| By: Carolyn Braff, Managing Editor | Published: September 23, 2009 |
In 2001, the Arkansas State University athletic department purchased and installed video boards in its football stadium and basketball arena. To fill the boards with content, the athletic department embarked on a partnership with the department of radio and television, so that students could learn to operate the boards. Eight years later, Arkansas State students run all the in-arena production operations from a dedicated mobile-production truck and, in the process, are working themselves into full-time jobs in the production business.
A Division I FBS institution that competes in the Sun Belt Conference, Arkansas State games are not often televised, so the school has the rights not only to produce the show for the video boards but also to record the games for playback on the local cable channel.
Step Into the Truck
Along with the video boards, the Arkansas State athletic department purchased a production truck for the students to use, and all of the content originates from that unit.
“Our mobile-production truck parks outside of the football stadium and the basketball arena, and we send everything through fiber optics straight to the video boards,” explains Collin Pillow, instructor and studio supervisor at Arkansas State. “Our students are running all the equipment — stirring fans up with a make-noise graphic, doing a replay of the last play, doing sideline games during timeouts, as well as producing the actual content of the game.”
The 24-ft. truck is equipped with four Hitachi cameras, with other cameras sometimes added on. A Ross switcher is on board, along with a Fast Forward Video recorder and a Mackie audio mixer.
“We have upgraded our equipment occasionally,” Pillow says. “We started out with tape, and now we’re doing more and more stuff strictly digital, straight to hard drive.”
Through the partnership with the radio-TV department, Pillow is able to purchase the equipment he needs, even if his budget cannot accommodate the entire purchase.
“If we see an area we’d like to upgrade, we’ll work out a partnership that says we’ve identified a piece of equipment we’d like to purchase, but our budget may not allow for the purchase of the entire thing, so can you guys help us out,” he explains. “We’ve had a very good relationship with the athletic department over the past decade.”
Developing Professionals
As part of the requirements for the bachelor’s degree in radio-television, Arkansas State students are required to accumulate professional-development credits, which they earn by working a certain number of live-sports-production events each semester.
“We have workshops that we undertake where the classes will go over and spend some time in the truck,” Pillow explains. “We have anywhere from 50 to 60 students a semester that participate in the program.”
A small group of those students are paid staff members responsible for programming the school’s 24-hour cable channel, as well as working the live sporting events. The cable channel also airs coach’s shows for football and men’s and women’s basketball, and those shows also re-air on Fox College Sports, so the student work is showcased outside of the university context.
For each football game, Pillow generally has a crew of 15 students, only four or five of whom have worked previous events.
“The critical positions like directing, switching, and a couple of the cameras are generally the paid staff, and we know that they’re going to know what to do every time,” he says. “But one or two of the cameras occasionally has a brand-new person on it who has only worked a camera for class work or maybe worked as a cable puller in a previous game, so some of the training goes on during the games themselves.”
Three professional engineers rotate through each of the live events to ensure that a seasoned technician is always present. A member of the production faculty is usually on hand as well, but the students are truly in charge of the productions.
Into the Real World
“It’s been a great experience for our students over the last nine years,” Pillow says, “because so many of them didn’t know they were interested in sports to begin with, especially on the sports-video side, and some of them have gone on and gotten great jobs in the industry.”
One Arkansas State student is currently working in Bristol, CT, as an ESPN intern, and others have gone on to become collegiate video directors at such institutions as Ball State University and Rice University. In addition, networks like Cox Sports, Comcast, and ESPN know to ask for Arkansas State students to help staff their shows when they produce a local event.
“We’re constantly getting people into rotations where they end up maybe not being one of the upper-level production people for these events,” Pillow says, “but they’re getting some experience and getting paid to do it.”
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