Livestreamed video is booming in everything from product launches to events and houses of worship. It’s a high-pressure world that demands a different way of working to any filmmaking crew more used to documentaries, more in line with live TV production. News and live TV is where the crew from Bubble Production cut their teeth. Based at Hereford in the Midlands, the Bubble boys work all over the country producing big, multicamera outside broadcasts and conferences, through to classical music, pop music and even the live TV coverage for the annual Remembrance Day on 11 November, from the Western Front or Whitehall in London for the BBC. But they love the thrills of action sports and have entered their incredible, adrenalin-fuelled live coverage from the Arenacross World Tour in this year’s awards. Starting in Birmingham but ending in Abu Dhabi, these cover live off-road motorcycle racing and freestyle competition with a show including dancers, pyrotechnics, presenters and commentators. “Typically most of our productions are between four to six cameras, but this is nine, including a pole cam and a camera linked by wireless radio. So eight cameras on the track and one that’s moving around, all put together by a crew of eight,” director Graham Essenhigh tells us, about his production at the Wembley round in London. “There are two of us in here in the main production centre, as I’m joined by George Tarplee who is my senior vision tech. So he’s looking after all the cameras and switching. Behind us we’ve got an engineer who is looking after all the exposure and colour, making sure all the cameras look the same. “Out on the ground we’ve got three cameras in main positions, four other fixed cameras, plus the pole cam and roving cam. We didn’t use any PTZs as it’s all really fast action. Each lap is only 20 seconds long, so switching lap to lap to keep up with the leaders takes some doing. But we’ve been doing this series now since 2016 and the video is streamed on a pay-per-view channel as it has a growing fanbase.” The entirety of the production chain incorporates Blackmagic cameras: the Ursa Broadcast G2, Micro Studio G2 and Blackmagic LIVESTREAMED EVENT FOR RIGHT-HERE, RIGHT-NOW FILMS
8K vision mixers. “As well as various switching devices, recorders and everything else to stick it all together.” Two expert pundit presenters are on site for the event, plus TV personality Matt Crowhurst up on the podium entertaining the crowd in the stadium. So it’s a true challenge, especially as the team are vision mixing for two different outputs – one to the screens in the arena for the crowd to watch, and another separate one that goes to the live stream. “When we go into the start of the show, a half-hour prerecorded loop goes out to the live stream. Then everyone sees the same thing until the interval, when we play adverts in the main hall before cutting to a few cameras focusing on the T-shirt cannon and bits of fun camera stuff. And while that’s going on, we’ve also got a pundit show going on where we can switch to two live cameras.” Apart from the radio camera, all the signals come back to the mixing truck via fibre cable. It’s then converted back into a digital signal and vision mixed. So to get the arena fully cabled up, camera podiums in position and everything tested, the crew came in at noon on the Thursday, two full days before the Saturday night show, to allow for rehearsals and dry runs. To get the signal out to the world, it goes out over the internet via a bonded system that connects to the venue’s own internet, with Bubble’s own 4G bonded system as a backup. With punters paying £35 to watch the racing, there’s a lot of money to lose if things go awry. “One of the toughest things is the long days, but luckily most of us go back 20 or 30 years. We’ve all become really good mates and work so well as a team. Things going wrong is where we earn our money, so the audience doesn’t notice anything has changed,” says Essenhigh. It’s a big, complex operation performed under a lot of pressure, but the results speak for themselves. The production is slick, action- packed and professional enough that people keep coming back for more. If you produce live event coverage, make sure you enter the awards for your chance to be recognised and honoured.
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