New possibilities: Creating a new production company with a difference at Momentum Broadcast
The core Momentum Broadcast team is made up of freelancers that all know each other from working at ITN and on World Athletics Productions (WAP). They are now in the thick of production on the new Grand Slam Track series
The team at Momentum Broadcast has all worked together at ITN and on World Championships at World Athletics Productions (WAP), the joint venture between governing body World Athletics and ITN. When ITN lost the contract for World Athletics, the WAP crew knew they were being made redundant.
Mark Fulton, executive producer at Momentum Broadcast, explains what happened once the ITN WAP team found out that their termination was imminent. “It was a really weird year because we were coming out the contract, but we still had 12 months to do with World Athletics Productions. We knew that we were all being made redundant at the end of the year.
“As a team at WAP we were always very close,” continues Fulton. “Clair [Goodwin, Momentum director], Anneka [Radley-Hodges, Momentum Broadcast senior producer], myself, Melanie-Jane Clark, who’s our head of production, and Mickey [Payne, Momentum senior director and head of quality] and Shabir [Sharif, Momentum head of rights holder services], we were all quite a tight close team.
“We always thought there was something out there that we could do that was different, but we couldn’t quite put our finger on what it was, until we gradually thought, “right, we will set up a production company”.
“I set up the company and everybody is freelance,” continues Fulton. “We decided to come together as a group of people with a huge amount of experience that had worked across all major sporting events. We put this team together on the understanding that we might get stuff in, we might get stuff that certain people might not work on. We always knew that there were certain elements of maybe smaller projects or bigger projects where we could upscale and downscale if we needed to. As a team, we always worked well together and we just wanted to try and keep the team together in some form if we could.”
The inaugural Grand Slam Track was held in Kingston, Jamaica on on 4 to 6 April
New possibilities
That was when, while still at ITN on the WAP contract, Grand Slam Track appeared on the horizon. Under the guise of Momentum, Fulton began conversations with Grand Slam Track around 12 months ago, after its team approached him about the possibility. He went to LA a couple of times for meetings with Rick Qualliotine, chief content officer at Grand Slam Track.
While there the idea was born to create a joint venture production company with US-based Carr Hughes Productions and Momentum Broadcast in order to service the host broadcast of Grand Slam Track. The new venture is called M-CHP and is one Grand Slam Track-down, with three more in the US to go.
Fulton explains: “When Grand Slam Track came along, we put our budgets together with Carr Hughes Productions. We’re not setting up a traditional production company; we could never compete with your Whispers, your Sunset+Vines, your IMGs, as a group of people. We could all probably be employed by them, but as a company it would be very difficult to compete with them because of the scale of them.”
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“One of the frustrations that I think that we all had [during our careers] is that you always want to try and do a little bit more on a production and there’s never the budget there to do it. If you are with a traditional production company, there’s always a production fee, so straight away, if you are looking at a million dollar budget or a million pound budget, you’re losing a hundred thousand of that on a 10% production fee. So therefore then you put your overheads on top of that, then you put your taxing on top of that as well, it’s a lot.
“We wondered how we could do this differently, in a way that gave more value to a governing body, that gave more value to a broadcaster, that gave more value to a local organising committee.”
Team spirit
Fulton says team spirit is at the core of what Momentum is about. “For us it is about working and just continuing to work and wanting to work, not wanting to make massive amounts of money out of something; if I wanted to do that, I’d have gone and done a different job, if I’m honest with you, but I’d been involved in broadcasting for 35 years and I love it and I’m passionate about it and we all just want to make great television.
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“We all want to do something that’s different. We all want to try and innovate as much as we can. And I think that as long as we were all earning a living, and as long as the company is covering its costs – there is a small overhead – we are quite happy just to see what’s out there. If further projects came in, what we always said was that we would cherry pick people to come in and do stuff. I have no experience in certain sports, Anneka might not have experience in certain sports, so therefore what we will do is bring other people in to do those jobs. And again, we’re not looking to make money out of it; we’re looking just to try and keep a quality of production as high as possible.
“I think that when you can be completely open and completely transparent – that’s what the invoice is, that’s what it costs, that’s what your AR costs, that’s what your technology costs – people can’t argue with that,” continues Fulton. “And that’s basically what it is. It’s just a very open, very transparent, very collaborative group of people that just want to make brilliant television.”
Widening horizons
The team is looking to other sports outside of athletics, states Fulton: “Grand Slam Track is taking a lot of our focus at the minute, so trying to do the business development side of it is a little bit difficult, but that’s not to say that we’re not having other conversations with other people at the moment. We’re having several conversations and people like what they see, they like what they’re hearing. I think once we get a couple more of these things under our belt – and we’re not talking about World Championships, we’re not talking about the one and two tiered sports, we’re talking about maybe some of the smaller sports that just need that little bit more of a lift, that little bit more of production value to get them to the next level – we’ll gain real traction.”
Radley-Hodges adds: “I think it’s quite important that all of us – every single person that does Momentum, but also everyone that we pick – that we’ve all worked on so many different sports. The unique thing for us as a freelance consortium is that we can pick the best for [whatever we need] so if we got a Tiddlywinks event, we’ll know the best people that have done Tiddlywinks forever.
“We’ve all worked for the other big companies, and we’ve all got loads of different sports under our belts, so we don’t have to just be seen as an athletics gang,” insists Radley-Hodges. “It’s just that we happen at the moment to be riding on an athletics wave, which is amazing. But what probably what makes us quite strong is that we can then pick the best people from other sports as well. We’ve all got big contact books!”
Together again
Kevin Orwin, technical director at Momentum Broadcast, comments on what it was like to be part of Momentum, after years of working with the team through WAP while he was freelancing for technical services provider, NEP: “It was great to get back with a bunch of people I’ve spent doing three World Athletics events with over the last six or eight years. Mark came up with this idea and it was just a great opportunity to let us work together again.”
Adds Radley-Hodges: “One of the reasons that Momentum is so unique and important is that Mark has been an amazing supporter of getting women into senior roles. The truck for the world feed in Kingston was mostly women. It’s not a token thing; it’s picking and encouraging [the right people]. Mark is doing a lot for women in production without it [trying to tick boxes]. You’re there [on the job] because you know what you’re doing I think Momentum is unique in that.”
For its work overseas, the Momentum team is pulling local operators into its productions, providing new opportunities, and also bringing in people from the team’s extensive contacts list. An example of that is in Jamaica at the Grand Slam Track event, one camera operator on the crew first worked with WAP at the 2021 World Athletics U20 Championships in Nairobi, Kenya, where he is from, although he now lives and works in the States.
Fulton comments on that camera op: “We gave him an opportunity to work on a global event in the under twenties a few years ago, and he’s managed to get work in America, and then suddenly he’s working back with us in Kingston. For me that’s a real plus in what we actually do. We’re a really close team of people and that’s everything from the commentators, the EVS operators, the sound guys, the camera operators.
“It’s a really tight knit team, and everybody buys into what we do and everybody just wants to give it the best,” Fulton concludes.
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