33 XTREME Fortnite Summer Skirmish
his summer wrapped up with one of the year’s biggest esports events, around one of the year’s biggest online games. It was the Fortnite Summer Skirmish, held in Seattle, Washington, the hipster capital of the American northwest. The esports tournament featured players from all over the world facing off against each other. Some of them were major professionals – twenty-somethings pulling in six figures – others were unknowns, enthusiasts who thought they would try their skills against the best in the game. Esports events are not like traditional sporting events (in fact, traditional sporting events are now trying hard to be more like esports events). There is music, there are pyrotechnics, there is augmented reality and there are screens – lots of big screens. The atmosphere is one of Super Bowl meets music festival meets alien robot political rally. Ironically, the skills being celebrated in this massive spectacle are things that are almost invisible to the human eye – the sudden, subtle double flick of a thumb at just the right moment, combined with calculations and tactical thinking behind an impassive face staring at a monitor. Kurt Heitmann, through CP Communications, has been providing live event production solutions to broadcasters, sports leagues and event companies of every kind for the past 30 years. He counts the Super Bowl and Tony Awards among his clients. CP Communications also offers a fleet of six HD RF mobile production trucks, two ENG vans, five motorcycles and a full-service machine shop. Heitmann has jumped into esports with both feet. “We’ve done numerous esports events,” he says. “We did Major Gaming in New York City. We’ve done esports for Turner. We’ve done esports in Boston, Washington D.C. and Atlanta. It has really become a new field of entertainment event production. Esports takes gaming, entertainment and sports, and lumps them all together.” Skirmish was held at the PAX West gaming convention, at Seattle’s Washington State Convention & Trade Center. The tournament was streamed live to the official Fortnite Twitch.tv channel and to a variety of social media platforms. YOU’RE NOT RUNNING CABLE The Epic Games’ Fortnite Summer
The elements of the Fortnite broadcast were spread out around the Convention Center. Fortnite had its presence on the main PAX West show floor, but had also built a gaming room on one of the lower Convention Center floors. Additionally, they had a studio set and a massive outdoor screen set up across the street from the Convention Center. CP Communications was tasked with connecting these disparate elements into a single broadcast workflow. The company brought its flagship HD-21 RF truck as a central point to manage signal acquisition, distribution and transmission between the three different locations, as well as to a truck by outside broadcast company NEP. “The major stumbling block was that there was an active road and an active trolley system between the Convention Center and the outdoor screen,” laughs Heitmann. “So you’re not running cable – not on the ground, not up above. So we made it a wireless application.” CB Communications developed a single-frequency network for the event, mainly for the purpose of low-latency return video, using all available UHF spectrum in the 600 band. The single-frequency network made it possible to achieve return video that cannot be covered with a single
transmitter. The multiple WAN transmitters automatically set their power output levels based on their GPS locations, which allows signal overlap across multiple transmitters without interference. All return video was delivered to video monitors on the set and the RF cameras in real time. The RF infrastructure included Eurotek transmitters, one inside and one outside, to support return video paths for camera feeds. A total of seven RF cameras operated in the 3GHz bandwidth range, with three fixed cameras and one jib camera used for signal acquisition on the outside production set. The remaining three cameras, two
IT’S DEMOCRATISING THE PRODUCTION PROCESS. OURGOAL ISTOLEVELTHEPLAYINGFIELD
WHEN FOUR BECOME ONE CP Communications had to connect the disparate elements of Fortnite’s broadcast into a single broadcast workflow, developing a single-frequency network for the event
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