Not your average game film

The thought of his Junior Project loomed large in the back of junior Mike Jorgensen's head this summer as he took classes in Los Angeles. As a civil engineering major in the visual arts certificate program, Jorgensen knew he had to make a movie to fulfill the junior independent work requirement — he just did not know what the film would be about.

As it turned out, he spent the summer living with the answer.Jorgensen lived for part of the summer with junior Zach McKinney, a Los Angeles native and member of the sprint football team since his freshman year. The trials of this team and its players have become the focus of Jorgensen's documentary.

"There is something interesting about sprint football — this weird version of football which only five schools play," Jorgensen explained. "[These athletes] play a sport in which you are normally supposed to be big, but you have to watch your weight."

Despite the fact that he had never played football before, Jorgensen hoped to capture the participatory spirit of Morgan Spurlock's "Supersize Me," so he decided to partake in a new activity for a few months. When Jorgensen arrived on campus this fall, he joined the sprint football team to gain insight on the sport he was filming.

"I sort of wanted a personal perspective of it," Jorgensen said. "I really get to know the other players as teammates."

Because Jorgensen is on the sprint team, he has had to recruit a friend who is also in the visual arts program to film the sprint football team's practices and games.

"I'm filming whatever I can myself," Jorgensen said. "Besides attending practice every day, I spend another few hours a week interviewing players and organizing my footage. I am doing a shotgun approach, where I have to shoot 40 to 50 hours of footage in order to create my one-hour-long documentary."

Jorgensen asks his teammates about everything from their prior football experience to why they believe football holds such an important place in American culture, from what frustrates them about sprint football's losing streak to how hard it is to stay under the weight limit.

"One guy told me that when the team does win a game, the after-party is going to be like that [crazy party] sequence from 'Matrix 2,' " Jorgensen said when he was asked about the craziest thing he has heard in an interview thus far.

If you asked Jorgensen, who started taking film classes at Princeton two years ago on a whim, he would tell you that the filming and interviewing are the easiest parts of this process. Football, however, has been a different story.

"I've never done anything like this before," he said. "I am terrible at football and have no clue what to do. Football is much harder than it looks."

Jorgensen, listed as an offensive lineman on the team's website, played very briefly on a kickoff return in last weekend's loss to Army. Standing six feet, four inches tall and weighing in right at the weight limit of 172 pounds, Jorgensen described himself as a "twig getting blown all over the place." Not your ideal lineman.

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He is athletic, though — last season he walked onto the varsity swimming team, choosing not to return this year due to the time commitment.

Still, though he has only been around the team for a little less than a month, he has grasped many of his teammates' attitudes toward sprint football at Princeton.

"It is interesting to see that [football] is a lot of work," he said. "The team doesn't get a lot of respect many times because of the losing streak, but the team is really passionate about this."

Jorgensen has been with the team long enough to formulate his own opinion as to why the team can't seem to get a win.

"I wouldn't say that it's just because the people on the team don't care," he said. "First of all, the team has a lot of trouble recruiting — one could see how it could be really tough to convince new people to play. [Second], many players don't have [football] experience ahead of time. [Third], the team is underfunded compared to most other varsity sports. If anything, this losing gives us a certain drive because we know we are better than this."

Currently, Jorgensen does not know where this project will take him, as he has not yet begun editing and cutting together footage. But for now, Jorgensen is enjoying the ride and letting the experience dictate the direction of his film.

"Even if I don't really understand football by the end of it," Jorgensen said, "it's an experience."