Mavericks add impact to baseball dinner
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This was very evident at the team’s annual Granite State Baseball Dinner. Held virtually this year, with Events United producing the event at Studio Lab, the fundraiser ran over its scheduled time because of the high level of interest from fans throughout New Hampshire. “The Fisher Cats are an institution in this area,” said Tim Messina, owner of Events United. “Since they could not hold their dinner live, we helped them create a new atmosphere of their traditional event in a livestream.”
The key to creating a welcoming mood in the broadcast was a massive 53ft wide by 14ft tall curved video wall backdrop that was used to display engaging backgrounds, images, and live video conferencing feeds featuring baseball stars like Danny Jansen, starting catcher for the Blue Jays, as well as legends like Boston Red Sox Hall of Famers, Bernie Carbo and Luis Tiant.
“The live video conferencing calls were big part of the show,” said producer Chase Clark. “During the calls, the centre third of our video wall displayed the baseball stars interacting live with each other and Tyler Murray, the host for the event. Tyler did a great job balancing all the different feeds and calling audibles when needed. Our Maverick MK2 Spot fixtures, turned down to low intensity, provided us with excellent key lighting on him, while not washing out the video wall images.”
A wide variety of baseball related images, sponsorship call outs, and other graphics were displayed on the two-thirds of the video wall that were not devoted to playing live call-ins. These colourful images did more than create visually pleasing backdrops for livestream viewers, they also were critical in setting the tone for different segments of the broadcast.
“We spend a good amount of time setting lighting, audio, and camera shots for each event. It’s important to us that each event looks and sounds the best it can and that means that we spend a decent amount of time setting proper camera exposure, colour balancing, adding texture, dialling in audio, and working with talent so they are comfortable on camera,” said Clark. “Credit for balancing all these elements goes to our team, which includes our LD Ryan Lane, audio engineer Kevin Smith, LED wall operator Trifon Athnos, graphics operator Joel Pelletier, and teleprompter operator Martin Lyons, as well as our camera operators Lauren Thomason, Jeff Garcia, and Peyton Geisler.”
