SPORTS FINAL - TV SHOW
Client: Ithaca College Television (ICTV)
Project Type: School
Position: Producer
Timeline: January 2019 - May 2020
Sports Final is a weekly sports news show covering Ithaca College sports, Cornell sports, and local High School sports. I started on the show as a Freshman in my very first semester (Fall 2018), and I've now been producing the show for three semesters. In my time on the show it has changed a lot.
BECOMING A FRESHMAN PRODUCER
After redoing the graphics package for the show in my first semester, both producers of the show were moving on to either another show, or interning in LA. This meant Sports Final would have to have all new producers for the Spring 2019 semester. The show would also need to be changed drastically. In order to basically bring the show back from the dead a second time in the last six months, the exec staff brought in Cal Dymowski, Jack Powers, Jason Rossell, and me. The outgoing producers had recommended me to be a producer, so I was brought in as a fourth producer. The thing is, having a freshman produce a show is something that's fairly unprecedented for ICTV.
I had a lot of pressure because all the other producers that came in were super experienced, and I was in my second semester at the school. We also needed to re-invent the show again. Historically, Sports Final was a local sports show focusing on Ithaca, Cornell, and local high school sports, but in Fall 2018 the producers decided to make it focus on national sports instead of local. This did not fly with exec staff and the show was nearly cancelled. The four of us were tasked with restoring it to a local sports show.
SPRING 2019 - FORMAT CHANGES
Obviously, the format had to change substantially for Spring. In the Fall, we'd open the show with a cold open, followed by the show open, followed by a two sets of readers and highlights on national teams and at the end of the block we'd bring in an analyst to talk about their assigned national sports. This would happen for both A and B blocks, followed by a C block with more discussions and a segment on history called "This Day In Sports".
Here's an episode of Fall 2018 Sports Final:
For Spring, we changed that up a lot. We went back to being focused on just Ithaca, Cornell, and local high school sports. Our A Block would feature two highlights and a discussion at the desk with either our Ithaca sports analyst, or an athlete we brought in for an interview. After the break, B Block would feature two Cornell highlights, and a discussion with the Cornell analyst at the desk. In C Block, we'd have a High School host independently break down the week in High School sports, followed by the hosts back at the desk filling time with This Day In Sports or a similar segment.
Here's an episode of Spring 2019 Sports Final:
SPRING 2019 - RUNDOWN
SPRING 2019 - PRE-PRODUCTION
One of my major duties as a producer in Spring 2019 was to run pre-production. Every week we needed to create the entire show the day of, from writing the script, to cutting the highlights and packages, to creating all the graphics for a very graphics heavy show. That meant coming in at 1 PM the day of the show and directing the assistant producers through the pre-production process every Sunday leading up to the live broadcast at 8.
The pre-production workflow started with the other producers and I generating a rundown. My co-producers were so experienced that they could actually generate a rundown for the show in about 30 minutes every week. After the rundown was set, I would get the assistant producers (AP's) started on their tasks. I organized the AP's through a color coded google spreadsheet where I delegated all their tasks and had them update it when they were finished with a particular task so I could keep on top of things. Everything is built using the graphics template I created for the show and is linked using the Park School of Communications' Parkstor server. Parkstor links every park desktop computer together, allowing everyone to share their work and build out my templates into the show's graphics.
AP's will cut together highlights and packages, as well as boards and motion graphics to get ready for the show. After an AP finishes their task, they can export it to the shared Daily folder on Parkstor. I would work on some aspects myself, and also go around helping the AP's and answering any questions they have or fixing any problems that may arise. In order to help the AP's even more, I also created a comprehensive 20 page guide on how to be an AP on the show.
After everything gets finished, I was in charge of moving it off of Parkstor and ingesting it so we could access it in the control room. Highlights, Packages, VO and other video were moved into the K2 server that we used at the time, static graphics were imported onto Chyron Lyric, while motion graphics were moved onto Chyron Clipstore.
SPRING 2019 - REFLECTION
Overall, I think Spring 2019 was a big success. We had to completely redo the show for a second time and refocus it on local sports again, we rose to the occasion. We also called a lot of audibles that led to good changes in the show long term. For example, pre-recording the High School Segment and utilizing the jib for discussions. I also fully updated the graphics package during this semester.
The downsides were that we didn't really have much in the way of packages or reporters, we just had the hosts call highlights all the time which meant we didn't really have as much journalism as we could've. I also didn't really like the set, the brick walls suck. There were also some inevitable problems with the format of the show, mainly discussions were way too long and C block feeling a little pointless. There was also a lot of unnecessary chaos caused by having to move so many people on and off the desk. All said and done though, I think it was definitely a great comeback for a show that was on death's door twice in one year.
Fall 2018
Spring 2019
FALL 2019 - FORMAT CHANGES
In the Fall of 2019, I continued to produce the show, this time with Brian Barnes and Garret Bampos, and we changed the format up again. We decided we wanted to have a much larger focus on reporters rather than just calling a bunch of highlights. We got 5 great reporters on the team and we assigned them to Football, Men's Soccer, Women's Soccer, Volleyball, and miscellaneous sports. They wouldn't just make packages for us, they would also act as analysts for their specific sports and come onto the actual show after their package aired to talk about their show. So we would open with a reader on the first sport of the day, call a highlight, then watch a reporter packaged, followed by a discussion with the reporter who made the package in A block. For B Block, the hosts would call another Ithaca highlight, followed by another package, followed by an interview with an athlete at the desk. For C block, we'd open with a Cornell reader and highlight, followed by a discussion with a designated Cornell analyst. After that, we'd have our High School Analyst do his segment, and we'd wrap up the show with a new segment called the Two Minute Drill, where the hosts would attempt to cover as much material possible in the last two minutes of the show. In my opinion, this is where the show really started to get good.
Here's an episode of Fall 2019 Sports Final:
FALL 2019 - RUNDOWN
FALL 2019 - PRE-PRODUCTION
Pre-Production in fall of 2019 has been very similar to the spring so far. One of my goals going into this semester was to clean up the templates. The Sports Final templates were always very messy because they were made very quickly halfway through the Fall 2018 semester and they were also built off the back of older templates made by Jake Wright, so even though they were good graphics they were very confused on the backend. Now they made perfect sense to me, but they were pretty vague for anybody else, so over the course of the semester I simplified the graphics templates to make the AP's lives easier. We also used OTS graphics much more this semester. I also got the chance to clean up a lot of outdated older graphics like the social media board, and design a lot of new ones like the two minute drill graphic.
FALL 2019 - BROADCAST
The broadcast was also pretty similar compared to spring. The two major changes beyond the fact that we had literally one returning crew member from spring were the set and readicam. The Spring 2019 set was honestly pretty bad, it wasn't exactly at the top of our priority list so we just kind of threw the brick walls up in studio A and called it a day. For Fall 2019, we decided to go with a more colorful set utilizing the show's colors as well as the monitors. I think this was a large improvement, but what we didn't count on was that balancing the blue and yellow lights was not easy. We experimented with it throughout the semester until we settled on one we liked. As previously mentioned, we also started using readicam again. Readicam AKA the insert room is a separate space down the hall from the studio with a camera where you can basically stick a person in front of a monitor. This was a big feature of the show in Fall 2018, and we decided it would work better than bringing everybody onto the desk. The only downside is that one background is literally the only good one we can use, and the monitor behind where the analyst sits has a few pretty obvious dead pixels.
FALL 2019 - REFLECTION
Fall 2019 was a great season. We changed the show as a whole as well as on a week by week basis and the cast and crew landed on their feet every time. The best call was definitely allowing reporters to come on the show and talk about their packages. In the previous three semesters I'd been on the show, we'd aired two packages, this season, we aired two packages a week for the entire season. The quality of the show went up a lot, we revamped our set, and hopefully we can continue to build on it in the Spring.
SPRING 2020 - FORMAT CHANGES
In the Spring of 2019, Garrett left the show and we brought in Tyler Longmoore as our third producer. We also kept the format pretty much the same
Here's an episode of Spring 2020 Sports Final:
SPRING 2020 - BROADCAST
The whole idea of our broadcast this semester was just to refine the changes we made in the Fall to try and get some award-submission worthy episodes finished. Unfortunately, our semester was cut short by the Coronavirus pandemic, and as a result we were only able to make three episodes. The good news is, I'm very proud of all three episodes. I got to further push the boundaries of what we were able to do, and I even got to make an on camera appearance in our final episode which was honestly a good way to go out since Spring 2020 was my last semester producing Sports Final.
OVERALL REFLECTION
I had an incredible time producing Sports Final for 2 and a half semesters. It sucks it ended the way it did but I was proud of the what we were able to make. When I started out on the show it was on the verge of cancellation, and when I left after putting the first half of college into producing it, it was one of the best shows at ICTV, and definitely the most modern in terms of the technical side. I also got to test my skills immediately in the second semester of my freshman year which was a wild ride, but on the bright side I got to learn from some of the best producers to recently attend Ithaca like Jake Wright, Joe Gutberlet, Jack Powers, Jason Rossell and Cal Dymowski. I got to work with some truly great talent as well and by the end, we were able to make some really great shows after we completely changed the structure like 3 different times. I believe that we would have been able to make some award winning television if we'd been able to finish that last season, but alas, it's time to move on to Gridiron Report.
