Making Their Mark: Amazon’s AFL documentary wants to take the sport global
A new documentary will be broadcast to a potential audience of 150 million. The subject: our national football game. What will the world make of it?
A funny thing happened in the middle of 2020. American audiences got “obsessed,” with AFL, says Kylie Rogers, Executive General Manager Customer and Commercial at the sport.
“Twitter, and all of these social channels, were blazed up in lights with all of these Americans who were like, ‘What is this game? It’s extraordinary!’” recalls Rogers. “A lot of Americans fell in love with the sport for the first time ever.”
The American interest in our homegrown footy came courtesy of a partnership deal between the AFL and sporting channel ESPN to broadcast games to US audiences starved of live sport, after the COVID-19 pandemic emptied stadiums and cancelled fixtures. But down under it was a different reality: after a hiatus of more than two months, the AFL returned to stadiums, setting up quarantine hubs in Queensland and Western Australia for players, coaches and their families to ensure that the football show really could go on, pandemic and all. These AFL games, played to socially distanced crowds, really struck a chord with American fans.
“Now, I can see that happening globally,” muses Rogers. And one way she envisages that unfolding is after the release of Making Their Mark, the brand new, access-all-areas, seven episode documentary about the AFL’s unprecedented 2020 season, premiering this week on Amazon Prime Video — not only locally, but to some 150 million members in 240 countries around the world.
For Tyler Bern, Head of Content at Amazon Prime Video Australia and New Zealand, AFL was “a no-brainer” when it came to the local audience — and the global audience too. “To me, it’s not really about the sport,” explains Bern, “it’s about the story. It’s an excellent story. And it’s a great sport! I take a lot of pride in the fact that with this partnership with the AFL we can help educate all our customers all over the world about the sport, and about these unique and dynamic personalities that we follow.”
Making Their Mark is one of the biggest original commissions that Bern has made locally, alongside cricket documentary The Test, Rebel Wilson’s comedy game show LOL: Laugh Out Loud, and the forthcoming reboot of Packed to the Rafters. The documentary follows several key characters, both on the pitch and in the locker room, offering footy fans a window into the sport they know and love.
From a player perspective, Making Their Mark sticks close to legendary Carlton small forward Eddie Betts, stalwart and inspiring Adelaide Crows captain Rory Sloane, the charming, but injury-plagued ruckman Nic Naitanui of West Coast Eagles and Stephen Coniglio, the new captain of Greater Western Sydney Giants. Then there’s coach Stuart Dew of the Gold Coast Suns and the executives steering the Richmond Football Club’s ship: Peggy O’Neal, Brendon Gale and Damien Hardwick.
The casting process was “meticulous and thoughtful,” explains Bern, as Amazon producers scoured the teams looking for a “dynamic and diverse lens” into the AFL — and he believes they have isolated “the best storylines”, ultimately showing the relatable and personal side of some of the game’s most recognisable faces. Starting in the pre-season — and heady, pre-pandemic days of early 2020 — Making Their Mark then proceeds, fly-on-the-wall style, throughout the rest of the season, culminating in the grand final on 24 October, held for the first time in Brisbane.
The documentary was conceived long before COVID-19 uprooted all life, but unsurprisingly the pandemic quickly became a main character in the miniseries. The first episode unfurls with nailbiting tension as executives, including O’Neal, discuss the future of the game — and just how many millions of dollars are on the line if matches are postponed indefinitely. The episode concludes with the decision to halt the season after the first match, a scene that Rogers admits was difficult to watch, as someone who was in the decision-making room where it happened herself.
Thinking back to that “agonising” moment, Rogers describes the time as “terrifying, to be frank.” “Because none of us knew what was around the corner,” she admits. “All we knew was that we had to find the way, because football always finds a way. So we didn’t have a choice.” She believes that the AFL made “the right decisions at the right time”, while still staying “agile” throughout the season. “But it was scary,” she says. “Certainly difficult for me, from a commercial perspective, because we were speaking daily — frankly, hourly — to our members … and our corporate partners, trying to find value for those guys while we weren’t playing games.”
But not once, Rogers stresses, did the AFL want to stop production on this landmark documentary. “We were always committed to keep going forward,” Rogers says. “At the end of the day, no-one knew how it was going to play out, no-one knew how it was going to end. But at the very least, we knew we had a wonderful partner capturing it all. The good, the bad and the ugly. Never at one point were we saying we have to stop this.”
The same was true for Amazon, although Bern admits there were some “stressful” times. “There were moments when we didn’t know,” he explains. “First and foremost, the safety of our cast and crew and everybody involved was our number one priority.” Through March and April, when the potential to keep shooting was under question, Bern and his team talked about whether they could continue. “Is this the right thing to do?” Bern asked himself. “We got to the place where we built such strong protocols around our production, we had 100% confidence that everybody was going to be safe. If it was 99% confidence, we wouldn’t move forward.”
The new normal, then, for the Making Their Mark team involved multiple COVID-19 tests and masks as they joined players and coaches in the isolation hubs in order to keep the cameras rolling. “The crew really ended up being extensions of the clubs, and the players and officials,” Rogers says. “They lived and breathed in the locker rooms, they had multiple tests a week, like the players did.”
The result is a miniseries that feels authentic, “raw and unfiltered,” says Bern. Amazon’s camera crews were given enormous access, both inside the belly of the stadiums and at home with the players and their families. Rogers calls it “sport-tainment”, and says that AFL is perfectly placed to offer that in Australia because “it’s so real, and so emotional.”
A second partnership with Amazon Prime Video — a documentary on AFLW star Taylah Harris — is already in production as well as a third project soon to be announced, and Rogers teases that a second season of Making Their Mark could be in the works. “I guarantee we will whet the appetites of our fans around the world by offering them more in time,” Rogers hints. “I can guarantee you, we’re not going to stop there.”
Because, she says, “for the first time ever, [fans] are getting an unprecedented access into the code and the game that they love, and the teams and the players that they adore.” She adds: “They are going to get insight and watch moments in time that really happened that they have only dreamt could actually happen. And I think they’re going to be addicted.”
Making Their Mark streams on Amazon Prime Video from 12 March.