Ever
wished you could be in the TV control room at the stadium during a cricket
match?
The six that ended the World Cup on the evening of April
2 is an image that will be talked about for generations to come. For the man
responsible for getting that picture out to the world, all that mattered was
what the next one would be.
In the crowded broadcast control room, where numerous
cameras showed the crowds starting to explode in celebration, television
broadcast director Deepak Gupta's immediate motive was to get a camera as close
as he could to the pitch.
 |
| The wall of monitors |
"Get in, get in, get in," he ordered into
his mouthpiece, talking to one of his camerapersons. Upstairs, in the
commentary box, Ravi Shastri was going off. Gupta's earpiece connected him to
the commentators as well, so he had Shastri full-tilt in his ear, but he
continued to call unaffected: "Camera two, camera 11… 15," ordering
different shots, different angles.
The control room is where the story of a cricket match is written for anyone
who isn't at the ground. The director is the narrator, and along with the
producer, who sits in the commentary box, he crafts the story that the world
sees.
For the production unit, the match starts four days before it is actually
played. There are four core crews and five operations crews for the tournament.
The core crew is the executive producer, director, producer, floor manager,
director's assistant (DA), producer's assistant (PA), statistician, and
reporter. The operations crew has the production manager, vision mixer, six EVS
operators, three soundmen, five graphics operators, three Hawk-Eye operators,
11 engineering operators, 18 cameramen, five satellite operators and eight
riggers.
The all-important voices of the broadcast emanate from the commentary box. Here
sit the commentators, the producer, the statistician, the scorer, and a field
logger, who is responsible for the fielding graphics.
The all-important voices of the broadcast emanate from the commentary box. Here
sit the commentators, the producer, the statistician, the scorer, and a field
logger, who is responsible for the fielding graphics.
 |
| It's a jumble out there |
It was an evening to remember for millions of Indians,
but for Gupta, tournament host broadcaster ESPN Star's man in charge for the
World Cup final, it was another day at the office, and his job after the
winning stroke was hit was to pack in as much as he could. He used shots from
all 15 manned cameras at his disposal after the winning stroke: MS Dhoni's
smile, Harbhajan Singh's tears, Yuvraj Singh embracing Sachin Tendulkar, the
abject Sri Lankan dressing room, Muttiah Muralitharan's final minutes in an
international match, the ecstatic crowds and the fireworks, Gary Kirsten being
carried about on the shoulders of Suresh Raina, Aamir Khan turning to his wife
in delight. For about 22 minutes Gupta cut shots from all the cameras at his
disposal to bring the viewers a montage of pictures of the culmination of the
Indian side's World Cup journey.
Upstairs in the commentary box, Gupta's producer, Ajesh
Ramachandran, dispatched Sanjay Manjrekar and Nasser Hussain for flash
interviews with the Indians. He instructed the floor manager to line up as many
Indian players as possible, and then had Shastri go down to the ground for the
main presentation.
Ramachandran put Sunil Gavaskar and Tom Moody on air
immediately after the win, mainly because both had been World Cup winners and
would know how to relate to the emotions on both sides. Moody, who also was the
Sri Lanka coach at the 2007 World Cup, spoke with insight about what the Sri
Lankan dressing room might have felt after losing a successive final. About his
choice of Manjrekar and Hussain as interviewers, Ramachandran said: "They
are natural and conversational. They're good on camera, and it is not
everybody's cup of tea."
Wired for action
Some of it is played by ear, especially in unscripted
situations, such as the one after the final, but Gupta's team is well prepared
all the same. "When we get to crunch time, we know which camera will be on
the batsman, which one on the crowds, another near the team dressing rooms, one
on the celebrities," Gupta explains.
"It is very difficult to cut otherwise. You are
trying to capture everything on the field, because remember, the viewer is only
watching one camera. So you want him to feel 'Wow, that is all that is
happening and I am missing nothing.'"
At first glimpse the broadcast control room is
suffocating. The floor is a maze of cables that run all over before climbing
into various machines, monitors and screens. The room itself is square and
windowless. Personnel from various departments - engineering, Hawk-Eye, the
camera-control wing, graphics, sound, communication, and the EVS (which relays
the replays) - sit here for long hours. They chat in whispers. The director is
omnipresent, in everybody's ears.
Flanking the director are his assistant, who gives
ten-second countdowns to the global broadcasters before the end and start of an
over, and for drinks- and innings breaks. The vision mixer, on the other side,
is the man who pushes the buttons as the director calls out instructions.
Inputs from the cameras, graphics, Hawk-Eye, EVS, are fed to the vision mixer's
desk, where he assembles them according to the director's calls. He sits still
but his hands move like an expert pianist's - in short, swift movements. The
feed is routed from his desk to the satellite truck, parked in the stadium, and
uplinked from there to a satellite for international broadcasters to downlink
into their control rooms.
Gupta is the conductor of the orchestra. He sits facing
two plasma screens on which feeds from about 28 cameras (manned and unmanned)
are beamed live. The unmanned ones include two stump cameras, four for
run-outs, two for lbws, and one "beauty" - the wide shot of the
ground from on high that you see in the background when scorecards and other
stats are imposed on the screen.
Setting up
The first job is to get the control room ready. The
engineering team gets the generator set up, for power, and then puts the
monitors in place. Next comes rigging up the cables, which is an elaborate
process. All the camera positions and microphones across the stadium are hooked
up to the control room.
The next day the facilities check happens under the
vigilant eye of the director. The cameras are in place, the cameramen check the
viewfinders, the picture inputs are checked, and the director gets the TV
monitors placed so he is comfortable. The sound checks happen at the same time.
The engineers also link the producer, statistician and
the commentators, who all sit upstairs in the commentators' box, to the control
room. The commentators have a microphone, a view of the programme output (the
last video image that has been transmitted, before the director has cut away to
another), and a "fruit machine" - a gadget that displays essential
data like the team total, batsmen's scores, bowlers' figures and such other
stats.
Each crew member works for about 12 hours on match days,
starting three hours before the match and finishing two to three hours after.
Through the match the only time Gupta walks out of the room is at the halfway
stage, save for quick dashes to the restroom.
Talking a good game
At 12.45pm on the Saturday of the final, the commentary
team was warming up. Sunil Gavaskar and Sourav Ganguly were having a laugh. Tom
Moody, whose head almost hit the low ceiling, wondered if Sri Lanka were
gambling playing Suraj Randiv, who had been rushed in at the 11th hour as
cover. Nasser Hussain wanted to check if the wi-fi was working. Sanjay
Manjrekar, who would go on first, sat still.
 |
| The EVS, where the replays come out of |
Ramachandran was in the back of the box, seated on an
elevated platform. The biggest match he had produced so far had been the final
of the World Twenty20 in the Caribbean last year, but like for Gupta, there
were no nerves. Ramachandran had done the day's roster, the commentator's time
table. For the semi-finals and final there were eight men, as against six for
the previous games.
At any given time there was a designated lead
commentator, who describes the delivery, along with two "colour"
commentators who offer expert views. Shastri is usually the lead commentator
when India are playing. "Ravi manages to talk up an event,"
Ramachandran said. "In the first half hour of the game you need that to
set up the match."
****
The "most tense" moment of the day, according
to Gupta, was the toss, usually a straightforward event. In the final the match
referee had to toss the coin twice as he failed to hear Kumar Sangakkara's call
the first time. Gupta desisted from airing a replay of the first toss. The
global feed (when the international broadcasters start their telecast)
commences ten minutes after the actual toss, so Gupta, his bosses and
Ramachandran could afford a few minutes to decide whether to show the first
toss on the global feed. "In the version that was shown across the world,
only pictures of the first toss were shown, without sound, before moving on to
the second toss," Ramachandran said.
Thankfully the rest of the day was without controversy.
Gupta conducted the show with aplomb. All through, he and his team remained
unaffected by the happenings around them. They were metres away from the field
of play but sealed from it. Kaushik Basu, ESPN Star's vice-president of
production, said he had been on the job for 16-odd years and never once had he
stepped on to the field of play.
Standing there as they worked was fascinating. Gupta's
primary aim was to show the cricket, but he also had his eye peeled for the
sidelights. As Mahela Jayawardene closed in on his century, Gupta kept his
focus on the batsman but one of his cameramen had Jayawardene's wife,
Christine, in his sights. Not quite up to watching as her husband came up to a
hundred in a World Cup final, she masked her face with a scarf. When
Jayawardene stepped out to loft Zaheer Khan for a boundary and raised his arms,
Gupta initially captured the player's celebrations, before briefly moving on to
Christine jumping in the stands.
The closest Gupta came to reacting was when 12 deliveries
were left and India needed five runs to win. A smile lit up his face. He asked
Philip Betts, one of the ESPN executive producers, to go out and feel the
atmosphere. "The World Cup happens every four years and we were so
fortunate that it was in India and India won it. It was a moment not to be
missed," Gupta said later.
I asked Gupta if holding back his emotions is one of the
most difficult part of his job. "We [directors] don't really watch the
games. I am thinking of what I would like to see if I were sitting at
home."
Gupta and his team, of course, are not at home. It is
close to three hours after India have won the World Cup. The Indian players
have started to let their hair down in their hotel. Outside the Wankhede,
thousands are partying along Marine Drive. In the ground, though, Gupta's
runners are busy winding up the cables. The "derig" - dismantling
everything and packing it all up - will take another three hours. Eventually
all the equipment will be loaded onto trucks, ready to go into storage, till
the next tournament, when the show hits the road again.
Courtesy : This article was written by Nagraj Gollapudi, Assistant Editor, ESPNcricinfo and published on April 18, 2011.
You can read the original article here on ESPNCricinfo -
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