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SUPER BOWL LII FEATURE
SUPER BOWL LII What was unique this year was that the Super Bowl served as a launching pad into the Winter Olympic Games from Pyeongchang, which began just four days later
he 52nd Super Bowl had to outdo all others and of course the producers looked to technology to achieve that. We asked the director Drew Esocoff and executive producer Fred Gaudelli what were the standout technical highlights for them last month. Director Drew Esocoff: “We had some great technology such as two SkyCams for the first time, I believe, in Super Bowl history. We started using high SkyCam a little bit during the season. We got to it three or four times in three or four games, and it really provides a great view of football action without being a gimmicky view. We had a good plan. The basic blueprint was our Sunday Night Football plan with expanded facilities. Our plan was to cover any defining play that needed to be covered. “The double SkyCam has really changed how we have covered the game over the last couple of months. You know, how it has evolved the way that we look at it in the truck, the way that we use it.” Executive producer, Fred Gaudelli: “It’s just been a nice complement to what we already have. We try to use it strategically based on the schemes the two teams run, obviously, the game situation, down and distance. It’s a great look at offensive line plays, especially offensive lines that run that wide zone scheme, things of that nature. We’ve experimented with receivers and routes and seeing all those things develop. So, it’s a really nice complement. I don’t think it supersedes the other SkyCam, but it’s been a great complement to our coverage.” Drew Esocoff: “I think it gives a football coach’s perspective from a little bit more of a dynamic view than your All-22 50-yard line camera or your high end zone camera. It has more movement to it. It has some dynamic traction to it, and I just think, especially on a show like the
the outskirts of my monitor wall. In other words, I try to keep the monitor wall the same as it would be for the Sunday night game, and I’ll look to those specialty cameras in game-specific instances. “You know, it’s the biggest sporting event in the world, and our goal was to have the best look of any scoring play, any penalty that comes into question, so on and so forth.” Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBC broadcasting and sports: “We’ve been streaming games for many years. It’s a complement to our TV coverage. It’s the same coverage, and just making it available to those who are maybe place-shifted and not in front of a television set. What we’ve seen over the years, it makes up somewhere between 1% and 4% of the total audience, so it’s relatively small. But in the case of a Super Bowl, that can mean well over one million, maybe headed towards two million concurrent users. So it’s a significant amount of people. On a percentage basis, it’s not the largest number. But we think it’s important to make the game available, as we do with every broadcast we do for sports at NBC. Everything is simultaneously on linear and streamed for our fans.”
Super Bowl, which is a game that a lot of people are probably watching their first game of the year, I think it gives the football purist what they want to see and the casual fan a shot that’s, quote unquote, not boring, like a coach’s film session would be.” Fred Gaudelli: “We also debuted a virtual 3D system. We did body scans of six players and during the game, when we do graphics on the players – not all the time, but a few special ones – you saw them in full. The players themselves in full three dimensions with their information, obviously, designed into the shot. So we were really excited about that. “The ultra-slow-motion, the cameras that are running at 600, 800 frames, we had more of those for these games. They always seem to be the cameras that really provide that definitive view on the big plays of the game.” Drew Esocoff: “We also added some high-speed cameras. A lot of the stuff we have is to add what we consider a defining view of a critical play. It’s 4K cameras, high speed cameras. We added pylon cams for the Super Bowl, which we don’t use for the Sunday Night Football season. “So a lot of these things I describe as add-ons that, at least from the director’s point of view, get added to
IT’S THE BIGGEST SPORTING
EVENT IN THE WORLD, AND OUR GOAL IS TO HAVE THE BEST LOOK
ABOVE The 52nd Super Bowl was the first in history to use two SkyCams.
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