The making of Blues’ tribute video for David Perron: ‘Unbelievable and I’m not surprised’

In the past 10 years, tribute videos welcoming back players who once wore the home uniform have become a lot more common around the NHL.

So when the league’s schedule is released every July, the Blues video department, Blue Note Productions, sits down and maps out the season.

“It’s our first chance to say, ‘OK, who did we trade last year? What team are they on now? When are they coming in?'” Trevor Nickerson, BNP’s vice president and executive producer, explains. “It will go into the production timeline of, ‘OK, this has got to be worked on before a certain date.’ We don’t want to miss anybody.”

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This time around, when Nickerson’s staff saw that Detroit would be visiting Enterprise Center on March 21, they knew it would be a busy night. Blues fan favorite David Perron was set to make his first trip back to St. Louis with the Red Wings, along with Ville Husso, Jake Walman and — he was on the roster at the time — Oskar Sundqvist.

So, there was the potential for four ex-Blues, though it became three when Sundqvist was traded to Minnesota on March 3.

“We’ve never had a situation like that before,” Nickerson says. “So you’ve got to sit there and go, ‘OK, how are we handling that?’”

For a 90-second video and a pair of graphics, it takes months of planning and hours of production to create the product fans see on the JumboTron.

How does it all work? To find out, The Athletic spent two days with BNP last week, including two hours in the editing room to witness the making of Perron’s tribute video, which aired during Tuesday’s game. We’ll take you through the entire process, ending with the reaction of the beloved Blue.

The department’s offices are in a corner of Enterprise Center, and they’re dark. The only light is the computer screens of the staffers working on projects that range from commercials to hospital visits.

There’s a 48-terabyte server that houses all of the interviews and highlights — as many as 400 per game, categorized by player — and that’s where each assignment originates.

Nickerson sits in front of his computer, thinking back to when work began on a video for Perron, who was drafted by the Blues in 2007 and returned to the team three times before becoming an unrestricted free agent at 34 years old last summer.

“We don’t know what (Blues general manager) Doug Armstrong has in his head, but we try to stay ahead of the game,” Nickerson says. “If we get a sense (of) where things are going, we might start working ahead. We put our heads together and say, ‘Is David Perron going to re-sign here? It’s possible. But it’s also very possible that he’s not going to re-sign here.’ So instead of us getting caught unprepared, we start to pull the footage.”

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Depending on the schedule, BNP may have months to finish a “welcome back” video, but the staff also produces “goodbye” videos, and those require a much quicker turnaround. When there’s breaking news of a trade or signing and a Blues player is headed to a new team, Nickerson wants that goodbye video to hit the team’s social media accounts within hours.

“You don’t want to do it immediately because the shock just happened, and the information has to flow out, and you want the video to have its moment,” Nickerson says. “But you also don’t want to wait too long because then it looks like, ‘What took you so long to put a video together?’ So it’s a delicate balance when it comes to that.”

In the case of Perron, that’s what occurred last July, when free agency opened at 11 a.m. CT, and he had a deal with Detroit before 2 p.m.

Will Chatmon of the content team already had Perron’s big moments with the Blues organized in a file and laid into a timeline. It was time to pull it all together.

“With a guy like David Perron, you have to think to yourself, what is the story? What is the essence?” Nickerson says. “We watched David grow up in front of our eyes, from a kid battling Keith Tkachuk for ice time to a dad with two kids. There may only be a handful of players that play here that long and win a Stanley Cup, so it’s a special case with David.”

They loaded up Perron’s first goal, on Nov. 3, 2007, against Chicago, a call in which Blues play-by-play announcer John Kelly belted out: “He scores! Perron got it in! I believe the kid knocked it in.”

“The video quality alone will tell you, ‘Wow, he has been here that long,'” Nickerson says.

They laid some melodramatic piano music over the highlights.

“We’re trying to evoke some emotion, really drawing out the nostalgia,” Nickerson says.

They had an interview with Perron talking about coming back to St. Louis a third time because, he felt, the Blues had a good chance of winning a Stanley Cup.

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“It takes somebody going back and finding a poignant comment and saying, ‘This might work,'” Nickerson says. “Editing takes time, and a lot of the time is the research and drawing of the footage in. Every edit goes to the beat and the cadence of a song, and polishing it and matching the footage from many different cameras and different sources can be a lengthy process.”

And, of course, they ended it with a clip of Perron hoisting the Cup.

“That really does it,” Nickerson says.

Before Perron landed in Detroit, the Blues had already posted the goodbye video.

Good luck @DP_57! You’ll always be part of our family.

— St. Louis Blues (@StLouisBlues) July 14, 2022

Eight months later, the Blues are going to use the guts of that original goodbye video for his “return” video, but they want to change the tone of the piece when it plays as the “welcome back” video on the JumboTron on Tuesday.

“At the time, we felt the vibe was right,” Nickerson says. “But some time has elapsed … and so rather than the nostalgic piano feel in the goodbye video, we’re going to re-edit and re-package it to bring a little bit more energy.”

Nickerson turns the project over to content manager Brian Santa Maria, who grabs his mouse and goes to work, with The Athletic sitting next to him.

“Conceptually, what I’m trying to do — we want it to feel more like a story,” Santa Maria says. “Not an in-depth feature, but a nice story with progression, and with David it’s different because he was gone and back a couple times.”

The video has a foundation, but if Santa Maria needs more highlights, they are easily accessible in the department’s archiving system. Many of the clips have already been viewed, and some given “five stars,” making life a lot easier on the editor.

He likes the images Chatmon used, but as Nickerson says, it’s the music they want to change in the second half of the video.

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“When we’re thinking how to craft a video, it’s always important to try to imagine it in the bowl (at Enterprise Center), and in the game environment,” Santa Maria says. “That song wasn’t wrong for the video, but is that the right vibe? Is that what we want people to feel when they’re watching it in the game? So we just try to think about the purpose of it and how the music helps us get there.”

The Blues use APM Music (Associated Production Music), a royalty-free collection that’s available to them through a deal with the NHL, but still, sifting through potential songs can be the most difficult part of the process.

There’s a search key, in which you can input specific words — “strong, scary, uplifting, dramatic” — that help you find the mood you want for the piece.

“For something like this, I don’t want it to sound sad, but I don’t want it to sound too triumphant,” Santa Maria says. “So I’ll focus on something that has a positive sound to it, but a less serious tone.”

Santa Maria opts for a strong mood and listens to a few examples.

“Yeah, that’s no good,” he says. “I’ll just kind of listen through until I find something that hits correctly.”

With no luck, it’s onto the next one, and the next one, and the next one, before Santa Maria switches from “strong” to “nostalgic” and finally finds a song called “Seize the Moment.”

“This doesn’t sound bad to me,” he says. “I can hear the (play-by-play) calls happening over it. I’m OK with that one. It gives it a different feel than it currently has.”

So a song has been chosen, but that means a few of the highlights need to be re-arranged to match the new beat.

The early highlights of Perron’s career play on Santa Maria’s three-screen setup, and with each puck rising into the air, Santa Maria increases the voice of the broadcaster on the call, or turns up the volume on the tune.

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“I learned a long time ago, if there’s nothing visual in your video to hang a movement on, then you hang the change on a sound,” he says.

As Perron scores a few goals, it’s all coming together for Santa Maria, who now wants to transition into Stanley Cup footage. Showing the championship run is important because that’s what he wants fans to remember most.

“I always go back to the presentation secrets of (tech pioneer) Steve Jobs,” Santa Maria says. “He was notorious for his presentations, and one of the things he said that stuck with me: ‘When you’re telling people about a product, they don’t know what to care about unless you tell them what it is that you want them to care about.’

“So you want to see the first goal, the hat tricks, but what I really want you to care about is, ‘We don’t win the Cup without David Perron.’ So this is the moment of the video that I want to hit hard for you.”

The only thing left to do is put the “slate” on the end of the video, which is the graphic that says “Thank you, David!” That’s added, and then Santa Maria watches it one last time before hitting save on his computer.

“I think it’s pretty great!” he says.

From Nickerson to Armstrong, the video is then sent up the organizational chain for approval.

“Doug feels a strong vibe of honoring a player in the correct way,” Nickerson says.

It’s been a busy stretch for player tribute videos recently, with Jaden Schwartz finally playing in St. Louis after leaving for Seattle two years ago, Ivan Barbashev coming back with Vegas and Sundqvist returning with Minnesota.

But now it’s Detroit, and there are three players to honor in one game.

In the first TV timeout, the Blues put a graphic on the JumboTron for Walman and Husso, who each played 57 games for the Blues (remember that number). They wave and the crowd applauds.

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Then in the second TV timeout, fans start to roar as soon as public address announcer Tom Calhoun says: “St. Louis, No. 57, David Perron.”

The video lasts one minute and 37 seconds, which is longer than most, but the Blues purposely wanted to keep it to less than two minutes to leave enough time for a live shot of Perron’s reaction.

The standing ovation is as loud as you’ll ever hear in such a moment, and there is something else unique: every player on the Blues bench goes onto the ice to salute Perron.

Perron thumps his chest with his glove and points in several directions, and it is clear he’s having a tough time taking it all in.

“Extremely humbling,” he says. “Even going on the ice for warmups, seeing all the signs, I’ve never experienced anything like that. I had to gather myself. Everyone was yelling and hitting on the glass. Even getting the assist, you hear the cheers again, and then the video.

“Extremely special. It’s just a surreal moment that … I don’t think I ever thought I would get to this point. But these fans are unbelievable and it means a lot. I had to just try and stay composed for a bit there. Barely did it.

“(I was thinking), ‘Don’t cry,’ basically. All the memories from watching the video, from the start to now, having the chance to go through that with every single person that I encountered over the years was special.”

The response lasts over two minutes, and the game resumes a little later than it’s supposed to, as Blues players make their way back to the bench.

“(Perron) said he felt like Brett Hull or Bernie Federko, that he got a heck of an ovation,” says Brayden Schenn, the Blues alternate captain and Perron’s former teammate.

Nickerson watches from the press box as months of work were well-received.

“A pretty surreal moment,” he says. “We’ve seen ‘welcome backs’ before, but there’s something special about David Perron. Before the game even started, we did a pregame of David, and the crowd cheered. So I thought to myself, ‘OK, they’re going to be into this one,’ and the moment the video came up on the board, this crowd was lit.

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“You could tell David was feeling it because even when he went to the faceoff circle, he was trying to shake off the tears. I know we do a lot of these, but that is special and something beyond our wildest dreams.”

Nickerson is happy for his staff, which includes Chatman, Santa Maria, John Hamper, Anna Goff, Denita Victor, Mitch Finnegan and Drew Porterfield.

“This department is nothing without them, and also organizationally,” he says. “When you do something well, and people feel good about it, it’s the organization that really wins and shines. We celebrate the wins and we correct our mistakes. But I think organizationally, it’s a collective, ‘We’re the St. Louis Blues. We do it right!'”

The Blues did it right.

“Unbelievable, and I’m not surprised,” Perron says. “Every single tribute, jersey retirement, anything like that, it’s always been really special in this building. I didn’t know what to expect coming back, with the emotion of what happened over the summer, kind of waiting for the game all year to happen. They did a phenomenal job, and I’m just lucky to be part of that.”

(Top photo of David Perron and teammates during a standing ovation for Perron: Jeff Curry / USA Today)