Risks and opportunities: Feeling the change on supertri Toulouse with an all-female leadership team in the gallery
The Aurora leadership team for supertri Toulouse 2024: [Back L-R] Emily Merron, Lauren Hunnibell-Moss and Lisa Galliers [Front L-R] Kate Andrews, Anna Piqueras and Laura Watts
“If you have a diverse crew, you have a diverse set of interests. If you have a diverse crew, you have a diverse set of ideas. If you have a diverse crew, you have a diverse sense of humour and everyone brings something different. And it just makes it work better. I can’t tell you why, I can’t tell you if there’s any science behind it, but it just feels like it works better”
Watts comments: “We’re still not at 50:50 if you look at the crew. But if you look at the gallery and leadership, it was certainly female-heavy. So for example, the executive producer is female, that’s me. The director in this instance was female, Lauren [Hunnibell], the script supervisor, Lisa [Galliers], and Monica [Coyne], the vision mixer. So that’s where it clicked. Also, Henry Ferdinando is our tech lead on this, but he was on another job so Emily [Merron], who’s a tech lead with me on E1, came into support us. So that was another happy coincidence in numbers game.
“Certainly from my point of view and from the company point of view, we’re invested in equal opportunity full stop. And from my point of view, I like what happens to a crew when it’s diverse.”
Dynamic changes
The female leadership team and strong female presence in the gallery was purely a coincidence in Toulouse, but Watts explains how she shaped the team: “What I see is the dynamic changes. The intention is to build a crew based on merit first. Everyone’s there because they deserve to be there. But second to that, we want people to enjoy being there. So we build a crew that have friends in it, which enables them to enjoy being there, look forward to going to work, and then look forward to relaxing after work. I think if you have people that are relaxed and enjoying themselves, they bring a different vibe to work.”
She continues: “We all work hard, don’t get me wrong, it is really hard. For me, I think if you have people that are doing the same job all the time, it’s probably easier to [develop a] kind of tunnel vision way [of doing those things, whereas] if you have new people coming in, they can bring an idea. That’s what I like.”
Watts comments on what it actually feels like to be on a gender-diverse crew, and the benefits for the production overall. “I think if it’s a diverse crew, anyone can come and say, “what about this?” and “we want that”. If you have a diverse crew, you have a diverse set of interests. If you have a diverse crew, you have a diverse set of ideas. If you have a diverse crew, you have a diverse sense of humour and everyone brings something different. And it just makes it work better. I can’t tell you why, I can’t tell you if there’s any science behind it, but it just feels like it works better.”
Aurora does strive to create a genuinely inclusive workplace, embracing differences of all its crew, and celebrating diversity. Says Watts: “And that’s not because it ticks a box, it’s because it genuinely makes a difference to everyone working on the crew.”
Aurora’s female crew on site in Toulouse:
- Exec Producer – Laura Watts
- Director – Lauren Hunnibell (making her supertri debut)
- Vision Mixer – Monica Coyne
- AD – Lisa Galliers
- Tech Lead – Emily Merron (set-up coordinated by Henry Ferdinando)
- Production Manager – Anna Piqueras
- Producer – Kate Andrews
- Floor Manager – Caroline Cox
- Camera Supervisor – Emma Moate
- RF Handheld Camera – Laura Dean
Post-production team:
- Editors – Maria Aloy and Ann Philips
supertri Toulouse is a fast and furious event with a myriad of challenges thrown up for the host broadcaster, Aurora, due to the event taking place in the centre of an ancient city
Risks and opportunities
Part of bringing in new faces and voices to a team is about making space for people to gain experience in particular roles, and giving them those opportunities to grow.
“It’s a really hard gig because it’s so unusual; the sport is so fast – honestly, every single briefing I say to people, “it’s really fast” and afterwards they say to me, “wow, that was fast!””
However, that does entail a significant responsibility on others in the team who then have to aid that person in being the best they can be. In Toulouse, an experienced vision mixer working with Aurora was given that opportunity.
Watts explains: “It’s exciting for me. It’s exciting. It is exciting to see people realise their potential. Lauren Hunnibell has been our vision mixer a number of times. Our director, who we’ve been using this year [on supertri] couldn’t do Toulouse. We discussed it and we thought, well, it’s a really hard gig because it’s so unusual; the sport is so fast – honestly, every single briefing I say to people, “it’s really fast” and afterwards they say to me, “wow, that was fast!” – so you weigh up the options of do you go for a more experienced director who’s never done [supertri], versus a vision mixer who’s got some directorial experience who wants to shift into that director space and has more experience of the sport? And we went with the latter option. We went, “okay, she’ll need more support as a director, but she has a lot more experience of the sport than somebody we would just bring in who would need different support”.
“It was a happy coincidence that our director for the season couldn’t do this one, and it gave somebody an opening,” continues Watts.
She adds that giving people opportunities to gain more experience does place pressure on the giver of that opportunity, but it is worth it in the long run.
“For me, the joy was being able to give that opportunity. And it’s not easy, it’s scary; it is kind of on me to go, “I’m backing this person”. Obviously I’ve discussed it with colleagues and senior members of the company, but you want to give the support [to that person] and I know that’s going to put more on me in the preamble and during. But the reward, seeing that person get that opportunity, seeing what their potential is and realise it, is just amazing.”
Laura Watts, executive producer at Aurora Media Worldwide
Big break
As to how Hunnibell did on such a big break in directing, Watts says, “she did great”. She goes on: “I think she will have experienced pretty much every emotion it was possible for a human to experience in the three days she was in Toulouse, and she embraced it,” Watts laughs. “What I really loved about and respected about how Lauren approached it is we spent very many hours leading up to this programme, talking about what I wanted to see on the screen, how I wanted to tell the story of the races and how she can enable that.”
As a vision mixer approaching directing, Hunnibell came up with a new idea – of putting a screen in screen box up so viewers could more easily see stories in the athlete pack unfolding through the narrow streets of Toulouse – and Watts embraced that.
Watts says: “To my point about changing and bringing in diverse and new ideas, we then had two boxes on screen so that we always kept a transition on screen when something was happening, so you could count everyone through. There were two stories happening all of the time, which excited me because the hard thing with this storytelling is the person at the front of the race very rarely wins it in the first two triathlons; it’s the third triathlon that matters. So you have this challenge of telling a story of where did that winner come from? If you follow the leader, you only see who led, but you need to be able to show how these people came through the field to get to the front over the course of three triathlons.
” Lauren brought this new idea; she looked at it, she’s a vision mixer, so she knew what was possible.”
Kate Andrews, Aurora producer and for supertri Toulouse, the graphics producer, comments on the new idea from Hunnibell at supertri Toulouse: “So what Lauren and Laura worked to introduce was this kind of pushback split screen, which allowed us to keep eyes on the people leading the race, but then also to be able to look at who else still might be in the running coming through the transition zone. I think that was really well received in Toulouse; you realise that someone like Hayden Wilde might be coming out of the swim in 10th or 11th, but then will come and finish it in usually first, but he was third in Toulouse. So having that pushback is something that is, I don’t think they do that often in triathlon; sometimes we’ll have a picture in picture if something of note happens, or if there’s an injury or a crash or something like that, on replay. But to actually be able to keep an eye on the transition where all the action happens, then also knowing who’s still leading the race and that we’ve not missed anything there, was a huge difference for Toulouse.”
Team work
All members of the team supported Hunnibell in her supertri debut as director. Says Watts: “What was really interesting was to see how everyone pulled together to make sure Lauren was successful. So she had a vision mixer next to her, Monica [Coyne], and I saw Monica say to Lauren just about two minutes before we were going on air, when Lauren’s kind of realised the magnitude of what she’s taken on at this moment in time, say to her, “you have done this so many times before, you’re just in a different chair”.
“So it was peer support. Lisa [Galliers, AD] who runs the show from the point of view of keeping us on air, she counts everything and she makes sure it all fits into the space as our script supervisor, I watched her looking at Lauren and getting her eye contact, telling her to breathe, making sure that she heard what she needed to hear.
“So everyone pulled together, but not just in the gallery, the cameras as well,” notes Watts. “I spoke to a couple of the cameras before the event and said, “look, Lauren has never done this before and has limited directorial experience, so go with your gut; give us what you think she needs as you might not get as much direction”. And they all just went, “it’ll be good, she’ll be fine”. Everyone worked hard, they always do, but they worked hard with the intention of making it work because that person was new to that role.”
Watts concludes on the risk versus reward of giving someone new that big break, or that extra experience they need to keep moving forwards: “It’s an educated risk based on what you’ve seen from somebody, and what you believe they can do. I think in a freelance world, you rarely get opportunities to grow. You do the job you do. So to give somebody in the freelance world that opportunity to develop, that’s really cool.”
Andrews notes on the strong female leadership team: “It’s not something that we aimed for. It was something that just we didn’t really realise was happening until we were on site; you look around and you realise actually there is a heavy female presence, which there hasn’t always been. Three years ago it was just me and Laura and our production manager that were the females in the gallery. But it’s nice to see strong women come in; it feels like a more of a step forward than it has been.”
Meanwhile, Emily Merron, technical producer at Aurora, adds: “I think it’s just nice that we’re in a time now where just completely organically you can have an all-female team, and it is not necessarily something that people feel the need to comment on anymore, which I think is really good. It’s also just nice to know when you are there that you are surrounded by people who are all individually really strong; it’s just genuinely that you’ve got a group of people who are really good at their jobs that have all been booked for something. There isn’t any compromise in having that team at all. It’s genuine and organic.”
supertri Toulouse took place on 6 October 2024 in France