Pitched Together

One week in Sacramento

In July 2023 the Homeless World Cup came to Hornet Stadium at Sacramento State — the tournament's eighteenth edition, and its first ever in the United States and on a university campus, played July 8–15. Around four hundred players from forty countries took the field, every one of them someone who has experienced homelessness or housing insecurity.

Football here is not charity spectacle. It is reconnection — confidence rebuilt, a community re-entered, a team to belong to. The project is tied to Sacramento State's Center on Race, Immigration and Social Justice.

Being there

The wager of immersive media here is not spectacle but presence — to shorten the social distance between a viewer and people who have lived through homelessness. You are not shown them; you are placed among them.

The athletes appear as what they are: skilled social agents, not objects of pity. The camera sits among the players, the sidelines, the flags and the crowd, because the event is spread across a place — and so the viewer inhabits that place rather than a summarized version of it. A conventional documentary decides where you look; here the frame is given up.

The title reads two ways — the pitch is the field; pitched together, people brought into proximity.

The apparatus

A spherical rig of six cameras recorded in every direction at once; the stereoscopic image gives depth the way embodied vision does; the ambisonic sound keeps its directions, so a shout stays where the shout was. Post was heavy — a few minutes of footage could take some fifteen hours to render, on the way to a planned six months of postproduction. Filmed in July 2023, finished as a 2024 film.

Artificial intelligence supported the background research and interview preparation — summarizing more than 700 news and academic articles and proposing interview questions. It did not generate the footage, and it did not replace the film's subjects.

Recognition

The production story: Jonathan Morales, Sacramento State News, July 2023 →