High benchmark: Inside the inaugural Grand Slam Track production from Jamaica
The inaugural Grand Slam Track event held in Jamaica included groundbreaking use of AR graphics. Featured here, the Girraphic-created head to head AR graphic
The exclusive broadcast partner for the inaugural Grand Slam Track season, M-CHP, started its first production in Kingston, Jamaica on 4 to 6 April. Next up M-CHP has a further three events in the US, starting in Miami on 2 to 4 May, then onto Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
M-CHP is a joint production company run by Momentum Broadcast in the UK and US-based Carr Hughes Productions.
The first event in Jamaica was a learning curve for both production companies. Kevin Orwin, technical director at Momentum Broadcast, comments on the biggest hurdle they faced: “Obviously going to Jamaica with the first one brings a lot of the logistical challenges as much as technical, because there are limited resources on the island in terms of power, in terms of porta cabins, and also production facilities. Whatever we did, we were going to end up bringing in the technical facilities from elsewhere.
“We looked at fly packs and we also looked at trucks,” continues Orwin. “We ended up bringing two trailers in from Game Creek Video in America, and they formed the centre of our production; we bought two trailers on a roll on, roll off ferry service out of the US.”
US-based Game Creek Video supplied the OB trucks as well as other technical kit for Kingston, while NEP UK provided the RF cameras, UK-based Aerial Camera Systems (ACS) provided the rail cams and one speciality remote camera, and SkyLynx Productions from the Netherlands provided the drone. Additionally, Australian-based graphics company, Girraphic, provided the graphic design and execution. All the same technical partners will also be supplying in the same areas for the next three Grand Slam Track events.
Read more Big package: Groundbreaking AR for live athletics comes to Grand Slam Track
Adds Orwin: “We had a mix of different vendors all because of the experience we’ve had working with them on events, and we wanted to take them along with is on this one.”
Orwin adds: “Logistically it was a difficult place to go to just because of having to deal with limited resources, but also the challenges of doing AR graphics on steadicams and drones, which people hadn’t seen before, was hard.”
US-based Game Creek Video supplied the OB trucks as well as other technical kit for Kingston, while NEP UK provided the RF cameras, UK-based Aerial Camera Systems (ACS) provided the rail cams and one speciality remote camera, and SkyLynx Productions from the Netherlands provided the drone. Additionally, Australian-based graphics company, Girraphic, provided the graphic design and execution
High benchmark
The production for the Grand Slams is in HDR and 5.1 sound. Notes Mark Fulton, executive producer at Momentum Broadcast: “We wanted to go in and set the benchmark high very, very quickly. We’d all worked on host broadcasting before and I think that when we were with World Athletics Productions, we always tried to push the boundaries of what we could do with host broadcasting.”
The Momentum team has been working on the Grand Slam since October last year. Fulton comments: “We tried to get ahead of the game; we got crew all booked and pencilled in from a European perspective in November last year. We were really prepared for every eventuality in terms of Kingston, Miami and Philadelphia as well from the beginning of the year in January, when everything started in earnest.”
Of a total of around 120 crew on site for the Jamaican Grand Slam, about 50 came from Europe to work on the world feed. Over the four Grand Slams the joint production is keeping as many of the same crew as possible, says Anneka Radley-Hodges, Momentum Broadcast senior producer: “We’ve cherry picked everybody that we want to do it with, but we’ve tried to make sure that they can do all four so that it’s a strong team. They’re all going off, but then coming back and saying “see you in three weeks!”, so everyone has got a passion for it because it’s great events, but also they’ve learned so much.”
Head to heads
For Jamaica and the Grand Slams going forwards, the production team created two minute mini features for Kingston for rights holders to take and use in their broadcasts and on social media.
These included little head to heads between athletes tasting Jamaican foods – one that Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Gabby Thomas participated in among others – and athletes asking each other questions, “and it just gave the viewer such a unique insight into these two athletes and they were great,” says Radley-Hodges.
Adds Fulton: “All features were put onto a portal. They also had scripts as well; everything was scripted in terms of the audio, so if it was being played out for another language, they knew what was coming. We also did post-track event interviews. The really cool thing as well was that – and this is where I think it becomes slightly different and you get the athletes buying in – we actually did pre-interviews as well. When the athletes were introduced into the stadium, [our interviewer] was walking up to them and he was asking them two questions, and this was three minutes before they were starting the race, and a couple of them actually went and set their blocks so it was literally a minute and a half before they set the race.
“One of the reasons that we did that was that we’ve all seen Formula One where you’ve got a driver that’s going to drive at 200-odd miles an hour sat in his car with his helmet on, and Martin Brundle’s there asking him a question, so I think if a Formula One driver can do that, why can’t an athlete do it? And they all bought into it,” he notes.
Learnings from Kingston
On how Kingston as the first Grand Slam went, Fulton states: “We came away from Kingston very happy with the production. We came away with lots of learnings, particularly on how we can tell the narrative better and be better at our storytelling. Also, now we’ve seen the graphics working in anger, we’ve come away knowing where we need to fine tune.
“I think the onsite studio and the onsite world feed was a good dynamic,” he continues. “It worked really well together. But I also think that we can be a little bit slicker in areas from a production perspective.”
The commercial adverts in the broadcast caused some challenges for the team, which it intends to refine for Miami. “From an American point of view [the commercial breaks] were an eyeopener, and there were a lot more three minute commercial breaks than we expected,” states Fulton.
“I think that’s where we need to get better. From a world feed perspective, we can be slicker in terms of when we take the commercial breaks and when we come back from commercial breaks. In general it worked, but there were a couple of times when it didn’t work, and it’s little nuances like that where we need to be a little bit stronger.”
Forwards to Miami
On Miami in May, Fulton says the team is ready to face new challenges. He explains: “It’s a very different venue. It’s a smaller venue that brings its own challenges because we are going down a new innovative route with remote cameras as our main cameras. Our main camera one and camera two will be the remote heads, which has only ever really been done indoors before; it’s never been done at a major athletics event, so that’s a challenge.
“We have all the same toys that we’ve had in Kingston. The camera narrative that we have is very, very strong. It’s very technical as well, so we have a lot of movement in there. We have two rail cams, we have two drones, we have two 15 metre jibs; it’s all about giving that movement and that grace of following the athletes around the track, so at any point on that 400 metres we can be moving alongside them,” concludes Fulton.
Grand Slam Track Miami takes place from 2 to 4 May 2025. This is followed by Philadelphia from 30 May to 1 June, and Los Angeles from 27 to 29 June