Wimbledon 2024: Whisper expands offering with enhanced access All England feed

(L-R): Harry Allen, Joe Bennett and Lauren Kirk

Now in its second year as Wimbledon Broadcast Services (WBS) Production Partner, Whisper has added to its offering with an enhanced access All England feed designed to help broadcasters get viewers closer to the players.

Harry Allen, senior producer at Whisper, explains: “The idea is that the broadcasters have a feed that they can access that basically tells the story of the players’ day. So we’ll get them arriving – we’ve added a rackable shallow depth of field camera at the player arrivals area so that we can get them getting out the car and coming into the building and we’re not struggling with light changes and things like that. Then we follow them using remote cameras as they make their way through the club and we pick them up at the other end on another shallow depth of field camera when they go to practice.”

Additional robotic cameras are then on hand to capture the players taking their practice shots.

“It’s given broadcasters a really rich opportunity to follow their players’ journey through the day. And they don’t normally have access to this coverage whatsoever,” he adds.

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The footage has been particularly popular this year given the interest in key players such as Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic who have been battling to return from injury in time for this year’s championship.

“With Andy Murray this year, people were devouring that content because it was almost like as soon as he was on site, people wanted to know about it. The same with Djokovic when he first arrived. When he hit for the first time, it was kind of a big deal,” says Allen.

In addition to making content available for broadcasters on site, Whisper also creates clips and makes them available on a web-based service that can be accessed anywhere. This was done when Aryna Sabalenka pulled out of the competition on the first day.

“That was one of our most downloaded clips. We found that it’s a good combination of some of our really creative features but also when the news breaks you can see the real spike in downloads. When she pulled out, we basically just clipped up everything she’d done that day. So that everybody can then, if they’re having a studio chat, say ‘well, let’s have a look at what she looked like on the practice court earlier’. Things like that I think broadcasters have really enjoyed, being able to analyse those elements.”

The Murray moment

Undoubtedly one of the biggest talking points of the championships so far, however, has been Andy Murray’s farewell, and Whisper was at the heart of ensuring this was both fitting and moving.

“The Andy Murray moment was a huge effort with everybody involved,” says Allen. “It was full of uncertainty in terms of when it was going to happen, how it was going to happen. But rewinding months, the moment itself and the video that we created for it was quite a long time in the making. You’ve got to hand it to the club, because they’ve got these incredible relationships with the players and the fact that they can get Nadal, Federer, Venus Williams and Djokovic sitting down paying tribute just shows the warmth that they feel towards the championships. We were filming in New York, Mallorca and London as well as at Wimbledon and it wasn’t green screen, it was all authentic.”

Joe Bennett, creative digital lead at Whisper, adds: “That was the biggest task going into the champs, especially in the last month, six weeks, knowing that we were going to have to deliver that moment that everyone’s been waiting for for years.

“It was great for us to be involved in that, but the pressure to make sure we got it right tonally and figuring out how you could tell his story and career within three, four minutes, it was massive. It wasn’t just the VTX production, it was the wider coordination that went alongside it too.”

Allen continues: “We elicited the emotion that we set out to, which was we want people to be emotional about this moment and we want people to remember what an incredible career Murray had and how special it was actually seeing a Brit winning Wimbledon. It was a satisfying moment to see our work, because so much went into it.”

Whisper has also been tasked with telling Wimbledon’s sustainability story this year – something both parties take very seriously.

“Wimbledon are very proud of their sustainability credentials as is Whisper, so it’s quite a good match in that perspective. We did some sustainability features last year, but this year we tried to make a much more concerted effort to do more pre-planning with the sustainability team here to create content that we felt would resonate with audiences in an authentic way, but still getting the message across,” explains Allen.

“We looked at some of the things that ATP Media have done with players and tried to engage with the players as much as possible.”

One example is a scavenger hunt with players on walkie talkies, controlling a reporter who was trying to find the six key sustainability features at Wimbledon. The players were competing against each other to see who could get the six items into their cart the fastest.

“It’s really simple, but it’s a way of engaging people in a fun way while seeding the messaging in there as well around what Wimbledon are doing,” he says.

Bennett concludes: “This was our second year [as production partner] so we’ve built up that trust with the broadcasters. Obviously we came in last year, knowing that we could deliver high-quality features and content, but if you’re a broadcaster that’s got its own resources, they’re always nervous to rely on Wimbledon’s content to run on their channels. Whereas this year, BBC have run loads of our pieces in full, because they know there’s going to be an [Carlos] Alcaraz VT that they can rely on, so they don’t need to make it themselves. Amazon Prime are the same, they’ve been running various bits of our content in full. It’s taken that year to build up the trust that you will be delivering top quality content.”

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