooting can even begin. Beiene describes the filming and editing process as one of trial and error, and says the biggest challenge was narrowing down four hours of raw footage into a coherent six-minute film. Happily, their subject—Lenahan—loved the finished film.

When NESN Next Producer airs on Monday, viewers will not only see the women introducing their film, but footage shot by NESN of them following and interviewing Lenahan as they were making the documentary. That part took some getting used to, concedes Beiene, whose previous experience was strictly behind the camera. “It was weird to have a camera crew follow us,” she says.

Beiene believes she and her team have a shot at winning the grand prize, because unlike the competition, On the Mic: The Connor Lenahan Story offers something more than a traditional profile of a student athlete. “It’s a twist on that idea,” she says. “Rather than making a film that’s just about, say, an athlete overcoming an injury,” they chose to focus on someone “behind the scenes in athletics with an inspiring story.”

On next week’s installment of NESN Next Producer, another team of BU filmmakers will be shown, Kyle Floyd (COM’17) and Jake Reiser (COM’18), with their film Can They Get There, about a group of high school hockey players who dream of playing professionally.

The NESN Next Producer episode with Beiene, Badduke, and Roberts will air Monday, April 20, immediately following NESN’s postgame Boston Red Sox coverage (about 3 p.m. EDT). The episode showcasing Floyd and Reiser’s film will air Monday, April 27 on NESN at 10 p.m. Find a full schedule of episodes, view the student films in their entirety, and vote for your favorite here.