Preempting Sandy

     As hurricane Sandy barreled up the east coast the last weekend in October E:60 producer Heather Lombardo rushed to complete her story about a filly that was rescued from starvation and abuse. The filly grew up to be a racehorse, and her name, “Notinrwildestdremz”, was a metaphor for the storm that bore down on Connecticut.

     Lombardo was one of four E:60 producers who raced against time and nature. Sandy was due to hit Connecticut on Monday October 29. The next night E:60 was scheduled for its next-to-last show of the fall season.

    Normally last-minute edits are made the night before or the day of the show, but not this time. Fresh in memory was the “Snowtober” storm of the last weekend of October 2011. That freakish event drubbed central Connecticut with a record amount of wet snow and knocked out power to thousands of residents and ESPN workers.

     “Considering last year, we tried to be pre-emptive,” said executive producer Andy Tennant. “Last year was in the back of everybody’s mind.”

     Lombardo finished her edit at Bluefoot Entertainment in West Hartford on Friday evening. All it needed was the voice-over by Bill Nack, the venerable horserace writer, who lives near Arlington, Virginia. Nack was supposed to voice the piece at a studio near his home, but was prevented by a personal circumstance. Monday would have been do-able if not for the storm. So on Friday Lombardo got a hold of a voice-over recording device.

     “We decided to overnight one to Nack so he could track and e-mail the audio files without leaving his home,” recalled Lombardo.

     Nack gave the device a try on Sunday, but reported to Lombardo that the operating instructions “looked like they were for an F-16 fighter jet.”

     Fortunately, reporter Jeremy Schaap was familiar with the device, and agreed to call Nack Sunday evening, and walk him through the procedure. On Monday morning Nack used the device to voice the story.

     “As the winds started whipping on Monday I received the audio files via e-mail from Mr. Nack and we finished the piece that afternoon,” Lombardo recalled.

     Sunday morning found producer John Minton in Chicago completing his story about high school wrestling coach Mike Powell, who battles a rare disease called polymyositis. The edit was in Chicago because Powell coaches in a Chicago suburb, and the shooter/editors, Joel and Jesse Edwards, are based there.

     By that time Minton knew that Sandy would prevent Fed-Ex from delivering his tape to Bristol on time.

     “We looked into sending a high-res version through an FTP site,” recalled Minton. “But we were nervous about our edit house, Bluefoot, losing internet connection and not having the ability to download.”

     The solution was to set up a satellite feed - at 11 p.m. Monday - from another private production house in downtown Chicago.

     “We fed out the feature to the in-house feed to Bristol,” Minton said.

     Tuesday morning producer Vin Cannamela dubbed out a tape and brought it to Bluefoot, where it was digitized and dropped into the show’s timeline.

     Saturday and Sunday found producer Mike Loftus at Anderson Productions in Bristol at work on his story about MMA welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre. Tennant and senior producer Ben Houser asked for changes on Sunday afternoon. Loftus realized he would need Monday morning to complete the edit, but before he went home he took a precaution.

     “In case Sandy did its worse we outputted a version that could air,” Loftus said. “We outputted a mix and split just in case. It was only four to five minutes long but it could have aired.”

     On Monday morning Loftus returned to the studio to complete the edit. Reporter Rachel Nichols re-voiced the new version, and Loftus drove it to Bluefoot late Monday afternoon, just in time to beat the storm.

     Monday morning found producer Mike Johns at Northern Lights in Bristol, completing his edit on 49ers tight end Vernon Davis. He had worked double shifts on Saturday and Sunday to beat the storm.

     As it turned out, Sandy walloped southern and coastal Connecticut, causing two deaths and knocking out power to 630,000 utility customers. Damage was moderate in the central part of the state, where the ESPN campus is. No E:60 personnel lost power in their homes, as was the case in Snowtober.

     Some felt an impact. Tennant’s parents left their home on the New Jersey coast to take refuge at Tennant’s condo in Hamden.

     Minton flew back into Hartford though he had flown out from LaGuardia. His car was at LaGuardia, and his family was in Comack, in central Long Island. The storm damaged their yard but left their house largely unscathed.

     “We counted our blessings - we were among the more fortunate,” Minton said.

      A week after the storm Tennant praised his staff.
     “Despite the stress and angst of the media reports, everybody kept their composure,” said Tennant. “Everybody was home safely when the storm came in late Monday afternoon. That’s how teamwork is supposed to work.”

     Eleven days after Sandy ESPN President John Skipper e-mailed employees:

     “As is now all too clear, the hurricane significantly impacted much of the U.S. East Coast. Many ESPNers and their families—especially those in the New York/New Jersey area— were personally impacted by the storm. To those colleagues I want to say that our thoughts remain with you. Please know that the ESPN HR and Outreach teams are here to help. I also want to thank everyone for your support of each other and your commitment to keeping ESPN business operations running smoothly in the face of significant challenges during and after the storm. You proved once again that ESPN has the best employees in the business.”



     posted by Steve Marantz on November 20, 2012

The Kellyton Shot

          E:60’s story on Justin Tuck tells of his attachment to his hometown, rural Kellyton, Ala., even as he captains the defense for the Super Bowl champion New York Giants.  Kellyton has a few more than 200 residents and many are relatives of Tuck.

          Producer Frank Saraceno wanted to show Kellyton in a way that explained its hold on Tuck.  In August Saraceno shot scenics, along with reporter Jeffri Chadiha, and with Barry Dycus on the camera and Ray Sullivan on audio, near the railroad tracks.  Saraceno mentioned that he hoped to find a “local” to go on camera and describe the town.

          A pickup truck pulled up nearby.  Neil Moseley, who grew up in Kellyton, and whose father lives near the tracks, greeted the crew.  Moseley, a friendly sort, chatted with Sullivan before he went over to his father’s driveway.

          “There’s your man, right there,” Sullivan told Saraceno.

          “What do you mean?”

          “Talk to him and I think he’ll give you everything you need.”

          Saraceno went up the driveway and introduced himself to Moseley.  They chatted.  Then he asked Moseley if he would describe Kellyton on camera.  

          “Yes siree.  Ah can do that.”

          Soon enough, Moseley and Chadiha were at the railroad tracks, next to Moseley’s pickup.  Saraceno suggested to Moseley that he “speak to what you know”. 

          Dycus shot with a wide lens, to accentuate the town Moseley described in the background.

          “I had no idea he was going to describe the different locations in town, but he just kind of naturally did it,” Saraceno said.

          “By framing it the way we did it’s a memorable shot, because now Kellyton is a character.  If we framed it tighter it would be another sound bite, but by framing it wide you not only see what he’s describing but you get a sense of the town as a character.

          “It was perfect.”

          Saraceno had two takeaways from the shoot. 

          “One, listen to the people you work with,” he said. “We work with camera crews that in a lot of cases have more experience than we do - it’s imperative that you pay attention to their instincts as well as yours.”

          “Two, be aware and nimble.  Always go in with a plan but understand that something could pop up that makes your plan better.

          “This was one shot in an 11-minute piece, but it’s the shot people will remember.  That’s what you want.”

posted by Steve Marantz, November 1, 2012

Shooting Ben Petrick

          The story of former major league catcher Ben Petrick’s struggle with Parkinson’s disease is emotional, at its essence.  Producers Vin Cannamela and John Minton wanted to tap the emotion.

          Petrick was a baseball and football standout at Glencoe (Oregon) High School, where his father Vern was athletic director. A five-tool natural when he was drafted by the Colorado Rockies in 1995, Petrick had All-Star and even Hall of Fame potential.  He reached the majors in 1999 and was on his way to stardom. 

          But in 2000 he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s, at age 23.  Petrick was forced to retire in the spring of 2004.  By 2007, when his first daughter was born, Petrick’s disease had stolen his motor skills, and reduced him to a shell of the great athlete he was.

          Brain surgery in 2009, with a new technology, resulted in infection, and almost killed Petrick.  A second surgery, in 2010, succeeded.  Petrick regained some motor skills and resumed his life as husband, father, and high school baseball coach.  His second daughter was born last January.  He wrote a book called “40,000 to One”, and became an inspirational spokesman in the fight against Parkinson’s.

          Cannamela first contacted Petrick last December.  Petrick was open to the story, but wanted to put it off until spring.

          Said Cannamela: “It was a long process of keeping him in the loop and building trust and being honest about what we would ask from him and his family.”

          Before the producers set foot in Oregon they sent cameras to shoot Petrick while he coached high school baseball.

          When they finally met Petrick, they took the time to build a rapport.

          “The more you can get to know your subject on the front end the more it becomes reciprocated and they let you know how they feel about you,” recalled Minton.  “What Vin and I both try to do is show who we are, what our show means, the types of stories we’ve done in the past, and how we could tell his type of story with as much genuine feeling as we could.

          “Ben and his family bought into that we were going to treat this with sensitive hands.  You could tell by the way they opened their homes to us and the time Ben gave us, and the video and stories he shared.

          “When you’re able to not rush into something, and to work on the subject’s schedule, you’re investing in the relationship.  The whole time it was an open dialogue.  ‘What works for you?’ ‘This is what we’re looking to do - when do you think you could do it?’”

          Once Petrick felt comfortable, they made a few key decisions.

          The first was to have Petrick read from his book, a memoir.

          “He has slurred speech and we wanted him to read those passages because we thought it would connect to the audience,” said Cannamela.  “The short sentences he read in his own words would be clearer than a face-to-face interview.”

          Another decision was to have Petrick speak - when he wasn’t reading from his book - directly toward the camera, rather than toward reporter Buster Olney.  They shot Petrick’s face in a tight frame.

          “It created intimacy with the audience,” Cannamela said. “It brought out how authentic a person he is.

          “We wanted Ben to talk to us, and the other interviews to talk about Ben.  If Ben could find a way to lock into the camera and talk to people about what he was going through then you would connect more immediately to him, while everyone else was speaking off-camera.  You would hear them like a confessional interview, but you were listening to Ben.  You were the one with Ben and you were gaining information from your secondary interviews.”

          Another decision was structural.  Petrick’s father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s seven months before he was.  The producers chose to hold back that information until the narrative reaches the point of Petrick’s retirement from baseball. 

          “Being that it was Ben’s story we opted for revealing Vern’s Parkinson’s in a way that helped our audience connect to Ben in the sense that he was going through something difficult and that he wasn’t going to be alone when he went through it,” Minton recalled.  “Holding on to that bit of information, while it took us out of the chronology, we felt it helped build to a bigger climax.”

          Two moments stood out as emotional peaks.

          One was Petrick’s wife, Kellie's account of her decision to marry Petrick, despite his concern that his illness would make her unhappy:

          “I told him ‘you don’t know who you’re going to fall in love with - I’m in love with you no matter what’.”

          Another was Petrick's account of his first surgery that failed, and how he had lost the will to go on, until his father urged him to persevere for the sake of his daughter.

          “Ben, there’s a little girl at home,” Vern Petrick said.  “Don’t you ever give in - you owe it to your little girl - don’t ever give in.”

           The camera was tight on Petrick as he recalled his father’s words:

          “He told me to suck it up. He was right - I had a job to do more important than me.  I was so self-consumed with what I was going through.  He was just being a good dad once again.  That’s what I told myself.  Get back to my job being a dad and husband.”

          Said Minton:  “The most enjoyable moments of a person’s life were filled with insecurity for Ben.  His ability to talk about that brought out his inner emotions and made him genuine on camera.”

(posted by Steve Marantz, October 25, 2012)

Monkey Rodeo

        

          Shooting the Monkey Rodeo is a dream assignment that comes along once a lifetime, if that.

          Which is why producer Mike Johns was all monkey business when it fell into his lap, like a winning lottery ticket.

          Monkey Rodeo features monkeys mounted atop Border Collies as they herd sheep.  The monkeys are dressed like Curly in ‘City Slickers’.

          Johns caught up with Monkey Rodeo at the ballpark of the minor league Delaware Blue Rocks. 

          This was not “Planet of the Apes”.  Johns did not have the time and budget of a feature film.  He had one shoot to get it right.   Monkey rodeo performed for one minute after the third and seventh innings, and for five minutes after the game.  Seven minutes of action.  Johns fretted.

          “It’s incredibly brief and hard to plan for,” he recalled. “There’s just no good way to predict where a monkey is going to go.”  

          His first decision, to maximize footage, was to shoot in slow-mo, at 60 frames per second.

          Another tactic was to mount a Go-Pro camera on the saddle to get a close-up of a monkey as he rode.  The first attempt was with a monkey named Sam.

          “ “Unfortunately Sam decided to put his hand over the camera for the entire thing and then he tilted it in the wrong direction,” Johns recalled. “So the first round was unusable for Go-Pro.”

          For the second attempt Johns attached the Go-Pro to an extension arm, so that the monkey could not easily place his hand on it.      This time he got his reversal footage of the monkey, but not as much as he wanted because the camera was aimed too low.

          Now he was down to the last roundup - the five-minute performance after the game.

          “It was a bit of a dilemma,” Johns said. “Do you go for the perfect reversal shot?  Or do you flip it the other way for a POV of what the monkey saw?”

          He looked Sam in the eyes - was the monkey egging him on? - and made the call.

          “I decided that what we had was good enough and that I wanted the front-facing shot,” he recalled.   “Maybe if I’d had three more tries I could have got it more perfect.”

          Asked what he learned from Monkey Rodeo, Johns was philosophical. “Expect the unexpected,” he said.   “It’s like shooting any unpredictable act of nature.  You’re not really able to get the perfect shot you have in your head.  You can’t tell a monkey to hang on so you can make sure you have everything.”

Posted by Steve Marantz on 09.26.2012

Salters on Interviewing

          In interviews with E:60 reporter Lisa Salters,  Detroit Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson revealed himself to be thoughtful, modest, caring, and affable, with an endearing ability to laugh at himself.

          But those qualities emerged only after Salters broke through the shyness that has kept Johnson’s off-field profile far below his mythical on-field profile as “Megatron”.

          They weren’t total strangers.  She had met him several years ago when she covered a Georgia Tech-Notre Dame game - he was 20 - and she reminded him of that.  A shared memory broke the ice.

          Salters lives in Atlanta, where Johnson makes his home in the off-season.  They chatted about local neighborhoods, parks and restaurants.  The ice began to melt.

          “I like to find some common ground and go from there,” Salters says. “When people are shy the best thing you can do is make them feel comfortable.”

          Turned out Johnson played the “Michael Jackson Experience” on his Ninetendo Wii.  Ditto Salters.  By now the ice was a puddle.

          On camera, Salters’ manner was conversational and playful.

          “My nature is to tease guys - he saw that,” Salters recalled. “I wanted it to be fun, more like hanging out than an interview.

          “If you have notes in your hand, and you’re reading the questions, one by one, that’s not how people talk.   My style is conversational, and if a subject veers on a tangent it can lead to material that doesn’t get used, but that’s how conversations go with most people.”

          Salters has a rule of thumb: “Share a bit about yourself.”

          In an interview with Eagles running back LeSean McCoy that has yet to run, McCoy spoke haltingly about his grandmother’s fatal battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease).  Salters mentioned that the mother of one of her close friends also was stricken with ALS, with the same symptoms.

          “The interview went from him telling his story to him helping me help my friend,” she recalled.  “He opened up more, absolutely.”

          As McCoy opened up he became more emotional.

          “I could see LeSean feeling self-conscious and having a hard time controlling his emotions,” Salters recalled. “Once he went back to her illness and death he was really upset - even though it was two years ago he was upset all over again.

           As a second rule of thumb, Salters recommends empathy.

          “You have to show that you care about them, too,” she said.  “You’re asking them to be personal and honest and to be very real.  You have to show that you’re hearing them, and you’re feeling with them.

          “When they’re telling me something I’m feeling exactly what they’er feeling, as much as they give me.  I end up walking out emotionally drained, too.  You don’t want to tell somebody something personal and not feel they are impacted.

          “It’s kind of like being a psychiatrist.  You have to make them feel safe like a psychiatrist does.  The environment has to be non-judgmental and safe.  Nobody will share unless they feel safe.  If they feel like you are a million miles away, not really serious or trying to get to dinner, you’re not going to get anywhere.”

Posted by Steve Marantz, September 6, 2012

The Art of Sound

          The difference between good television and good radio is as simple, and as complex, as the difference between sight and sound.

          Many of E:60’s stories make the jump from video to audio on “The Sporting Life”, a weekly one-hour show (Friday, 10 p.m. Eastern, Saturday 5.a.m and 7 a.m, Sunday 5 a.m.) hosted by Jeremy Schaap.

          Some don’t.

          “Cheese Rolling” did not.  That was the 2009 piece about a medieval   race in England where people tumble down a steep hill in pursuit of a bounding round of cheese. 

          “You had to see the participants on that hill - I don’t know that the audio translation would have cut it,” said Peter Ciccone, program director.

          Most E:60 stories do well on audio, though some require slight tweaks.  Subtitled dialogue on television needs voice-over identification on radio.  Lisa Salters’ report on a girls’ soccer team in post-earthquake Haiti required voice-over.   ESPN Radio anchors Christine Lisi, Marc Kestecher and Doug Brown often do the voice-overs.

          “We want someone with no inflection - some of our anchors are so distinctive you want to stay away from them,” Ciccone said. “You want a flat matter-of-fact translation of the speaker.  The idea is to leave the speaker’s original voice in a way that the listener can gauge the emotion of the speaker.  It’s something NPR (National Public Radio) does well.”

          More tweaks:  TV can abide by silence if the visual is good.  Audio does not like silence, unless it’s a dramatic pause in someone’s oratory.  A mood-enhancing specialty shot for TV tends not to help an audio broadcast.  Audio producers inject sound whenever possible.

          “If we think sticking with the sound of a crowd in a gym or on a field a bit longer would help we encourage that,” said Ciccone.  “Sometimes an additional play-by-play highlight - especially if it’s a profile of a well-known athlete.  We might suggest something extra in the way of narrative in setting up a scene.  Anything to lend texture.”

          In April 2011 E:60 aired “Hero: The Paco Rodriguez Story”.  It told of a boxer who died from ring injuries but whose donated organs allowed several others to live.  Schaap was the on-air talent, so it was a natural to bring to “The Sporting Life”.

          Conversion of “Paco” to audio required that it be split into two segments.

          “We look for the climax, we want to find the conflict - we use that to close segment one,” said producer Bill Ennever.

          The break came at the bite from Paco’s widow, Sonia Rodriguez, who said, “He wanted to be a hero and he would always tell me that, and so I said you know, if that was his goal in life then, you know, we’re going to do it for him.”

           

            Schaap re-tracked the audio to provide identifications for the numerous speakers.  Producers had a difficult decision on an emotional scene - subtitled in the video version - in which the mother of an organ recipient whispered into the ear of Paco’s mother, and thanked her.

          “It was tricky - I believe we left the whisper even though it was inaudible,” Ennever said.  “You could hear that they were talking to each other in a solemn tone, so the meaning wasn’t completely lost to our listeners.”

          Producers also grappled with a couple of visuals of women as they cried, but did not speak.

          “The visuals were incredibly compelling,” Ennever said. “On radio it was still important to let it breathe, allowing the listener to be in the moment.  But we felt that listeners would eventually get lose or grow tired of the sobering silence, so we shortened those parts.”

          In June 2012,  “The Sporting Life” won a prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award, for Outstanding Audio Sports Reporting for its version of ‘Paco’.  The award cited producers Vin Cannamela and Frank Saraceno, and editor Josh Drake.

posted by Steve Marantz on July 16, 2012

Off the Cutting Room Floor

         At 12 minutes Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Willis are compelling.  At 24 minutes they should be twice as compelling.  At least that’s the theory behind E:60’s new sub-brand called Profile E:60.

         “Sometimes we have great content on the cutting room floor,” said executive producer Andy Tennant. “Why not branch out and dig even deeper and expand the story further?  It’s a way for our producers to spread their wings.”

          Profile E:60 was conceived last fall after Yaron Deskalo produced a standard length feature on Rodgers, the Packers star quarterback. The story was good at 12 minutes, Deskalo knew, but there was more to tell.  ESPN Programming agreed, and Profile E:60’s first effort, on Rodgers, ran at the start of the NFL playoffs.

         In doubling the length of the Rodgers piece, Deskalo used material about Rodgers’ friendship with a young cancer patient, and his foray into the music business, as well as a sideline interview Rodgers gave reporter Jeremy Schaap prior to the Packers’ 2011 season opener.   None of those elements had been in the original piece.  Moreover, Deskalo expanded the section in which Rodgers’ talked about being backup to Bret Favre.

         “The biggest thing was how to lay out the piece,” Deskalo said.

         The 24-minute piece had three parts and two commercial breaks.  Part One covered Rodgers’ early years - he was underestimated at each step of his career - up to his arrival at Green Bay.  Deskalo decided to forego the traditional “bump” - “E:60 Profile will be back with more on Aaron Rodgers” - before a break in favor of a “cold” in and out.  The first part ended with a question, “What was it like to follow a legend like Favre?”

         Part 2 required a decision.  Fill it with the Rodgers-Favre material and Rodgers’ Super Bowl victory or bring in the cancer material.  Deskalo decided on the latter because it dovetailed with a comment Rodgers made to his mother, which she repeated, about being a good man as well as a good quarterback.  

         “I felt that led perfectly into his charity work and relationship with this kid Jack (Bartosz),” Deskalo said.  “It was an easy way to end that segment because it was so emotional.  Starting a segment with that would have made it hard to keep the emotions running.”

         With the luxury of time, Deskalo let the Rodgers-Favre material run for about 2 ½ minutes.

         “It’s not that we glossed over Favre in the 12-minute piece, we didn’t,” Deskalo said. “But some of the sound we put in really enhanced that section.  You got a feel for what Rodgers went through at that time.”

         Part 3 focused on Rodgers’ marketability and business ventures, and on the Packers’ 2011 season in which they won 13 straight before losing.

          The long form enables the story to expand beyond the playing field to a more rounded portrait, Deskalo said.

         Producer Beein Gim’s profile on 49ers linebacker Patrick Willis, in expanding to 23:40, brought in new material on the tragic drowning of Willis’ brother, Detris, in 2006.

         “We couldn’t get into that in the original story - how do you spend 20 seconds on a death like that?” said Gim.

         In the long form, Gim uses Part One to tell about the abuse Willis and his siblings endured at the hands of their drug-addled father.  Part Two shows how Willis used sports to cope with his problems at home, and concludes as he and his siblings are taken in by his high school basketball coach.  Part Three details his rise to stardom at Ole Miss and with the 49ers.

         “With the longer piece you just let it breathe - you can tell a fuller story,” Gim said. “The shorter piece is harder.  You have to leave things out and weigh things.  You have to be more disciplined as to what fits the spine of the story.”

         Long-form storytelling at ESPN has a proud history, with the SportsCentury series at the millennium, the 30 For 30 series in 2009 and 2010, and more recently the documentaries by ESPN Films.  Profile E:60 aspires to the tradition.

         Tennant said MLB stars Justin Verlander and Matt Kemp could be the next Profile subjects.

         “Our fans look to us for the definitive profile now,” said Tennant.  “We’re getting the sense that athletes, agents and teams understand what we do.  Profile E:60 is now part of the conversation with agents - they’re interested.  It’s great exposure.  We’re getting a lot more buy-in from agents and teams because of this brand.”

(posted by Steve Marantz on May 4, 2012)