Inside the Sky production truck
What goes into bringing live golf to your telly? Quite a lot, actually
It’s the crack of dawn on the Thursday of the 2016 British Masters at The Grove and Sky’s TV crew are already hard at work. Sound tests are taking place in the commentary booth; a new Hawkeye Green Reader is being tested on screen; and a comprehensive stat pack is being handed out to the graphics team.
The flurry of activity doesn’t stop there, with everyone from producers and sound operators to runners and lighting technicians flitting in between a dozen or more production trucks. Open the door to one and you’ll be greeted by countless TV monitors and a hightech vision mixer emitting more bright lights than those seen at a Coldplay gig.
By the time we catch-up with Jason Wessely, Head of Golf at Sky Sports, his eyes are glued to a TV screen inside a Portacabin. “We haven’t done this before during a strokeplay event,” says Wessely (right), as he watches Tim Barter conduct an on-course interview.
“It’s quite unique to talk to a golfer during a round. If you think of a cake being the main host coverage, the icing, candles, wrapping and the box are what we add through our montages, openings, graphics, commentary, features, studio analysis, interviews and commercial breaks.”
Wessely calls it “a massive jigsaw puzzle”, but admits it’s very much a team effort. “We contract European Tour Productions to do our golf coverage for us,” he explains. “You have three elements to a TV compound: One is Sky, the broadcaster; one is European Tour Productions (ETP), the world feed host company; and the
third is CTV, the facilities company who own all the trucks and drive them to all the events.
“In the ETP main production truck, that’s where they cut all the golf live. The tension is a lot greater in there because the director will be calling out numbers (cameras) and the producer will instruct where he wants the coverage to go. When the main feature groups are walking between shots, they will then play in pre-recorded bits from around the course. That’s the job of the sub-mix team on the truck next door. In addition to that, we have the responsibility of turning it into a Sky product that the viewer recognises. It’s an integrated production and a friendly, collaborative effort.”
Sky may be keen to share the workload, but that’s as far as it goes. The BBC’S decision to drop its coverage of the Open 12 months early meant that every single European Tour event and PGA Tour event was screened live on Sky Sports last year. Add to that all the highlights and preview shows and we were treated to 7,800 hours of golf on Sky Sports, up 14% on 2015. The good news is that we can look forward to even more golf this year, with all five women’s Majors set to be being screened live for the first time ever.