St. Albert will be the centre of attention during the TSN broadcast of the World Financial Group Continental Cup of Curling.
“The exposure St. Albert will receive with TSN providing coverage of the Continental Cup is enormous,” said Mike Howes, the host committee chair. “It’s going to be great to hear Vic Rauter tell everybody in Canada what a fantastic place this city is.”
All 11 draws will be shown live in high definition during the four-day competition, starting Thursday at 8:30 a.m. at Servus Credit Union Place.
Rauter, known as the voice of curling in Canada, will be joined in the booth by broadcast partners Linda Moore and Russ Howard.
Running the show is producer Scott Higgins and director Andy Bouyoukos. The veteran duo of major TSN curling events are joined by associate producer Kevin Pratt. His specialty is players’ features and he works in tandem with the videotape editors and replay people to put all the footage together.
“This will be the same base crew that does the Brier and Scotties,” said technical producer Phil Laplante of Sherwood Park.
The equipment is provided by Dome Productions in Toronto. Two big tractor-trailer television trucks rolled in Tuesday afternoon from Calgary to set up shop.
“One of them has all fixed equipment, like a permanent control room. It’s 53 feet long and expands out six feet so it’s very spacious inside. It will contain 14 people working in the truck, and that includes the producer, director, technical director, audio and slo-mo replay people, engineers and so on,” Laplante said. “The rest of the truck consists of two audio assistants, five camera operators and a robo camera operator who operates the two overhead cameras.”
The rigging people and lighting director also arrived Tuesday with some assistant crew people to mount the trusses over the ice at Performance Arena for the cameras.
Today the entire camera crew and sound guys will set up the cameras, audio equipment and the booth.
“We have a crew of about six people for the one day, then the entire crew of about 24 people on Wednesday will set it all up and by Wednesday afternoon we’re pretty much ready to go,”
Eight cameras will be strategically placed to capture every shot by Team North America and Team World. They include five man cameras; two big cameras, one at each end of the ice, and three hand-held cameras, plus two overhead cameras and a “wide beauty shot camera.”
“Four of the cameramen working on this event just finished the world juniors in Buffalo,” said Laplante.
He estimated 10,000 feet of audio cable, 3,000 feet of video cable and 5,000 feet of camera cable will be installed this morning.
“We have to put microphones in the foam dividers to get the sound effects from the rocks sliding on the ice,” he said. “We put little sound effect microphones on all the sheets, five per sheet. There is also video and audio cable going to the booth. We have up to 10 video monitors in the booth that we have to send feeds to and then all the microphones and headsets in the booth will have to have audio cables too.”
Prior to the opening draw on each day, the main crew is in place 90 minutes before the first rock is thrown and they don’t leave until an hour after the last draw that day.
“When it’s all over, it takes about two to three hours to pack it all up.”
Laplante doesn’t foresee any problems broadcasting the event from the home rink of the St. Albert Steel.
“We did the Continental Cup in Camrose two years ago and the [Edgeworth Centre] arena is virtually identical to this arena. It’s the same lighting and it’s virtually the same design, so it’s quite easy and quite simple,” he said. “The challenges are generally power requirements for the trucks and the lighting if we have to light, as well as the ceiling heights and facilities themselves in the different venues.
“As for this event, everything should go according to plan from our end of things.”
