Sky Sports sometimes cover the Ice Hockey games, which can be very awkward for us. Sky Sports use a company called TeleVideo who come in and film the games. Unfortunately they have lot equipment, and take over our areas. When this first happened to us we panicked, as we had not planned for this. When they first came to a game, we were still in our pre development stages, so this game did not get put up because we were still developing. But we made sure we had back up plans. Where we have our cameras, there is enough space for 3. When it is just us, we have 2 set up. When Sky comes, they have 2 up there, and they are very large cameras, which leaves us space for the one camera, which is the clubs which makes the DVD’s. So we have to move our main camera somewhere else. Luckily we have an access all area pass, so we can go where we like. We found an area which is ok, we do not have a clear view of the entire rink, but it is the best in the situation that we were in.
It is fantastic working along side Sky, because we can see how they approach the hockey. We can see how they set up the camera positions and what angles they use. They have 4 cameras, 2 up in the main filming area, one that gets a wide shot of the rink, with some Zooming, a camera that does purely close ups, a camera behind the goal, quite high which gets a shot of the rink from bottom to top, and cameras that are near how our camera 2 is set up, to get the shots of the goals going in. It is the same set up as us, but where they have a close up camera, we use our main camera for close ups. It is interesting to watch though, because in front of where they film and where our clubs camera is, is the commentators, and they have two screens in front of them which is where the love vision mixing final cut is shown, so we can see how they mix together the shots and what the final game looks like, as they do it all live from a Lorry outside the rink. Watching this helps give us ideas of how ours should look, as Sky Sports is along with Setanta the leading sports channels on TV, so how they produce there sporting shows must work, as they are not leading in it for nothing. We are pleased to see though that how they edit there games is how we try to do ours. Sky Sports has been a major influence on our work, having the scoreboards and having camera 2 where it is. They use a lot of replays, which we try to do, because they do work very. Plus the puck is so small, it is very easy to miss what happened, with replays it helps the viewer understand what has just happened. Sky can use replays from many different angles, which I wish we could but it cannot be done, as we do not have the equipment or man power to achieve this. However, one game we may try a different camera set up, try and experiment to see if there is at all a better set up than what we have, where we can get different angles for replays.
The commentators that do the sky sports commentating are very good; this is what we want for our highlights, having a commentator. For us though as we make highlights, doing the commentating after the game would be better, so we can edit it easier, and we can control how long the commentating lasts for. After the game, Sky Sports do interviews. They set up a interview area next to the rink, which was very interesting to watch. They had a desk area with a big HD TV; this is the area where they will talk about the game. Many of the ways they carry out filming the game is not impossible for us to do, because we do not have access to the equipment that they have, nor do we have the man power.
We have got many ideas though from working with the channel, and what we produce must be good and work within there channel because they have used our footage before when talking about Ice Hockey on Sky Sports Extra. Unfortunately we did not know about them using our footage till after it was shown, but Sky have contacted us asking for our footage of games, and they have used our footage off the clubs camera on a couple of instances. This makes us feel extremely happy, as we put a lot of effort into making our highlights and footage looking professional and to the highest standard we possibly can, and it pays off when Sky Sports want our footage to be shown on there channels. We have contacted the owner of the Blaze and told him to let us know next time they use our footage, so we can view it and see how it looks. We were quite angry that we were not informed, if we could have captured this happening, by taking photos of the TV or anything, or the email from Sky asking for our footage, we could have it for this blog, but unfortunately we don’t, but next time we will.
Doing this ice hockey project really has been an incredible experience, how many people on our course can say they have filmed along side Sky Sports, and who have then used there footage on Sky Sports News and Extra when talking about the Coventry Blaze. Working with Sky we have developed our skills, in camera techniques, editing and thinking on the spot. For example not having our usual camera space, so we had to think what we can do to get over this problem, in a very limited time so we can get set up ready for the games face off. The Rink is not that big, so we are very limited with space, which adds to our development as we had to imagine what the camera angles would be like from different areas within the rink. We have a client, who we produce work for, which gets around 1500 views a week. This is a project that I am very proud to be apart of.
http://www.skysports.com/icehockey
