Last time I talked about my journey through the wonderful world of long term disability. Nine months since I went down for the count, and ninety days after my spine was sliced up. I knew when the first surgeon refused surgery that whenever I was going to be ready to get back to work, it would be at the worst time. And I was right. Back to work with four weeks until media day and 4.6 weeks until the home opener. In the middle of moving our offices back to and reopening an arena that has hundreds more displays, 100+ million more pixels including brand new unique immersive LED architecture. Throw a Cavs 50th season in the mix, a celebration and campaign that as an organization takes years to plan and execute. Perfect timing.
It may come as a shock, but no one else started doing my work for me. So projects that start in June aren’t rolling until September. Yikes. Lots of things, big things, and little time. On top of that, the surgeon put in place tough restrictions, including work hours. And I held them extremely strictly. For about 2 weeks before it all went flying out the window.
Here’s the trick to doing 4 months work. Teamwork. Collaboration. Brainstorms. Green-light thinking. Storytelling. Inspirado. Take these amiable concepts and throw ‘em out the window. Not exactly, but usually more of an effort is made to fill up the idea bucket from a wider variety of sources before it’s poured over the director filter into the production funnel. Usually a couple of brainstorms, follow up wayfinding huddles, and a few blood oath ceremonies to seal our commitment to production. This time, I narrowly solicited our greater game ops and production staff individuals’ areas of expertise, and trusted their filters and decisions would get us where we needed to go. The physical process of making this stuff needed to start quickly, so as long as ideas were attainable without any obvious flaws, I rolled with it.
In the end, the main culprits ended up doing business as usual, we just nixed some of the pomp and circumstance and cut to the chase. This time of year is always hectic, stressful, and consumes most of my waking life. Throwing that all on top of trying to figure out if I am even physically capable of working, like, at all, in any kind of capacity. Months before, SITTING was mind numbingly painful. So, to be frank, I didn’t have room in my life for running every up the flagpole, gaining group consensus, entertaining feedback, circling back, and revising. If I die soon after posting, keep in mind these shocking corporate confessions.
At that point I’m honestly fairly frustrated and have a lot of internal conflict. I’m frustrated and resentful of the situation I’m returning to and the position it’s putting me in. I feel like I’m playing a little fast and loose with my newly attained, delicate health. But there’s also a feeling of gratitude as without the job there’s no insurance, surgery, therapy, long term disability. There’s thankfulness that I still even have a job to come back to. Then anger at a health care system that forces such a troublesome dependency… My internal Bernie Sanders and Ayn Rand have frequent arguments.
To get my thoughts (and this blog) on the rails again, I focused on keeping it simple. Started with the look and feel. Luckily, Nick Prost and CGX mostly kept the look established in the previous season with some tweaks, so I did a similar remix to bring their design into the world of motion and time.
Most of the guts of the project are the same from the previous, except I simplified camera movement and, like the overall CGX design, moved away from the brushy elements and text. I didn’t output the same breadth of player elements and LED’s as in seasons passed, which are a nice touch, but take an additional 30+ hours of design and render time.
The pre-open projection moment was a Matty B concept, who introduced the LED torch concept. We dabbled with the idea of an interactive element to projection over the years and started down that path, but this was the first to get traction and make it on the show. I worked with animator Matt Zronek to build this cool atmospheric moment that builds to a focused attention moment on our main marketing and branding theme for the season. It also gave us the flexibility to be less heavy handed with the concept in the open.
The open idea was the simplest concept of the bunch. Since the 2018-2019 open, we renovated our studio and used other CapEx spending to make upgrades to cameras and lenses. Basically, the thought process was we got a bunch of cool new lights…. with a bunch of cool color options and presets (Arri SkyPanels, some Quazars… “Light The Land” + lights = THEME!), new cameras (A7ii, C300), new lenses, a Ronin-M…. Let’s use them!
Part of my restrictions was to stay off the ice, so that made the decision to shoot in the locker room easy. Which is better than waiting for practice to be over, then scrambling on to the ice to get your setup in place before the players start getting impatient. We were able to do a rough setup the night before, some time in the morning, and by the time the players were ready to come through, we had the atmosphere going and were able to grab 3 different looks in the 5 minutes max we had with each guy. In terms of direction, we went with eminently achievable, tried and true “look at the camera somewhat menacingly” angle.
This was a week-of turn around, so I was trying to keep the demands on post low. Flashy, punchy lights, fades and cuts to dark black just give you a lot of inherent rhythm to work with that fit into a timeline easily and only need basic color adjustments. Give Kevin Libal a Ronin and an A7, turn him loose, you’ll get good stuff back. Nate Klein got a lot of great detail shots from the C300. Mark Zaremba craftily kept the shoot moving as we moved from look to look and station to station, helping us all look like pros.
Outside the open shoot, we setup a bubble hockey table that formed the basis of Power Playin’, a new series this season. Tim Long and Matt Zronek took the lead on making this station happen with our new project manager Kelsey Vorgert helping out and adding some set production skills to her repertoire.
The green screen room to media day veterans and legends Matty B and Matt Eck, with Myles Holt and Robert Weems shooting and producing, and as always a great job done collecting the back bone of in-arena content for the season.
There’s always an afterglow once opening weekend is over and accompanying sense of pride and accomplishment. The best part is the end result is these videos, which between frames contain for me memories of the times and people that made them. For the good and the bad, these videos and this work will have a significance to me far deeper than than the superficial content suggests.