This is the story behind the Dallas Stars’ New Year’s Eve videos. My name is Jessie, and I work for the team. I don’t work for the hockey club (I wish), but I do know some of the players from working with them over the years.
Every year around this time, we get a lot of questions about our holiday videos. Some of those questions are about what it’s like to work with the team, others are about how we find new, fresh ideas every year. And then there are questions about how we come up with new video ideas that make us stand out from other teams in the NHL (and, as a result, make us seem more creative).
There are two answers to all these questions:
1. We have fun while we do it and
2. We’re always looking for new ways to tell stories.
The Dallas Stars’ New Year’s Eve videos have been a tradition since, well, since the Stars were born.
It actually started in Minnesota. During the North Stars’ first two season, the team would gather in the locker room and sing Auld Lang Syne to each other. The singing was part-kidding and part-real, and it just sort of evolved from there.
When the team relocated to Dallas before the 1993-94 season, one thing that didn’t come with them was a video camera. So for their first New Year’s in Texas, they decided to do their own version of Auld Lang Syne, but on film.
“We all stuck our heads out of the locker room door and sang,” said former Stars forward Brian Skrudland, who is now the team’s Director of Player Development. “It was really kind of a cool moment.”
That first year wasn’t exactly broadcast quality, and certainly not something you would put on social media today. But it worked fine as a keepsake for players and coaches. (The team lost that night to Calgary.)
As we all know, the Dallas Stars have a great social media team. The Video Production staff has gone above and beyond for the last few years in breaking NHL records with their videos and content.
One of the most popular ideas that was brought to life in 2015 was the New Year’s Eve videos. With a play on one of the original traditions of playing “Auld Lang Syne” when the clock strikes midnight, these videos feature some of your favorite Dallas Stars players singing along to some classic songs as they wish you Happy New Year.
Last year, the video included players like Tyler Seguin, Antoine Roussel, Patrick Eaves and even Jason Dickinson. This year, it featured players such as Jamie Benn, Brett Ritchie and Adam Cracknell. The videos have been a fan favorite and have been shared across social media since they started.
So what goes into making these creative videos? I got a chance to sit down with Dallas Stars Director of Video Production, Mike Valdez, to talk about what goes on behind the scenes. Here is what he had to say:
Over the past few years, the Dallas Stars have come up with some fun ways to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and this year was no different. This time around, the organization created a video series that featured various members of the organization sharing their favorite memories from 2016.
The videos included interviews with Dallas Stars players Johnny Oduya, Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin, Dallas Stars Head Coach Lindy Ruff, Texas Stars players Travis Morin and Justin Dowling, Dallas Stars Alumni Landon Wilson and Marty Turco as well as two members of the Dallas Mavericks.
“We wanted to create a fun way to celebrate the new year by looking back on some of the best moments from 2016 for our players, coaches and staff,” said Dallas Stars Chief Marketing Officer Geoff Moore. “This has been a great way for us to interact with fans by looking back on some of our favorite moments from last season and connecting with fans on social media. It’s been a lot of fun to do something out of the box like this.”
The Dallas Stars are known for having an active presence on social media. We were recognized in 2015 as the Best Team Social Media account by the Sports Business Journal, and we strive to maintain that level of engagement with our fans. In the past, we have created and shared many different types of videos ranging from behind-the-scenes footage to interviews with coaches and players.
One of our most popular video series features the players participating in a “New Year’s Resolution” video, where each player shares a resolution for the upcoming year. This video has become an annual tradition for our team and fans, so this year we decided to take it a step further. Rather than just asking each player to share his resolution off the top of his head, we had them act out some of their resolutions in a short skit format, complete with props and costumes. We later edited all of these short clips into one cohesive video that was released on New Year’s Eve on Twitter and Facebook.
We had a lot of fun creating these videos (as you can tell) and everyone seemed to really enjoy watching them! We received positive feedback from our fans who said they enjoyed seeing their favorite players’ personalities come through with every clip. This project was unique because
On Friday, the Dallas Stars put out a video on Twitter and Instagram with former player Mike Modano, who spent most of his career with the franchise, talking about how he got to be a part of the organization. It was a promotional video for the team’s New Year’s Eve game against the Florida Panthers, and it included footage from Modano’s time as a member of the Stars.
In another video posted on Sunday, another member of the Stars’ front office, director of social media Andrew Harris, talked about his time in Dallas.
The videos have been viewed more than 1.6 million times on Instagram alone. And that’s just two examples. The Mavericks are producing similar videos for their games on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.
The videos are part of what has become an increasingly common trend in sports: teams creating content around their players’ lives outside of the game. The idea is that fans want to see what players do outside of their teams’ games, and they want to be able to interact with those players through these videos.
The problem is that many fans don’t know who the players are or how they play in real life. So teams have started creating these ”
A few weeks ago I got a call from the Dallas Stars public relations staff asking me if I would be interested in doing an interview with some of the Stars players as part of a New Year’s Eve “Mannequin Challenge” video. They described it as a video where people hold a pose for several minutes and then post it to social media. I had seen the videos and thought they were funny, but didn’t know what the Stars could do with them other than just posting one video on their Twitter account like everyone else had done.
I was told that the idea was to create several different videos and release one each hour on New Year’s Eve. But they needed a story to go along with each video, so they wanted to get comments from the players that would fit with the theme of each video. I figured they probably wanted something lighthearted and fun, so I came up with four different themes that might work:
1. Resolutions – Players make predictions about what will happen in 2017
2. Celebrations – Players talk about their favorite New Year’s Eve memories
3. Time Travel – Players pretend to go back in time and tell us things that happened during their playing career later than we thought (for example: Tyler Seguin tells us he actually
