Formerly known as Super League Triathlon, supertri is an Aurora Media Worldwide client that is keen to push the boundaries of what can be done within its annual production setup. supertri Toulouse, set amongst the tiny winding streets of the French city, brings a Tour de France atmosphere to the league, as the huge crowds that have become synonymous with the event over its first two editions line the course for a spectacular circuit.
“On the morning [of the race] people are in very early to build camera towers, pull cables out, build cables, build cameras. So that’s one of the things that’s always quite tight up to the mark”
Capturing the athletes sprinting and riding through these streets, however, is another story. Yet host broadcaster Aurora Media Worldwide is more than capable of bringing those pictures home,
Making it work
Supertri events are always a challenge for Aurora and its technical partner, EMG, in terms of the short time available before the start of each race for set up. Emily Merron, technical producer for Aurora, explains: “So the main challenge we always face with supertri is the fact that you don’t get the road closures until quite soon before the event. So with the best will in the world, you can run the cables out as close as you can get and you can test them. But on the morning [of the race] people are in very early to build camera towers, pull cables out, build cables, build cameras. So that’s one of the things that’s always quite tight up to the mark.
“The other thing I guess with Toulouse is you don’t have the line of sight that you do in a location that’s a bit more open. So at Neom, there’s positions where you could probably almost see the whole supertri course, whereas in Toulouse, because you’re running in between buildings and under bridges and over bridges, it’s difficult with a set number of cameras to be able to get good coverage of that because ideally you want a couple of options to go to. You don’t want to just be trapped having this one shot.”
Neom is a massive project to build a new city. Located in the Tabuk Province of Saudi Arabia, the city was originally – when the project was announced in 2017 – planned to cover over 10,000 square miles of desert. Today the project’s goal is said to have been modified to be significantly smaller. supertri Neom takes place on 3 November 2024.
Continues Merron on shooting Toulouse: “So it’s how you work the overlaps of what cameras can see, and how you use things like the drone. And in Toulouse the jib shots are really useful because you get [the athletes] coming up the route, and then you also get them running away from you, and then as they go down and underneath the bridge you can hang the jib over the side and watch them come down underneath you there. So it is just about how the guys work out the best way of overlapping those cameras so that you’ve got a couple of options through each place. Again, if there’s any technical issues or anything like that, we don’t want any black spots in the race coverage.”
Tricky conditions
The supertri events continue to evolve for the broadcast, and this year in Toulouse, PTZ cameras were used to bring the shots to viewers at home, despite the tricky conditions.
Merron says: “supertri are quite open to suggestions on technology for the broadcast. I’ve done a couple of them and for every one, there’s been some different approach to the cameras that we use.
“The main innovation for supertri Toulouse was we used PTZ cameras, which we weren’t sure were going to work with panning on the athletes, but they actually worked really well and it gives more dynamic coverage to something that could in previous shows just be a locked off camera, so you kind of see the athletes come into frame and then straight out,” she continues. “It’s just a way of making a more dynamic product within the kind of confines that we’re working with.”
The three Panasonic AW-UE150 4K PTZ cameras were spaced evenly out along the course so the remote operator could control one, follow an athlete or group of athletes going past, then pick them up again with the second then the third camera, giving viewers continuity and commentators opportunities for storytelling.
Adds Merron that the PTZ’s were useful for green reasons as well: “It is a way of also trying to keep the carbon footprint down of moving loads of people around, so instead of having to fly three operators out, we have one operator who can just do all of those cameras. The evolution of the industry seems to be going towards travelling fewer people, a lot more remote production, a lot more relying on being able to control things remotely, but then trying not to lose the human touch in the coverage and being able to understand the story.”
Genuine care
Technical partner EMG is a trustworthy pair of hands for supertri Toulouse, adds Merron. She states: “We work with EMG who are really good partners in this. They work really hard and we have a camera supervisor, Emma Moate, that we use for every event. So we put a lot of faith in that team. I think they genuinely care about making the show look good and getting it on air as well, so we’re really lucky to work with suppliers that will go above and beyond, and they’ll test and test as much as they can do, up until the point at which you just kind of have to take a bit of a leap of faith at 6:00am and hope that it’s all going to come up.”
Merron concludes: “It’s good that we’ve got a strong production team that really understand the technology as well and they’re quite happy to take questions. Laura [Watts, executive producer] and Lauren Hunnibell, director on supertri Toulouse] will always ask questions; they want to embrace [technology] and they want to know about it and they’ve got genuine interest in what it can do and how they can use that to tell the story, which I think is a really cool dynamic.”
supertri Toulouse took place on 6 October 2024 in France
