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It was no secret that the Buffalo Bills were not thrilled about the NFL and NFL Films essentially strong-arming them into being the 2025 training camp subject for the popular HBO documentary show, Hard Knocks.
Coach Sean McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane run a tight ship at One Bills Drive where privacy regarding their operation is imperative, but after years of being able to avoid the spotlight because playoff teams could decline from appearing, the NFL closed that loophole this year so the Bills had no choice when NFL Films came calling.
“The rules around eligibility changed this year, it wasn’t something we were seeking out,” Bills chief operating office Pete Guelli said. “They reached out and said, ‘We’ve selected you to be on the show.’”
That sound you heard from One Bills Drive? It wasn’t the construction work on the new stadium, it was the shudder coming from the administration building.
However, when McDermott met the on-site director for the show, Pat Harris, a native of Penfield who had grown up a Bills fan and attended numerous practices at St. John Fisher University, many of his concerns were quelled because he learned right away that Harris would do his best to paint the right portrait of the team he grew up rooting for, and do it in the most unintrusive way possible.
“When he introduced himself and said where he was from, it kind of gave me a little bit of ease of, hey, okay, he knows our fan base, he knows our culture, he knows the traditions of the Buffalo Bills and what matters to the people, and he’s a little bit more invested, naturally, when you’re from this area,” McDermott said the other day before a camp practice.
Yes, Harris is certainly invested, and every time he heads out to the practice field wearing his headset and microphone, he looks around and reflects how cool it is to be on this side of training camp in Pittsford, embedded with the team in a way no other fan or media member can be, as opposed to watching from the bleachers like he did as a kid.
“Yeah, 100%, I have little moments and stuff that still make it feel surreal and special,” Harris said the other day. “I don’t remember like a first memory coming here to camp, but I definitely remember coming and watching the night practices when those were a thing with Rex (Ryan). My dad had season tickets for a long time growing up, so I’d come with him a lot, came with buddies as I got older, even when I was back here post-college, we’d come a little bit.
“I’ve tried to appreciate the opportunity, and coworkers have said, like, this doesn’t ever happen that you get to do a show with your favorite team, let alone in your hometown.”
Harris played football and baseball, quarterback and pitcher, during his days at Penfield High, and then he played one year of football at Amherst (Mass.) College before concentrating solely on baseball until he graduated.
Knowing he probably wasn’t going to the major leagues, but wanting to pursue a career in the sports industry, he made contact with an Amherst alum who worked at NFL Films who passed along his resume. That led to an internship at the company which is based in Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey, and later a full-time position.
He would spend hours breaking down footage to be used for various NFL productions, and then he began working on site for the various Hard Knocks shows doing anything he was asked.
“At the start I would get tasked with some of the, I’ll call them the less glamorous tasks like shooting players, walking in the hallways, being with cameras early in the morning,” Harris said. “I would basically take on anything I could get my hands on. ‘Hey, sunrise shoot, I’ll be there, I don’t care.’ So I think for me it was just getting reps those first couple of years, just taking it all in.”
He eventually began to delve into production on the Hard Knocks show in 2015 when the Houston Texans were the subject. “The director at the time, Matt Dissinger, just kind of took a chance on me to bring me out on the field and I fell in love with it,” Harris said. “And I’ve just been kind of working my way slowly up the ladder ever since.”
Going into the Bills’ show, Harris had worked on 10 of the last 11 Hard Knocks (he skipped the Dallas show in 2020 because his wife, Amy, delivered their son, Tristan), but now he’s on the top rung as the lead director, a position that comes with enormous responsibility.
Harris is directing a crew of 35 people at Fisher and then eventually back at the Bills’ home practice facility, and on the road for preseason games in Chicago and Tampa Bay as the summer progresses, during which five shows will be produced, the first one airing Aug. 5.
“In this role now, I think the best way to say it is I’m the CEO, controlling and overseeing everything that’s out here,” he said. “It’s making sure everybody from the production assistants, the production coordinator, to the camera assistants, to camera audio, the other directors, they know what they’re doing, know where they need to be. And then as random things pop up on the practice field, it all kind of funnels up to me and I think I just have to constantly be aware of everything that our production is doing.”
There are eight cameras filming practice, and on any given day there’s between five and eight players and coaches wearing live microphones. Harris is tapped into all of it and as each practice rolls on, he’s in constant communication with his staff to make sure, based on what he’s hearing, that they are positioned correctly to capture the most important, show-worthy moments.
When practice is over, the staff has ample access to the team behind the scenes, though there are limitations. For instance, in all the team meeting rooms there are microphones and cameras, but no NFL Films personnel.
“It’s done remotely,” Harris explained. “We have robotics cameras and typically each room has one to three, depending on the size of the room, and we have tile mics in the ceiling and then we have a command center where we have a guy with joysticks, basically, and he controls about four to six cameras at a time.”
If players and coaches give the OK, cameras and microphones are allowed into their dorm rooms as well as some team congregating areas.
“I think off days are really the opportunity we’ve had with that,” Harris said. “The Bills have really been an open book with us and said we can do everything, obviously, within reason. When players are on board, I think they’re comfortable with anything.”
Harris said that for every Hard Knocks season, the staff researches players and coaches to learn about who they are on and off the field which helps determine some of the storylines the show pursues, but nothing is ever truly set in stone because things happen in real time.
In this case, Harris had a distinct advantage because of his familiarity with the Bills and their history.
“Me being a Bills fan, following everything very closely, I kind of knew the football side of things coming in, but each year we basically have the five directors who kind of do our homework and get familiar with certain position groups, certain players,” Harris said.
“We look at social media, nothing too in-depth, but to say, ‘Hey, we have an idea that this guy has personality’ or ‘that guy has a family dog and they’re always around’ and things like that so we aren’t coming in with a completely blank slate. It’s a great template to start and we use it to get familiar as we’re miking out those early guys, but once we’re here we kind of just keep our eyes and ears open on what’s happening.”
Each week, all of the film and sound is fed back to NFL Films headquarters where another team puts everything together, a painstaking editing process with a severe deadline because they have only a few days to create each show.
“It’s crazy, and I’ve seen it now because I worked on the in-season show on the other side of it,” Harris said. “There really is two pieces to it. There’s the directing side where we’re trying to capture the content, and there’s a whole other army of people that basically take all the stuff we give them and make a show and make it cohesive.”
A writer named Gerry Reimel produces the script, and his prose is then sent to actor Liev Schreiber who has long been the voice of Hard Knocks.
“I want to say Gerry has written almost all, if not every season, and he knows Liev’s voice very well so he knows the tone of the show,” Harris said. “He’s really incredible what he does. They’ll send us a script just so it’s all factually correct and everything’s set in the right tone. And then Liev, wherever he is, gets the script and usually he narrates Sunday evening, sometimes very early Monday morning.
“Sometimes we have done it over the phone because he’s somewhere like Ukraine, or one time he was in the Arctic. A lot of times they set him up in a booth or a studio. He has a lot of flexibility with where he can record.”
By all accounts, everyone has been playing nice in the sandbox. The Bills’ worries about being on the show have been minimized, and Harris has been thrilled by the access he’s been granted and the material that his crew has collected. Then again, the first show hasn’t aired yet, and McDermott, for one, will be watching.
“They’ve been very professional, which I have a ton of respect for,” McDermott said. “I’m here to do a job, you’re here to do a job, and you appreciate it when somebody else is approaching their job in a very professional manner, right? The proof’s going to be in the pudding when they get to the final cut and they show what they show. I feel like we’re sharing, we share our core values with them, and Pat seems to be a man, Kaley Campen (the assistant director) as well, that wants to respect our wishes.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 35 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, he has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at [email protected], and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Hard Knocks production from Bills training camp led by Pat Harris
Continue reading...
Coach Sean McDermott and general manager Brandon Beane run a tight ship at One Bills Drive where privacy regarding their operation is imperative, but after years of being able to avoid the spotlight because playoff teams could decline from appearing, the NFL closed that loophole this year so the Bills had no choice when NFL Films came calling.
“The rules around eligibility changed this year, it wasn’t something we were seeking out,” Bills chief operating office Pete Guelli said. “They reached out and said, ‘We’ve selected you to be on the show.’”
That sound you heard from One Bills Drive? It wasn’t the construction work on the new stadium, it was the shudder coming from the administration building.
You must be registered for see images attach
However, when McDermott met the on-site director for the show, Pat Harris, a native of Penfield who had grown up a Bills fan and attended numerous practices at St. John Fisher University, many of his concerns were quelled because he learned right away that Harris would do his best to paint the right portrait of the team he grew up rooting for, and do it in the most unintrusive way possible.
“When he introduced himself and said where he was from, it kind of gave me a little bit of ease of, hey, okay, he knows our fan base, he knows our culture, he knows the traditions of the Buffalo Bills and what matters to the people, and he’s a little bit more invested, naturally, when you’re from this area,” McDermott said the other day before a camp practice.
Yes, Harris is certainly invested, and every time he heads out to the practice field wearing his headset and microphone, he looks around and reflects how cool it is to be on this side of training camp in Pittsford, embedded with the team in a way no other fan or media member can be, as opposed to watching from the bleachers like he did as a kid.
“Yeah, 100%, I have little moments and stuff that still make it feel surreal and special,” Harris said the other day. “I don’t remember like a first memory coming here to camp, but I definitely remember coming and watching the night practices when those were a thing with Rex (Ryan). My dad had season tickets for a long time growing up, so I’d come with him a lot, came with buddies as I got older, even when I was back here post-college, we’d come a little bit.
You must be registered for see images attach
“I’ve tried to appreciate the opportunity, and coworkers have said, like, this doesn’t ever happen that you get to do a show with your favorite team, let alone in your hometown.”
Harris played football and baseball, quarterback and pitcher, during his days at Penfield High, and then he played one year of football at Amherst (Mass.) College before concentrating solely on baseball until he graduated.
Knowing he probably wasn’t going to the major leagues, but wanting to pursue a career in the sports industry, he made contact with an Amherst alum who worked at NFL Films who passed along his resume. That led to an internship at the company which is based in Mount Laurel Township, New Jersey, and later a full-time position.
He would spend hours breaking down footage to be used for various NFL productions, and then he began working on site for the various Hard Knocks shows doing anything he was asked.
You must be registered for see images attach
“At the start I would get tasked with some of the, I’ll call them the less glamorous tasks like shooting players, walking in the hallways, being with cameras early in the morning,” Harris said. “I would basically take on anything I could get my hands on. ‘Hey, sunrise shoot, I’ll be there, I don’t care.’ So I think for me it was just getting reps those first couple of years, just taking it all in.”
He eventually began to delve into production on the Hard Knocks show in 2015 when the Houston Texans were the subject. “The director at the time, Matt Dissinger, just kind of took a chance on me to bring me out on the field and I fell in love with it,” Harris said. “And I’ve just been kind of working my way slowly up the ladder ever since.”
Going into the Bills’ show, Harris had worked on 10 of the last 11 Hard Knocks (he skipped the Dallas show in 2020 because his wife, Amy, delivered their son, Tristan), but now he’s on the top rung as the lead director, a position that comes with enormous responsibility.
Harris is directing a crew of 35 people at Fisher and then eventually back at the Bills’ home practice facility, and on the road for preseason games in Chicago and Tampa Bay as the summer progresses, during which five shows will be produced, the first one airing Aug. 5.
You must be registered for see images attach
“In this role now, I think the best way to say it is I’m the CEO, controlling and overseeing everything that’s out here,” he said. “It’s making sure everybody from the production assistants, the production coordinator, to the camera assistants, to camera audio, the other directors, they know what they’re doing, know where they need to be. And then as random things pop up on the practice field, it all kind of funnels up to me and I think I just have to constantly be aware of everything that our production is doing.”
There are eight cameras filming practice, and on any given day there’s between five and eight players and coaches wearing live microphones. Harris is tapped into all of it and as each practice rolls on, he’s in constant communication with his staff to make sure, based on what he’s hearing, that they are positioned correctly to capture the most important, show-worthy moments.
When practice is over, the staff has ample access to the team behind the scenes, though there are limitations. For instance, in all the team meeting rooms there are microphones and cameras, but no NFL Films personnel.
“It’s done remotely,” Harris explained. “We have robotics cameras and typically each room has one to three, depending on the size of the room, and we have tile mics in the ceiling and then we have a command center where we have a guy with joysticks, basically, and he controls about four to six cameras at a time.”
If players and coaches give the OK, cameras and microphones are allowed into their dorm rooms as well as some team congregating areas.
“I think off days are really the opportunity we’ve had with that,” Harris said. “The Bills have really been an open book with us and said we can do everything, obviously, within reason. When players are on board, I think they’re comfortable with anything.”
Harris said that for every Hard Knocks season, the staff researches players and coaches to learn about who they are on and off the field which helps determine some of the storylines the show pursues, but nothing is ever truly set in stone because things happen in real time.
In this case, Harris had a distinct advantage because of his familiarity with the Bills and their history.
“Me being a Bills fan, following everything very closely, I kind of knew the football side of things coming in, but each year we basically have the five directors who kind of do our homework and get familiar with certain position groups, certain players,” Harris said.
“We look at social media, nothing too in-depth, but to say, ‘Hey, we have an idea that this guy has personality’ or ‘that guy has a family dog and they’re always around’ and things like that so we aren’t coming in with a completely blank slate. It’s a great template to start and we use it to get familiar as we’re miking out those early guys, but once we’re here we kind of just keep our eyes and ears open on what’s happening.”
You must be registered for see images
Each week, all of the film and sound is fed back to NFL Films headquarters where another team puts everything together, a painstaking editing process with a severe deadline because they have only a few days to create each show.
“It’s crazy, and I’ve seen it now because I worked on the in-season show on the other side of it,” Harris said. “There really is two pieces to it. There’s the directing side where we’re trying to capture the content, and there’s a whole other army of people that basically take all the stuff we give them and make a show and make it cohesive.”
A writer named Gerry Reimel produces the script, and his prose is then sent to actor Liev Schreiber who has long been the voice of Hard Knocks.
“I want to say Gerry has written almost all, if not every season, and he knows Liev’s voice very well so he knows the tone of the show,” Harris said. “He’s really incredible what he does. They’ll send us a script just so it’s all factually correct and everything’s set in the right tone. And then Liev, wherever he is, gets the script and usually he narrates Sunday evening, sometimes very early Monday morning.
“Sometimes we have done it over the phone because he’s somewhere like Ukraine, or one time he was in the Arctic. A lot of times they set him up in a booth or a studio. He has a lot of flexibility with where he can record.”
By all accounts, everyone has been playing nice in the sandbox. The Bills’ worries about being on the show have been minimized, and Harris has been thrilled by the access he’s been granted and the material that his crew has collected. Then again, the first show hasn’t aired yet, and McDermott, for one, will be watching.
“They’ve been very professional, which I have a ton of respect for,” McDermott said. “I’m here to do a job, you’re here to do a job, and you appreciate it when somebody else is approaching their job in a very professional manner, right? The proof’s going to be in the pudding when they get to the final cut and they show what they show. I feel like we’re sharing, we share our core values with them, and Pat seems to be a man, Kaley Campen (the assistant director) as well, that wants to respect our wishes.”
Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 35 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, he has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at [email protected], and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Hard Knocks production from Bills training camp led by Pat Harris
Continue reading...
