The industry event that I chose to go to this semester was the Overwatch League Grand Finals. Finding an industry event that was focused animation proved somewhat difficult so I instead chose to go the route of video production. Given the live action components of my project I thought it would be a good idea to be able to get a closer look at a full on television and online streaming production. Having been involved in the collegiate esports scene for the past few years I had a particular affiliation with the video game “Overwatch” and for the Overwatch League pro scene.
Due to past experiences having attended other esports events and meeting individuals involved in the esports scene I was actually able to spend some time speaking to some of the casters for the matches and see the work taking place in the casters’ booth. Here I was able to see the way the casters were filmed for the grand finals match, and the camera work that went into the production.
The experience was particularly enlightening to the processes necessary to create a production on the scale that the event was. The grand finals were being broadcast to three different television stations and two different online streaming platforms. To pull this off a large command center for all of the media output was housing several members of production that monitored events in the arena as well as the output to the different platforms to ensure that the feed was good on channels and that the production was running smoothly. The event was fun overall and while I wasn’t allowed to photograph the behind the scenes production it was a really good look at how television production works.
