Almost Fainting on Set: Behind the Scenes of the Bo Jackson Battle Arena Card Launch

So this is the one where I (Jonathan) almost passed out on the job.

If you saw the edit we delivered for BlokPax's Bo Jackson Battle Arena launch event, you'd never know the person behind it spent half the shoot fighting gravity. (You'd also assume it was filmed by one cinematographer. It was filmed by four people on the team.)

Let's back up.

The Project

Blokpax is a Columbia, SC company doing something a lot bigger than people realize. They make trading card games — real ones, the kind that end up on shelves at Target — and they don't pull punches with the talent inside the packs. The Bo Jackson Battle Arena set is one of their drops, and yes — that's Bo Jackson, as in Bo Knows Bo Jackson. The cards include signed athlete pulls — Bo Jackson, Ken Griffey Jr., Xavier Legette of the Carolina Gamecocks (whose card features him and his horse, because of course it does). For collectors, this kind of athlete-driven set is what makes opening packs feel like Christmas morning.

There's also a card in the set that is, as best we can describe it, a Godzilla pickle. We're not joking. The art for this game leans into a wacky, anime-flavored visual world where you might pull a sports legend and then on the very next card open a giant kaiju produce situation. We love it.

For us, the call was simple: come document the launch event. Capture the cards being opened, the reactions, the energy in the room, the tournament gameplay and the texture of a hometown company having a moment.

The Curveball

A small but relevant detail: this shoot fell almost immediately after Jonathan's hernia surgery. About fifteen minutes into shooting, the room started getting a little soft around the edges. (Anyone who's almost fainted knows the feeling — it's not subtle, and it's not optional.) Pain. Dizzy. Ooof.

Jonathan had to step back. Our crew had to pick up the cameras. We ended up with three or four different operators rotating through the night, which is not how we usually run a shoot. On nearly every project, Jonathan is on camera , because he knows what he wants from the edit.

Not this time.

The Edit That Wasn't Ours

This was the first time we had to cut a real client deliverable from footage that was team captured. That's a strange creative position. You sit down at the timeline and you don't recognize your own coverage. There are angles you wouldn't have chosen, moments you wouldn't have lingered on, framings you'd have tightened. You have to let go of how you would have shot it and ask the only question that matters: what does the client need this film to feel like?

The crew showed up. They got the moments. They didn't try to imitate Jonathan's style — they shot like themselves, and the truth is, the edit was pretty dope. We came back to it the next day, started pulling selects, and slowly realized: oh — this is actually really good. Sometimes the best lesson is that you're not actually the bottleneck you thought you were.

The client was patient, generous, and — most importantly — happy with the result. We've worked with BlokPax many times since. (We are big fans.)

https://vimeo.com/1061332442

Why It Worked

There's something genuinely special about watching a company in your own zip code launch something that's going to end up on shelves at Target nationwide. BlokPax is doing for trading cards what a lot of Columbia creatives are quietly doing in their fields: making real work, at real scale, from right here in the Midlands. We get to be lucky enough to film it.

If you've got an event — a launch, a release, a tournament, a tasting, a one-night-only kind of moment — that needs to be captured by a team that's done this enough to roll with the chaos (and, occasionally, a near-fainting incident), that's exactly the work we love at Soda City Films. Drop us a line. #BlockPacks #BoJacksonBallerina #TradingCards #ColumbiaSC #SodaCityFilms #BrandFilm #EventVideography #VideoProduction #SouthCarolina #BehindTheScenes #BoJackson