THE CLIENT
Supercars Group runs the Supercars Championship – an Australian touring-car race series that’s widely regarded as one of the best and most entertaining motorsport categories in the world.
Gravity Media has been the Supercars Broadcast Services & Facilities partner for the past eight years and, thanks to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the Supercars Technology partner since 2020.
When COVID-19 forced the Supercars Championship to shut down in March 2020, Supercars Group refused to be beaten. In an effort to keep the fans engaged – and the sport alive – they took the racing online, creating Supercars’ first-ever eSports competition.
THE PROJECT
The Supercars All Stars Eseries launched on 8 April 2020, and comprised 10 rounds of virtual racing that allowed drivers to compete from their homes via the iRacing platform – the world’s leading motorsport racing simulation. The format involved two races per round at traditional Supercars racetracks, as well as guest appearances from a couple of F1 circuits into the mix.
As the Supercars Technology provider, Gravity Media’s Australian operation provided all studio and facilities solutions for the new product.
THE APPROACH
The Production Centre Sydney was fitted out with a host set and full control room for the Supercars production. We integrated as many as 30 drivers from all over the world (often having to work with consumer-grade internet speeds), with commentators based at The Production Centre Melbourne, and Supercars’ driving-standards observers located on the Gold Coast – all with camera, on-air audio, and a separate communications link. The Production Centre Sydney also took care of streaming the action live across multiple platforms.
Commenting on the setup, Nathan Prendergast, General Manager Television & Content at Supercars Media, said: “We’ve been fortunate that Gravity Media has the tech and facilities to be able to connect our different talent and officials in an isolated, locked-down world. Gravity Media has the bandwidth to connect all these people and then output it to the world both as a traditional TV feed and encoded RTMP stream. It’s a very powerful environment.”
To help ‘humanise’ the coverage, we included as many real faces in the footage as possible during competition. Using the webcams from each driver and placing them in inset boxes while they raced not only showed the effort they were putting in, but also reminded the viewer that a real person was behind the outcome of each race. All driver webcams were available via Zoom, and two scan-converted outputs with driver audio were available on Discord channels.
The coverage philosophy was the same as for normal race coverage, but instead of directing cameras, we directed observers on computers to cover what we needed. We still had a clear idea of how we wanted the coverage to look, and how we integrated the in-car cameras, but eSport demands more work in the lead-up – for example, developing the right angles and creating camera overlays to make sure the race coverage is representative of what viewers would experience in the real world.
What’s more, to ensure the product looked, felt and sounded like a true Supercars broadcast, Supercars Media secured its primary TV-broadcast talent team, including lead commentator Neil Crompton, as well as integrating the Supercars GFX package with Girraphic.
An important final note is that throughout the entire Eseries, all Gravity Media production teams practised COVID-19-safe work precautions, including the use of hand sanitiser, gloves and face-coverings, as well as stringent safe-distancing measures in all work environments.
THE OUTCOME
All 25 Supercars Championship drivers took part in the All Stars Eseries, along with several guest drivers from other race series around the world – including F1’s Lando Norris and Max Verstappen. There was even a special 11th round, involving a mix of drivers and celebrities to help generate interest around the world.
The series was broadcast across a two-hour weekly window on Wednesday nights at 19:00hrs Sydney time. It was aired on Fox Sports, Kayo, TEN Play and Sky Sports New Zealand, and was streamed on Supercars’ Facebook and Twitch channels.
Gravity Media also looked after other streams for Fox Asia, motorsport.com and Red Bull TV, in territories as far away as Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Africa.
“Gravity Media’s ability to access a connected facility, along with the smarts and personnel to assist us in connecting the traditional TV assets like the host studio, the gaming and PC world, and the connectivity between drivers and interstate hosts – all from one venue – has been invaluable. This project was about three months of work in three weeks.” Nathan Prendergast, Supercars Media
“Broadcast skill and motor-racing passion fused to make literally the world’s best virtual racing broadcast product.” Neil Crompton, Supercars Hall of Fame
THE CLIENT
BBC Sport – the sports production arm of the UK’s national public-service broadcaster, the BBC.
THE PROJECT
Gravity Media was awarded by BBC Sport, the production contract to cover the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup, held in France from 7 June to 7 July 2019. All 52 matches were broadcast live on the BBC’s network TV channels, BBC iPlayer and the BBC Sport website, and for the first time at a Women’s World Cup, the big games – such as the main knock-out matches and the final – were on BBC1 in peak time.
THE APPROACH
Our approach to this project broke new ground in sports broadcasting. Each game was presented live from pitch-side in France, but produced remotely out of The Production Centre in Manchester.
This hybrid remote production involved the match feed being taken in full from the host broadcaster, HBS, and the live presentation and match analysis being performed remotely from Manchester. With our two UK facilities fully integrated together, all the production equipment– the switcher, audio mixer and matrix – was in London, linked to a custom-built gallery in Manchester where live camera feeds of the BBC presentation from France and the match feeds, were switched.
Out in France, there are three separate teams comprising BBC presenters, pundits and commentators, along with Gravity Media producers, camera operators, sound and engineers. These teams criss-crossed the country to present from the nine different stadiums in cities including Paris, Nice and Montpelier, chalking up thousands of miles to get from one venue to another ready for the next show. Behind the scenes, our Production Centre and engineering staff were integral to each broadcast, downlinking and on-passing feeds, and providing the technical infrastructure, support and expertise to make the production possible.
Gravity Media’s Director of Technology, Nick Symes, comments: “This is an interesting example of remote production, where we weren’t doing a full multi-cut of lots of cameras, the live element was less complicated because we had access to the host match feed. The difference was that we long-lined where people were doing it, but had to wrap a great deal of other workflows into the mix due to the geography involved.”
Meanwhile, all feeds from HBS coming back to Manchester enabled us to produce content-rich replays and packages, along with in-game Piero-powered analysis, and with reverse vision being fed back to the platform presentation positions.
THE OUTCOME
While this hybrid remote production was the ideal solution for BBC Sport, it still wasn’t the full works, as match coverage was handled locally. With Gravity Media having recently upgraded The Production Centre in Manchester, we have the technology to go to a full multi-camera remote production, if required – it just depends on the venue having the right capabilities.
A record-breaking 28.1m people watched BBC’s coverage of the tournament on TV and online – almost half of the UK population. England’s semi-final loss to the USA attracted the highest live TV audience of 2019 at the time, with 11.7m viewers. It was a show that saw Gravity Media being nominated for a BAFTA in the Best Sports Programme category. Alex Scott, a pundit throughout the production, won an RTS Award, in the Best Sports Presenter, Commentator or Pundit category for her work at the tournament.
THE CUSTOMER
BBC Sport – the sports production arm of the UK’s national public-service broadcaster, and rights holder of the World Indoor Bowls Championships.
ITV4 – part of the ITV network and owned by ITV Digital Channels, ITV4 has broadcast the Waterloo Autumn Handicap Crown Green Bowls tournament since 2015.
THE PROJECT
Gravity Media – then branded Input Media – was commissioned to produce the World Indoor Bowls Championships from 2010 to 2015 by the BBC’s Sport department. This 40 hours of BBC Two network television has been a staple of the terrestrial sports schedule every January.
Our expertise in live bowls production has been further extended by annual high-quality coverage of the historic Waterloo Autumn Handicap Crown Green Bowls tournament, played in Blackpool every September. This project was a sponsorship-funded model, broadcast for 16 hours on ITV4 each year from 2015 to 2018.
THE APPROACH
Gravity Media brought a new lease of life to the BBC Two coverage of the World Indoor Bowls tournament over five years, revamping the OB coverage and the ‘creative offering’ from the Potters resort in Norfolk. The imperatives were to improve coverage, build-up personalities in a low-key sport, and to widen the appeal of the game to larger audience.
Equally, the Waterloo Crown Green Bowls tournament was re-invigorated by Input Media’s broadcast strategy and tournament staging for ITV programming. The ITV4 coverage saw this historic slice of Northern sporting culture return to a free-to-air platform for the first time in two decades. Live OB coverage of the tournament transmits from 10am to 6pm over two days each September, with extensive coverage of the last-16 round onwards.
Our approach to both these elite bowls tournaments was to revitalise and modernise the core match coverage for the television audience, and to build the characters and recognition of the players.
For the World Indoor Championships, we dispensed with the traditional use of hot-head cameras fixed in the arena ceiling, instead installing long-arm jibs. These jimmy-jibs offered a wide variety of coverage options and allowed for precise and accurate overhead shots showing which player was nearest the jack. The jibs also offered an array of more interesting angles in respect of the trajectory and travel of each bowl as it approached the jack. The different style of coverage was ably supported by the Piero analysis tool and new concentric rings.
Similarly, overhead jibs and a remote-controlled mini-camera hanging from a Simon Tower provided an upgrade to the standard 6-camera OB coverage at the Waterloo Crown Green tournament. And our glossy programme features and player profiles were equally significant in terms of the sport’s editorial development, which were used extensively in both productions. Well-crafted features were successful at developing wider interest in the sport of bowls and its best players – allowing audiences to get acquainted with the sport’s biggest names and most notable personalities.
THE OUTCOME
Gravity Media has a strong and enduring broadcasting relationship with the Waterloo Handicap Committee and ITV4, which allows continued annual coverage of this great Blackpool sporting tradition. The Gravity Media programming has put the sport of Crown Green Bowls back on the map, with a massive surge in interest and entrants for all the major BCGBA competitions, including youth events.
Meanwhile, although we currently no longer produce the BBC Two coverage of the World Indoor Bowls due to the production contract becoming a BBC Nations tender (outside England), our creative and exuberant coverage pushed the indoor game in to a new era and style of television coverage for five successful years.
Gravity Media also forged new social media pathways for the sport, introducing the WBT World Championship and its top players to a much wider audience via numerous digital platforms. We were also particularly effective at using PR and publicity to further cross-promote the game and World Championships event itself, by effectively linking up with BBC campaigns such a BBC ‘Get Connected’ and ‘Sports Relief’.
