Creativity costs nothing: Sunset+Vine Scotland on the challenges of bringing Gaelic sport to BBC Alba viewers all year round
Sunset+Vine’s contract for BBC Alba is currently in year two of the three year long deal
BBC Alba trusts Sunset+Vine Scotland to cover around 176 hours of live and as-live sporting events including football, shinty and rugby over the course of the three year contract won by the production company in 2023.
Sunset+Vine has raised the bar on production quality for BBC Alba across its Scottish sport coverage
BBC Alba is a Scottish Gaelic-language free-to-air public broadcast television channel jointly owned by the BBC and MG Alba, also known as Gaelic Media Service. Sunset+Vine’s contract for BBC Alba is currently in year two of the three year long deal at this point. The production company has raised the bar on the quality and depth of coverage of sports in Scotland, and is continuing to do so.
Sunset+Vine produces a minimum of 26 live Scottish Women’s Premier League (SWPL) games each season, a deal which BBC Alba has the rights to until the end of the 2024/25 season. It also produces shinty – a team sport played with sticks and a ball played mainly in the Scottish Highlands – including the Camanachd Cup Semi-Finals, the MacAulay Cup Final, the Valerie Fraser Cup Final and the historic Camanachd Cup Final.
SVG Europe caught up with Grant Philips, head of Sunset+Vine Scotland, to find out more about the success that the independent production company has made of the BBC Alba contract.
The heartbeat
Sunset+Vine’s BBC Alba team covers around 90 events every year, with sporting events across women’s and men’s sport in Scotland, covering shinty rugby and football. “It is actually a lot, and across 10 months, it just never ceases. There’s no rest. We just keep going,” says Philips.
The BBC Alba contract is, “really the heartbeat of our Scottish operation,” notes Philips.
Philips says growing the Sunset+Vine team in Scotland has been key to delivering the BBC Alba contract successfully, but it has also been instrumental in allowing the company to, “win more contracts and grow our business here in Scotland,” he says.
The relationship with BBC Alba is a great one, according to Philips. He says: “To my mind, I find this a success story because our client and us are aligned. We’re aligned with the ambition; we know what we’ve got to try and achieve. Obviously the Gallic language is central to it, but also good sports production is, and they really just leave us to get on with it, and support us to deliver the best we can for them.”
Sunset+Vine has grown its portfolio since it won the BBC Alba contract, to also cover the Scottish Snooker Women’s Euros, bowls for BBC Sport, and BBC Scotland Scottish Cup highlights
Creativity costs nothing
On challenges faced by Sunset+Vine to broadcast for BBC Alba, Philips says: “Sometimes we go to venues that are a field; literally just a field. So we have to build a gantry. We present pitchside, which obviously in Scotland comes with some challenges given the weather and whatever, but the team just get on with it. I think we make some of our best programmes from not very much, if I’m honest.”
Philips gives an example of what his team have to deal with in terms of the huge variety of locations they have to work in. “Well funnily enough, just the other week, we had to deal with a condemned castle, and the other one was an asbestos roof in Elgin [Moray, Scotland]. Going to Old Trafford and Arsenal and all these places comes with their own challenges, but we certainly face different ones with the smaller locations and more remote venues.
“The budget is tight [for these productions] but that doesn’t stand in our way. We still make pre-produced, with a presenter, and live sporting events all over Scotland. So the budget is tight, but it doesn’t really stop us; creativity costs nothing. We just come up with different ideas and that’s it.”
On the creativity that gets unlocked when the team is up against it, Philips comments that filling time slots with features and analysis involves a lot of work for some of the sports. He says on the football matches the team cover: “For every single match we open the show and also we have a 15 minute halftime window that we have to have to create content for. The guys and the girls are out filming on self shooters, off filming every other day, here, there and everywhere trying to gather interviews.
“Our presenter goes [out with a] lot of [the ENG crews] and we make a feature per match basically, so we try and split the halftime into two or three sections with a nice big feature, editorially relevant to the match or something that’s coming up. And then beyond that, obviously we do analysis that you would see on most things, and then we try and engage with the clubs and players; access to some of these matches is better than some of the bigger grounds,” he adds.
Rugby and shinty are treated the same way, Philips says: “Obviously for the rugby we need to fill half time as well, even if it’s a feed. So we need to go and do a feature relevant to the team. Shinty is very much part time, it’s amateur. It’s a very unique sport and some of our best days are covering it; some of the most fun we have is just dealing with shinty and going to all the wonderful locations that we get to go to.”
Sunset+Vine’s Scottish team use two main camera specs to cover the majority of the BBC Alba sports events. Philips comments: “We’ve got a seven camera spec, that we would put maybe on international Scotland women’s matches. And we also have a five camera spec, which is for the most part of what we do. And then we do a number of off-tube matches, mostly the rugby.”
“Jack Donnelly [junior assistant producer at Sunset+Vine, pictured] is out filming features and editing them, and then he becomes a floor manager for the weekend, or the graphics operator. It’s very much one cap fits all”
The contract for BBC Alba was previously held by Irish television and film production company Nemeton TV, which also has a Glasgow office. Philips explains how Sunset+Vine’s team has grown, using local talent, over the last two years. “From our point of view, we’ve really built a strong team [for the contract]. We’ve got some junior people, some people with some experience, and then me! So it has been great. We’ve built a team of university graduates. There are trainees from various schemes around Scotland, some existing people that came from Nemeton to join us that have been really helpful. And some Gaelic speakers.”
The BBC Alba team is 14-strong, working from a base in the centre of Glasgow. Sunset+Vine works with Cloudbass as its technical services provider. Philips comments on Cloudbass: “They’ve got a base in Scotland and they have been brilliant, actually. They face similar challenges that we have, and I think everybody loves working on these smaller things. it comes with a little bit less pressure and more responsibility,” he notes, in that smaller productions with tighter budgets are a good place for people to gain experience and move up the ranks.
He adds: “You get a huge amount of exposure [on smaller productions] and you gather a great deal of experience that makes you fit for other productions, which is exactly what I suppose we trying to achieve with all the nation’s productions. It’s about upskilling people and giving them exposure to things. One of our young APs, Jack Donnelly [junior assistant producer at Sunset+Vine] is out filming features and editing them, and then he becomes a floor manager for the weekend, or the graphics operator. It’s very much one cap fits all. It’s important that everybody can do everything on these small productions. We face some bumps and we have some issues within the programmes once in a while, but in the most part they’re quick learners.”
In conclusion, Philips says the Sunset+Vine team has elevated the coverage of football, rugby and shinty for BBC Alba. He states: “We’ve certainly modernised it and we’ve used modern techniques and some of our expertise and creative nous to make the programmes very watchable for the audience. Long may it continue.”