Five students sit concentrated, executing their roles for a basketball game broadcast. Everyone, except the technical director calling out camera angles, is silent in the college’s television production center.
Suddenly, a camera operator in Dawn Tibbetts Potter Arena catches a player making a basket after being fouled. The player sinks the free throw – three-point play.
As the play developed, the technical director had already switched from a wide shot view of the whole court to the camera angle underneath the basket where the player scored. As the player stepped to the free-throw line to complete the three-point play, the graphics operator brought up that player’s free-throw shooting statistics, the sound operator adjusted the sound to ensure the roar of the crowd won’t cause sound levels to spike, and the slow-motion operator prepared a slowed down version of the clip. A producer oversaw the whole event.
This scene depicts the work that goes into producing just one play during basketball broadcasts.
Completion of the laying of fiber optic lines from both Muddy Waters Stadium and Dawn Tibbetts Potter Arena to the college’s television studio means that Technical Media Services (TMS) can now produce broadcasts in their television production center instead by using Broadcast Pix Granite, a large-scale integrated production unit. This change has not only made production easier to set up for TMS, but has allowed for improved broadcast quality.
“It’s pretty comparable to any sort of ESPN or CBS broadcast, it’s just not as polished,” said sophomore Nathanael Meadowcroft, who directs the women’s basketball games. “But we’re learning and it’s still pretty good.”
Broadcasts of not only men’s and women’s basketball, but also football and volleyball are streamed online. Online streams of games can be found while the games are in progress by going to Hillsdale’s athletical website and clicking the “Live Video” button at the bottom of the screen.
The improved broadcasting and streaming abilities of TMS has also allowed the college to stream special events like “Chopp’d” as well as speeches from the recent journalism CCA on YouTube.
All of the students involved in broadcasts are employees of TMS who volunteered for the role.
“At the beginning of the year, we all sat down and had a meeting and [TMS was] like ‘hey’ who wants to do slow-motion, who wants to try directing this year,” said freshman Hadley Gaines.
Gaines volunteered to be a graphics operator and manage the broadcast’s on screen animations.
While some want to pursue a career in broadcast media in the future, others just enjoy the experience.
“My best experience was not this past game, but the game before that when we won by one point and that ending where everyone just rushed the court after we got that winning shot, winning dunk,” said senior Brad Hamilton, who directs the men’s basketball games. “Not much can compete with that, that was pretty intense.”
While this is only the second school year sports have been broadcasted by the college, students are getting the opportunity to serve in a directing role with no previous experience. Hamilton and Meadowcroft have both enjoyed their work as technical director this year.
“Since everything is live, you just have to make a decision what to cut to. So thinking ahead very quickly is a good skill to have,” Hamilton said.
Junior Margaret Handel, who often serves as slow-motion operator, taught herself how to use the studios slow-motion machine.
“It was a lot of pushing buttons and finagling until I figured out how to work,” Handel said.
For those interested in television broadcast, Director of TMS Ted Matko said that since the college’s broadcast studio uses much of the same equipment as larger production studios do, the skills acquired by students many the skills acquired working on the broadcasts are translatable to careers in the broadcast industry.
Dawn Tibbits Potter Arena can have up to five camera points, and right now the broadcasts of basketball games only use three camera points. So, in the future Matko hopes to use one of those camera points have a sideline reporter at basketball games.
But the increase in the complexity of the broadcast will only come when Matko believes that the production team has mastered all of their current jobs.
“I want to get good at what we do here before we move onto the next [thing],” Matko said.
