At The Game: The Horse Trailer

Some of the behind-the-scenes stuff I’ve gotten to see this season has been more impressive than I expected. The Monday Night Football production trucks from a couple weeks back, for example, were remarkable in their size and scope. On one level, they looked just like the production truck Comcast uses to produce the Redskins preseason [...]

Redskins @ Panthers – First Quarter Technical Difficulty Thoughts

Here’s what’s interesting about the technical difficulties from this end: at the start, everything looked fine. The taped open ran as scheduled, the throw back to live coverage worked perfectly, and the game kicked off. Just before kickoff, the production room got word through the phone AD that they had lost the HD signal at [...]

Redskins @ Panthers – Meeting With The Booth

At this point, most everyone knows their marching orders. Everyone’s up to speed on the problems with the timing of the anthem and the resulting taped open. This is just the final review, the last time to get Joe Theismann, Mike Patrick, producer Brad Baker, Comcast SportsNet producer Rich Wolff, director Ernie Baur, and reporters [...]

Redskins @ Panthers – Production Room

Here’s the Production Room. This is where the massive amounts of information coming into the rest of the truck gets turned, hopefully, into a watchable TV presentation. The director and producer are the two people who essentially quarterback the show. Also working here are the technical director, who has to actually execute the instructions of [...]

Redskins @ Panthers – The Production Truck

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the production truck, to be honest. I’ve seen the brief interior shots before — one or two toward the end of a Monday Night Football broadcast, maybe, or one on a Thanksgiving or Christmas game — and I’ve seen the trucks outside FedExField, but never really paid [...]

Wednesday, August 20: Planning for Saturday’s Broadcast

(Because the Redskins produce the preseason games in-house, I thought this might offer a good opportunity to watch the entire production of a game, from the advance production work it all the way through to the actual broadcast. At Redskins Park, I’ve been meeting with producer Brad Baker.) When I walk into the Redskins TV [...]

Putting the Redskins on TV: Meet Brad Baker

Because the Redskins produce the preseason games in-house, I thought this might offer a good opportunity to watch the entire production of a game, from the work done in the week running up to it all the way through to the actual broadcast itself. It’s the kind of thing I won’t necessarily be able to [...]