Part 3 begins a look at what other crew members are busy with behind-the-scenes. Most of these people are “on the truck” in the parking lot.
In the fast pace of sports broadcasting, each individual crew member needs to know their role in literally hundreds of situations before the broadcast even begins. There’s often not enough time to tell everyone what to do. It helps when the crew members have experienced years of practice and exposure to new situations so that they always know what to do without a plethora of guidance during the game.
That is to say: a solid, experienced crew is just as important as its leaders.
Obviously, when covering a MLB game on FSN, NESN, MASN, Root Sports, or ESPN there are more than 5 cameras. We’ve already discussed how these additional cameras are only used for about 15% of shots – and mostly just during replays at that.
We also talked about a few basic ways to supplement the 5-6 camera setup. Now, we’re looking at some of the places you stash the excess cameras in a high budget broadcast to get the best angles.
37 days until Opening Day and my return to work in the ever exciting sports broadcast industry. I figure this means I should acknowledge the start of Spring Training last Saturday.
Working in MiLB certainly has unique perks, but one rewarding part is seeing a player get his first call-up to the show – and while a Spring Training invitation doesn’t technically count as an MLB call-up it’s still a big deal for the players.
Here’s my top 10 picks from the Super Bowl 2013 commercials in no particular order. Can’t say any of them are as good as some of my favorites from years past, but enjoy anyway!
It’s a cultural phenomenon. Spoilers used to come out with the 11pm news or the next day’s morning paper – easy to avoid if you tried. Today, so many of us are watching sports with a second screen device – and spouting our thoughts live on our favorite social platform with zero regard for spoiler-free content.
That’s an awesome enhancement if you’re watching live too – but if you planed on watching later and the ending is already spoiled, it takes away all the fun of watching it, which means you won’t do that.
FACT: If you watch it live, the commercials are unskip-able. If you don’t see them, you’ll at least hear them.
I don’t like getting into politics anymore than the next guy, but unfortunately broadcasting and politics mix once every four years in the form of …drumroll…Presidential debates.
The three Presidential debates between Democratic incumbent Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney were naturally heavily publicized and viewed by a huge number of potential voters. However, President Obama actually has around 150 challengers if you include third party candidates and recognized write-in candidates. They have once again received considerably less press.
As a sports broadcasting professional, I thought I’d share a little insight into what it takes to broadcast a baseball game. Different networks and stadiums obviously necessitate slightly different setups. The crew needs of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball looks totally different than say that of the American Legion World Series on ESPN3. Having worked in the past with people who’ve worked on one or the other, obviously the main difference is one of scale.
MLB broadcasts easily push the number of cameras to double digits. Other broadcasts use only four or five. Regardless, the concepts behind-the-scenes are the same. It’s perhaps easier to learn about and understand these concepts by looking at the smaller scale productions and building from there.
This April has certainly been quite the busy and eventful month. As alluded to in previous posts, it was not only the start of baseball season (and thus sports broadcasting), but was also the month in which I was heavily involved in principle photography for To Turn Back Time, a 40-minute independent film for which I was the DP. Amazingly, I was able to do both without any significant conflict in shooting schedules, but it also left me with only about 4 days off during the entire month.
And that makes the whole ordeal sound rather easy. As can be typical on lower budget independent films, some of our shooting days on To Turn Back Time ran upwards of 16 hours. That doesn’t include time spent afterwards planning out the next day (or sleeping, eating, etc.). When you do the math, I’ve worked at least 80 hours every single week since mid-March just on these two projects alone.
Anyway, here are the details:
I’ve met a great variety of people, some with graduate degrees in cinematography, perpetuating this rumor (and yes, sometimes I’m even guilty of such). Although it’s good and simple beginner advice, there’s a lot more to the story.
The ‘white card’ tip is only partly true and, quite frankly, is an extremely simplified version of the truth that is probably partly perpetuated by people who don’t feel like spending the time to explain the full story to you.
Assuming you read on, I’m about to put an end to that as best I can.
It’s variety of work that motivates many freelancers to do what they do day in and day out. However, this also means that for some, stability of income becomes an obvious concern. That’s when it’s nice to have something that vaguely resembles a day job, but is also still appealing and interesting to the freelancer in question.
In my case, that’s sports broadcasting.
Baseball was, and always will be, my first sport. I played organized ball as a child and continued to watch Detroit Tigers games regularly on television for some time after that. When it came to starting a career during and after college, sports videography was definitely one of the things on the table. Baseball was the first place I looked.
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