Joe Brackman

University of Cincinnati

Live broadcast of Cincinnat vs Xavier Men's Basketball

This was live coverage of Xavier at Cincinnati men's basketball on ESPN+. The show originated out of our school control room using students in many of the positions. As the director, I was mainly in charge of the technical execution of the production. I also managed the crewing of the event, the technical setup of the arena, and contributed to creative decisions alongside the producers and talent. In game, I was directing shots to creatively tell a story of this important rivalry.

This game was a major matchup between two rival universities in our city, with Cincinnati having lost the last 5 games against Xavier. There was a lot on the line for the production with high number of viewers anticipated to be watching, and it was important that we be hitting on all cylinders. For this show, I had students operating 3 of the 5 cameras, 1 of the 2 replay ops, a student in audio as the A1 and a student as the lead graphics op. Many of the other positions were crewed by former students / recent graduates.

As director, I was managing the creative direction of the game, working closely with the producer, Trevor Towle, who is a full-time member of UC Athletics. We really wanted to convey the crowd and atmosphere to the viewer during this production to help bring the energy of the arena to the viewer. One unexpected hiccup during the game was an internet outage affecting our primary encoder to ESPN. This occurred in the first half and was a challenge to manage while staying focused on the show. As one of the technical minds in the control room, the issue had to be delegated, but I was constantly thinking about workarounds in my head while the game was going on. It was mostly resolved during halftime and viewers only experienced a few breakups of the stream due to poor bandwidth. The finish of the game was exciting as ever, and for some of the camera ops, this was their first time ever shooting a finish like that. So covering that meant giving a lot of direction as their instincts have not been fully developed.