Has the world healed enough for shameless self-promotion to return? The last time I volunteered my unsolicited thoughts, the world-at-large was in quite a state. It’s been quite an interesting year in the life and times of a sports and live-event producer and director. In fairness, it was quite an interesting year to be any type of person. But amid a crazy, mixed-up world the very specific kind of person that is me got a TV show! Actual, hanging-over-top-of-the-bar TV, on a network and everything. I invested significant amounts of money and time on the ability to infrequently overproduce virtual meetings! I spun a feature-length, in-person/streaming hybrid event out of puns for an indifferent audience! I imposed my sense of humor on co-workers as a virtual game show host! I caught the deadly disease that killed over 2 million people! It’s good to stay busy.
Right now getting ready for the MAC Basketball Tournament now takes me back to about a year ago when I was getting ready to come in and call my first games of last year’s tourney. Then an email came postponing the session was canceled and that if I needed anything from the office, grab it now because who knows when we’ll be back.
It did, in fact, turn out to be a while. I got the sense that it might be. Though I’d prefer any other circumstance to do so, it was an unfortunate chance to work from home. Would you be surprised that an introverted only-child likes holing up in the comfort of home? And once Parsec gave our team incredible access to our workstations, it was a dream come true. Taking meetings with laundry in the wash? Afternoon workouts and homemade lunch? Eliminating my highest daily statistical probability of death by saving two freeway trips? Wearing comfy pants for the duration? Sign me up! The best part was being able to put in the extra work, either starting a bit early or coming back at it later after eating dinner, taking a nap. Even with a stressful project or fast-approaching deadline, it’s nice to be able to take weirdo, idiosyncratic breaks and decompress, and come back to things with a clear mind. Plus, the year before I was bed-ridden for the better part of several months, so I’ve already had training being trapped in the house for extended periods. At least this time I can walk! The time also allowed me to recommit to my back’s health and conditioning.
After the uncertain first couple weeks and the reality of an extended lockdown set in, the focus was clear: use the reach of our sports and entertainment platforms to help educate the public on measures to reduce transmission of COVID-19. And outside that critical mission, showing support for and celebrating frontline workers and essential staff. The first big lift was helping gather and create Monsters content for the 19 Action News telethon, helping raise funds. The whole process was an early challenge that helped everyone map out the way of production. I never heard of Zoom then all of the sudden it was the only way capture anything new! How does a team with varying levels of home technology access and move terabytes of video back and forth from arena to home and back again? Through incredible work with the Cavs IT team and from FieldHouse Creative’s Nate Klein and Matt Zronek, it all… worked. But after the initial, obvious focus, we put a bow on a season cut short by doing the yearly recap video and wringing the last drops out of Between Two Goals for now.
Then a fairly typical off-season began. With weeks of extra lead time and the need to find some kind of mooring without games and events to plan around, I took it as an opportunity to further build our random, fun inventory. For four months I requested eight producers create four fun elements that were either a game moment reaction, a crowd prompt, a pump video, or an edited dance loop. Not only does it deepen the grab bag of elements that sustain fun and energy throughout games they’re also fun little projects where you can work on a new technique and experiment. Or just be a silly doofus. I usually go the silly doofus route.
Now that games have started, it’s been awesome deploying some of these up to 10 months after they were made! When it was time to review when games rolled around, it was like seeing many again for the first time and I’m so happy with the range of stuff the team put together.
The hopeful belief that a normal 2020-2021 season starting in October kept us working ahead and one of the best yearly projects that benefited was the look and feel. Nick Prost once again designed it, Paul Mazzoleni and Christian Merrill made it move with motion kits and template builds, and the rest of us picked apart the pieces and remixed the projects for tons of easy applications. The result is a great look and more consistent application across several interpreters and final destinations. Not only the Monsters, but the Cavs’ primary and City Edition look and feels benefited greatly, and impressive work by both our Image group and FieldHouse Creative.
On the other hand, there was a whole new virtual world of trying to take, well, everything and do it from a phone or laptop in your den. At the arena, my workstation has horsepower and I’ve got access to quality cameras, cinema glass, powerful lights, and a multi-room spread of tools to choose from. Now I’m sitting at home amongst shelves filled with a mish-mash of equipment that spans the continuum of usability, and proximity + time = setting up green screens, adding random camera sources, using OBS and a MIDI keyboard to add graphics and sounds. What started as a bit of nesting and a few overdue improvements to the home workstation, my sense of production value started blew that up into full blown investment, upgrading lights, wireless audio solutions, and finally getting a decent camera of my own. (Side note: Even after a couple of years, the GH5 is still an awesome, versatile camera. Thumbs up!)
It began as a means of making jokes during telemeetings and fostering jovial virtual happy hour atmospheres and morphed into productivity and positivity. Within our department, we surveyed FieldHouse Creative to gauge interest in spending an occasional lunch hour having a good time and some friendly competition. Encouraged by our Executive Producer Matt Eck, streamer and fellow fun-haver Rob Weems and I led the development of FHC games. FHC expanded to a few invites to friends in other departments, and eventually, we enlisted frequent guests Dana Rowan and Lindsey Speyer to create a broader marketing team to initiate The Playmakers to organize interactive team member events that blend games, prizes, and just hanging out and building relationships with teammates.
While I love the flexibility of the work-from-home lifestyle and finding ways to have fun, the whole name of the game is gathering large numbers of people in an indoor space. Up until March 2020, that’s the only mindset I’ve known! Get asses in seats and entertain the hell at out ‘em! How fast technology moved and how quickly people adapted was eye-opening and the possibilities for revolutionizing work are exciting. But my whole gig and the ultimate goal is getting back to rocking a full house again, and building confidence in/proving effective precautions and protocols to get that were the most important aspects of every project in the last year. I, amongst many dedicated people, worked incredibly hard, incredibly cautiously in pursuit of the purpose of bringing people together once again, and doing so even in the smallest and safest capacities. And in lieu of being together, doing our best to bring things that people enjoy to them in novel and innovative ways.
But it was hard to gain a strong foothold when schedules and timelines shift swiftly and suddenly, and prospective projects or events come and go with the wind. At times, it felt like a lot of flailing, but it was flailing in a generally productive direction. With enormous amounts of care and preparation from building and security teams, the gears started to turn again. It started wide open on the bare floor of the empty arena during our street hockey clinics, and small-scale, spread-across-the-arena get-togethers with ticket members. The camps were an awesome way to get back into the building and be out and about shooting. It was also a perfect way to put that new GH5 through its paces in the workaday world I’m used to. The events were a chance to dust off all the gear and systems that it takes to make the glowy screens glow, and make sure we’re ready for the welcomed increase of activity.
The small steps forward started gaining traction, and the strides became more confident. In addition to limited events, we were looking to welcome employees back to the office. We combined this return with our yearly celebration of team members, an internal show called the Spectaculars. My stellar associate Rob Weems and worked with our human resources department and senior leadership begging teammates for enough pictures and videos for enough pictures and video to fill ninety minutes of team member generated, half virtual, half live studio audience variety show that foremost honored our hardest-working and longest-tenured teammates, but also showcased the personality and creativity of the whole company. Won’t lie though, Rob, Dave Moran, and the other usual suspects of FHC generously hewn the content into a presentable form, and Joe Frietchen’s engineering team with Dave McElhatten’s streaming expertise made it happen.
In addition to being a well-deserved feel-good event, The Spectaculars helped test the new technology and processes that would power larger streaming events for the 2020 NBA Draft Lottery and 2020 NBA Draft. And then… finally… eventually... games! Local, high school, and eventually exhibition games were being scheduled and season schedules were being hammered out powers-that-be. But games! Which also meant players returning, and attempting some form of gathering content that finally wasn’t on a damn Zoom call. I assisted game ops workhorse Tim Long along with our fearless leader AJ Johnson came up with a plan to gather a wide range of the growing content demands for diverse business needs in far less than ideal circumstances in a heavily sanitized and scrutinized manner. I mean, do you want to be the one who gets an NBA team sick and derail return-to-play? It led to a lot of groundwork being laid for a content capture day that I was in no uncertain terms not going to be a part of. This is quite fine when this operation of only 10 most necessary people is usually a practice facility humming with hundreds of various media gatherers. While making all this happen and waiting for the final word on how the NBA and NHL regular seasons were going to shake out and how those would affect the AHL season, I was part of a group tasked with an interesting but exciting sidequest.
It’s not often people just say, “If you wanna make a TV show, go ahead and have at it, hoss!” And that’s basically how Monsters OT was born. Time slots were offered and along with the inimitable Tony Brown and wily production vet Mark Zaremba, we now find time to put together pure and uncut Monsters on SportsTime Ohio. Creatively and business-wise, a television show is a powerful branding asset, and a task you take on with gusto!
At the same time this was coming together, so was the Monsters Community Foundation's plans of activating a long-planned legacy project in conjunction with the City of Cleveland’s Halloran Park. The team would be renovating a storage space into an educational resource and place that allows Cleveland families to connect with and grow the sport of hockey. No sooner than the project timeline was set, the AHL announced a target date to start the season.
Here we are again… less than 6 weeks to go until opening day. You know what that’s like, I told you here. We need an open, a television spot, and TV and in-arena shows that need quality segments. And like everything else this year, we have to do it on extra hard mode. AJ, Tim, and I ran the content capture day playbook again to over-prepare to do a simple media day in a convoluted but absolutely necessary way; fighting to get our first non-laptop-based video of these guys in over a year. Nate Klein and Dave Moran already had a perfect script in place for a spot. I tossed the keys to the open in the superbly talented hands of Kevin Libal, who tapped Christian Merrill to round the LED environment, and lighting guru Sam Brown used his skill to paint the arena. Myles Holt and I needed to cover the hell out of the renovation project and shared plenty of early mornings with the contracting crews, and taking meetings in the lobby with the Monsters front-office trying to schedule and strategize the moving pieces to pull it all off. We multiplied forces, worked nights and weekends and mixed it all together to create a series of thematically linked but individually positioned, multi-platformed videos whose production embodies the ideals they set out to convey.
The fun wasn’t over yet. We’ve yet to arrive at the pièce de résistance, welcoming fans back to the arena for Monsters hockey. While Cavs games had returned for a while, the control room protocols and extra precaution necessary hadn’t allowed my involvement, and it felt great and fell back into the groove quickly. There was a lot different about this opening weekend, but I took great satisfaction in sharing the evening with fans and working with our game day production crew again, and returning more part-time positions back to work.
Before I could relax and take a breather for the first time in months, there was one more item on the list: capstone the Halloran Park renovation with a press conference to unveil the changes to the community, and all the time hanging out gathering the incremental progress of the construction paid off in my first attempt at HGTV style makeover shots. To be safe, we couldn’t see the ultimate payoff in the kids’ reaction, but we look forward to returning for future gatherings in the future.
Ahhhhh… and now time for a deep breath! Except, not so much, as breathing deeply could spread the coronavirus which finally managed to find its way in me. I was sicker than I’ve ever gotin years, and it log jammed production we were finally getting ahead of. It sucks. And though I was able to handle relatively well, its potential to kill still weighed on my mortal mind. There could be no better reminder that even though things are looking up, we’re not out of the woods yet and now’s not the time to let up. Let’s see this through to the end and finally leave these times in the rearview where they belong.
Like so many, I’m ready to turn the page, again. Between losing seasons to COVID and my own medical trials, whatever type of normal is left to return to, I look forward to getting back to it. But much like the previous year, the challenges overcome hopefully sculpted a better producer, and I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish despite the hurdles laid before us. And now, after a long couple of years and a decade in sports, I hope to get back to the light, fluffy subject matter this site was constructed to house. Stay tuned for some top 10’s, early milestones, and more self-conscious ramblings of your friendly neighborhood video guy.