For the past two months, Cameron Duncan has been surviving on four hours of sleep every night in order to finish editing, compiling and publishing clips for his company, Prodigy Entertainment. Duncan goes from campus, to baseball practices and then to working on content for Prodigy Entertainment. The company is gaining popularity on Instagram and YouTube. As a company, they’ve shot over 150 games in total. Duncan’s passion for sports media began in his Broadcast 1 class. Duncan has four years of experience in video production while being on the sports staff.
Duncan founded Prodigy Entertainment Aug. 10 and currently runs it himself. It began with filming a few football games and turned into his own business.
“We have been [producing videos for broadcast] for a while and [we’ve been] going to a ton of different games,” Duncan said. “But we wanted to do more than that. I began going to as many games as possible and going right after baseball since it’s something I love to do.”
At every event Prodigy Entertainment attends, they wear their homemade lanyards. It shows their name, email address, phone number, a photo of themselves and their logo. When they arrive at events, they say they’re from Sac Joaquin Section media. With the recent normalization of artificial intelligence, Duncan created the look of his brand after typing words into a populating search engine.
“It looks official, [and] it looks really good,” Duncan said. “And you just use that to go into every single game. The logo was created from an auto-generated website. I asked it to create a P sports logo for me. What came out is our current logo. I’m lucky because in the middle there is a triangle similar to the YouTube logo.”
Orlando Zamora Ortiz, Gavin Rego and Caden Martin, the members of the company alongside Duncan, wear polo shirts that Duncan purchased for each of them. A polo shirt was $40 and a long sleeve was $50.
“Cam ordered them online and then he just gave them out to everybody, which made us look professional, which made it more real,” Caden Martin said. He is one of the company’s employees and specializes in film.
With the amount of work Duncan was putting into filming, he needed a partner. Over the summer, WCTV19 partners Duncan and Martin started filming and taking photos since they both enjoyed sports media. They went out and started to film more games and then expanded into bigger games in the community at Rocklin, Del Oro and Folsom. In the second week of January 2024, their following rose from 50 followers to 200. Duncan realized he needed a bigger team, which led him to hire Rocklin Student Orlando Zamora Ortiz, along with Whitney alumni Gavin Rego to help him.
Duncan has built relationships with people in the community while shooting games for Prodigy and by working at section games. Duncan’s dream is to be on a main channel news site such as ESPN, Fox or ABC. After high school Duncan plans to attend American River College and will have a job on the football team in sports media. After he would like to attend Arizona State and then get my major in journalism to continue his passion in sports journalism.
“In about 10 years, I’m hoping to have a job with a big company in sports media,” Duncan said. “This is what I love to do, so I’m gonna do it for the rest of my life.”
On equipment and gas, Duncan has invested $10,000 of his own money without any help from his parents into the business. In return has made $1,000 so far, which means he is working to make up the $9,000. Yet, while Duncan loves the craft, the cost of equipment and gas can be difficult to maintain.
‘‘The amount I spend on gas is tough. I had to drive to Folsom at 6 in the morning to film football last week,” Duncan said. “I’m down $9,000, but I love what I do [so] it’s worth it, ” Duncan said.
Their commitment has not only drawn the interest of principals, coaches and parents, but they have also won jobs with high school coaches contacting them directly.
‘‘Random coaches have hit me up through DM’s,” Duncan said. “They see some of my work I recently have done, such as the track and field video. Recently, the Twelve Bridges track coach [Mr. Joshua Winston] just texted me saying he wants me to film a video for them, too. I also have parents come up to me before games and after games. Some coaches have wanted me to take their profile picture.”
Duncan currently balances his busy schedule between Prodigy Entertainment, baseball and school, Duncan also works for CIF for Sac-Joaquin Section for the football and basketball championship games.
To keep up with the growing workload, Duncan said he has to manage his time wisely, even during school.
‘‘I [try] to edit during classes such as government/economics.I literally just [dedicate] it all to editing,” Duncan said. “Then I go right from school to baseball, then from baseball to just filming. So, today I’m going from baseball right to the Del Oro basketball game – their state championship game – so I’ll be out until like [9 p.m.] and then I get home and edit until about 2 in the morning, and then come to school the next day.”
Prodigy Entertainment has done collabs with local photographers and videographers such as Bella Harper, who is the creator of @Purfectpixx on Instagram.
“We work in broadcasting together,” Harper said. “So, it’s fun to see his stories and my stories [and] we push each other to get better. When I see his posts, it inspires me since he posts a lot. It’s like, ‘wow.’ Since we’re both going to be something big someday, it’s really cool to see.”
As Prodigy Entertainment continues to grow, Duncan and his team hopes to make it in the sports media industry in the future.
“It’s been really awesome getting to go out and do this,” Martin said. “It’s not your typical high school experience. I’ve covered stories before, but not at this level. It’s been a journey that’s evolved into more than just a YouTube channel.”
by SOFIA DUNMORE & JULIA LEVERON HIDALGO
