Welcome to the section on passing plays. And I have to start by confessing that passing plays are the part of shooting football that I most enjoy. And it's mostly because of the challenge that it presents, it's very challenging to follow a ball all the way down the field. But the reward is if you do a passing play well, especially a long pass down field, if you do one of those plays really well. The beautiful footage that results from it is very rewarding. And it's great to look at that footage later on and see how smoothly You did it.

So we're going to talk a lot about how to handle this we have a lot of examples for you to look at. But first, I want to preface it by saying that when a quarterback drops back to Pass, we don't initially know whether the ball is going to be thrown five yards down the field or 50, unlike a running play, where he takes the ball and he only has one speed straight ahead. So we're going to learn to anticipate and you're going to hear me use that word a lot throughout this section. We're going to anticipate not only when the ball is going to be thrown, but how far and we're going to use that as the way to start moving the camera and to try to get to the receiver before the ball lands. challenging, but it's fun. And when you get it right, it's extremely rewarding.

So let's dive into a whole bunch of passing plays now and see how we handle it. The first point, of course, is to have proper framing before the snap. If you do that, then your quarterback should inherently be positioned closer to the left or right side of the frame, depending on which way they're going and where they are on the field. This is important because our first rule is don't center the quarterback. As you can see, as I let this play run, there are blockers and even a potential receiver in front of the quarterback and there's nothing going on behind him. So there's no reason to include that dead space.

We're not following the Tic Tac Toe board rule here since the quarterback is not a runner, but we can use it to demonstrate an alternate version of our don't center rule which says we should keep the quarterback on the right or left third of the screen with the action in front of them taking up the other two thirds of the screen. It's important to note though that the quarterback should still be in the center square regardless of whether he's on the road. Left side. Doing this not only allows viewers to see more of the important action, but it will help you the cameraman be better prepared to follow the ball. When it's finally thrown. I want to add here that we're not going to zoom in before the past.

The more we're zoomed in, the harder it's going to be to track the ball. So we're either going to stay put, or we're going to widen out and that has to do with the next point, which is to use the quarterbacks body language to determine the distance of the throw. This goes back to what I talked about regarding anticipation. Going back to our first play, you can see that when the quarterback is ready to throw, it's obvious that he's gearing up for a long pass. Knowing the ball is going to travel far, you can already see what the cameraman is doing here. He's starting to zoom out a little to allow himself the room to keep the ball in the shot.

The second part of anticipation is to move the camera with the ball not behind it. That means when the quarterbacks arm starts to go forward, you're starting to move in the direction that the ball is headed. The goal is to use these anticipatory clues to widen out and move the camera early enough to get to the receiver before the ball, which is what happens here, we get to see the play on both ends. Here's another example of this quarterback drops back, no zooming in or out, and I'm freezing it here because it's obvious This is going to be a long pass. Not much reason to zoom out here because the cameraman trusts that he's wide enough. And in fact, he begins to zoom in when he picks up the receiver so we can center the action.

Here it is again at full speed so you can see how it plays out in full. In this example, you'll notice that the cameraman is a little late panning right to stay with the ball. I frozen it here to see that the ball is already gone and we're still focused on the quarterback. To compensate the cameraman quickly widens out to catch the receiver making the graph and this is a good rule to add for this section. It applies to really any play across All the videos in this course, if you feel you might lose the ball widen out, you may not see the ball, but by zooming out, it's likely it will end up on the screen somewhere. We've been looking at a number of long passes so far.

So let's take a look at a number of short ones. And you can see here that the quarterback is on the left side of the brain with the action in front of them. The body language signals a medium throw and the camera moves with the throat. In fact, if I rewind this, you'll actually see the camera moves perhaps a second behind the throat. But this is why being wide and having space in front of the quarterback helps it makes it easier to quickly recover and get to the receiver before the ball. Of course this is a lot easier to do on a short pass like this one, where the quarterbacks eyes and body language indicate a short throw that requires just a small camera move.

Here's a play close to the goal line so you know it can't be a long throw. Just anticipate and move with the ball. The cameraman here widens out a little but is able to push Back in and center the touchdown. In this play from the same game the quarterback takes off running. When this happens treat him like a running back and put him back in the center of that Tic Tac Toe board. Then of course you have the SEC, as soon as I know that the quarterback is going down, I like to push in emphasize the play, which also allows you to be closer to the action to see who made the tackle.

Finally, I wanted to show you this play well framed prior to the snap, but you'll notice that the cameraman pushes in even though it's a path. This will make it harder to follow the ball, but it boils down to how much trust you have in your skill set. By keeping the quarterback on the right side of the screen and moving just as the ball is thrown, you can get to the receiver in time to make the catch. Once you have enough confidence that you can shoot this way without losing the ball. It's certainly a better way to shoot because it brings you closer to the action. Put it all together and YouTube can soon be sure Shooting, passing plays as well as some of the examples you've seen there.

But of course you have to practice and the best time to practice is when you're set up a half an hour before the kickoff. This goes back to what we talked about in arriving early use that time to practice filming some of the passing drills and work on your technique. But what I can do for you here is to quickly recap some of the main points we just discussed. So let's put those on the screen and the first one you'll recall is to keep the quarterback on either side of the screen. Don't center him before he throws the past. Second, don't zoom.

Use the quarterbacks body language to gauge the strength of the throw and zoom out some if needed to keep the ball in the shot. Third, we want to anticipate begin to move the camera with the quarterbacks throw, try to get the camera on the receiver before the ball gets there. If that requires widening out as we mentioned in the last step, then you can do that. Here are a few more good examples to drive home these points. Good framing here camera stays put then moves with the ball to pick up the receiver then gets treated like a runner. And here the camera is wide enough to make it easy to stay with the ball.

And then the push in to give more detail makes this really well done. Hopefully these techniques will help you and I hope you enjoy shooting pathing as much as I do. The good news is if you can get this down, the skills involved in following a passing play are going to help you with everything else. You're going to shoot kickoffs, punts and all the things we're going to talk about next. So good luck with passing and I'll see you in the next section. We're going to talk about special teams.