Working for the worldwide leader in sports

The time spent shooting high school sports and now the Syracuse Orange (see my reel above) has landed me some exciting opportunities with ESPN.

It all started with an email to the CitrusTV sports director from a crewing company called Kwokman Productions. Kwokman was looking for utilities on the ESPN2 broadcast of the Syracuse/Minnesota football game in the fall (yes, apparently we still have a football team...), and I was quick to jump on the crew.

Several CitrusTV members and I helped the cart-cam unit, which could drive along the sidelines with a raised platform that had a camera on it. A few of my other friends from CitrusTV held parab mics (the big plastic semi-spheres you see around the field for any football broadcast). Here's a goofy picture of me on the sidelines.

It was fun, and just the start for a good relationship with Kwokman and various ESPN operations producers throughout what's been one of the best basketball seasons for the Orange. I've had the good fortune of working on every single ESPN or ESPN2 broadcast out of the Carrier Dome this season.

Generally speaking, a utility helps the camera operators with whatever they need with setup, strike (breaking stuff down and putting it away), and during the broadcast. During setup and strike, I've worked a lot with the operators of the Fletcher robotic camera operators - the cool remote controlled cameras above the hoops. One of the operators who comes to 'cuse a lot and is an alum from the '70s has even worked with my dad, aunt and uncle - it's a small world.

During the broadcast, I've mainly tended to the cable for handheld operators. Usually this entails sitting baseline, under one of the baskets in a coveted blue ESPN vest and whenever the camera operator moves making sure he has enough slack to get to where he needs to be and making sure no one trips over the cable. It can get pretty tricky during warmups when there are a lot of people on the court and during the game when we head into the crowd to get bump shots - those short little shots you see before the broadcast goes to a commercial break.

Of course - life is made much easier knowing the secrets of over-undering cable, thanks to years of practice with my dad who was a grip, gaffer and jib operator for years. Not to mention the handy instructional video by CitrusTV/Orange Television Network's own Wes Purvis...

Here's a quick video clip from my phone before the Syracuse/Louisville game on Valentine's Day:

Probably the most exciting broadcast to work on was the Syracuse/Villanova game on Feb. 27. The game broke Syracuse's on-campus attendance record as 34,616 fans filled the Carrier Dome.

Fans had camped out on the concourse of the Dome starting on the Wednesday before the Saturday game. CitrusTV News provided live coverage from the Dome on Friday. With a simple iChat connection back to our studio across campus, an A-block story, teases throughout the broadcast, the weather forecast (they even let me in front of the camera), and half of sports block were all live from the Dome. We had two cameras streaming back: one from the concourse where the campers were lined up and one of the court where the team had been practicing.

Check out this video of the team hanging out with fans on that Friday afternoon:

And here's the newscast featuring live hits throughout...

Finally, Saturday was game day... and not just any game day, it was College GameDay on ESPN. The pre-game broadcast brought several cameras, a news desk, interview sets and ESPN's top talent onto Jim Boeheim Court.



Everything led up to an exciting game - not to mention a pretty enjoyable assignment for me. During the broadcast, my job was to follow sidelines reporter Erin Andrews around with a battery-powered 1x1 foot LED LitePanel to hold up whenever she was on air. Not a bad job.

The Orange's journey in the NCAA tournament was cut short with the loss to Butler in the Sweet Sixteen, but my experience in sports TV production carries on. As Syracuse lacrosse season is in full swing, I'm still on the producing team for CitrusTV's Orange Press Pass, the only live post-game TV show for the nation's best lacrosse team.

This month we'll also be producing a play-by-play broadcast for a women's lacrosse game for SUper Sports, a joint production of the Orange Television Network and CitrusTV. For OTN I work as the Engineer in Charge (EIC) for SUper Sports, overseeing the four-camera shoot and fly-pack control room.

Last week director for NBC Sports Drew Esocoff was in Syracuse to teach a one-credit elective course on sports directing. Esocoff has directed Sunday Night Football for years. For the Olympics, he did swimming in Beijing and snowboarding and the closing ceremonies in Vancouver. He also directed the Super Bowl in 2009. Check out the photo below to see what the typical class was like... watching his monitor wall, hearing his commands and talent, and using a laser pointer to pick what shots we liked best. What a cool teaching tool.

What's next? This summer I'll be in Bristol, CT at ESPN's headquarters completing a studio operations internship.

Disclaimer: Any information and opinions in this blog post and throughout my Web site are my own and do not necessarily represent ESPN, Inc. or the Walt Disney Company.

Summer's end

It was a busy and productive summer for me. Here are a few of the projects I've worked on this summer.

NYC - MTV Networks internship

In May, I was living in Brooklyn Heights. Through a special program at Syracuse University, I had spent my spring semester teaching at the High School for Leadership and Public Service - a public high school in Manhattan's Financial District that was established by SU's Maxwell public affairs school.

During my last few weeks in Brooklyn, I started a 10-week internship at MTV Networks with Spike TV's digital team in New York City. The internship gave me a look at a side of the TV business I previously didn't have any professional experience with: distribution.

My time at Spike helped expand my Photoshop skills, as I was responsible for preparing photos and screen grabs for the designer on our team. I learned how to use Spike's custom content management system, and had an opportunity to fine-tune my Microsoft Excel skills, developing and maintaining a spreadsheet of legal details for posting Spike's many shows on the Internet.

Aside from the work itself, I was fortunate to be with a team full of cool, friendly and interesting people. Outside of cutting out several hundreds (I lost count) of photos of Jesse James for his new series on Spike, some of my tasks included:

• Watching episodes of "Deadliest Warrior" and writing down timecodes of good clips
• An unsuccessful pizza pillage from a screening of TV Land's "Cougar"
• Meeting MTVN digital executives who are some of the most powerful frontiers in the marriage of TV and Web
• A top secret mission one day to pick up cupcakes at Magnolia Cupcakes

Extra, extra, read all about it

Back home in Milford, PA I continued my third year as a regular correspondent for The Gazette, a weekly Dow Jones community newspaper distributed by the Times Herald-Record.

Among the events I reported on and photographed, I met Grammy-nominated singer and pianist Vanessa Carlton, a native of my hometown who played at the Milford Music Festival. I also had the privilege of shooting photos on the field at the graduation of my brother and several good friends from Delaware Valley High School.

In mid-June, a new weekly newspaper launched in the tri-state NJ/NY/PA area called the Pike County Press. After hearing about the newspaper from my high school journalism teacher, I contacted the manager who took me on as a freelance photographer, reporter and videographer. As a result, the Press became the first news site in Pike County to have video content. Since June, I've taken thousands of photos, written several pieces and produced a handful of videos for the Pike County Press.

Check out highlights of my photojournalism work on Flickr.

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

On the Web

I began work on a Web site for the new Brooklyn Heights Wine Bar, co-owned by my best friend's dad. The site launched in July. Designed in Dreamweaver, the site has a Wordpress back-end for the owners of the wine bar to easily update content themselves.

Myer and Myer, CPA in Milford contacted me to do two Web sites, one for their CPA office and one for Myer Property Management. The property manager recalled my name from back when I used to maintain the school Web site DV World when I was in high school. Their sites are still under construction.

And Myer's the lucky name for me. I've been working with Myer the Florist (no connection to the CPA...) on a Web site for the past year and a half. This summer we got the e-commerce portion of the site up and running, and the first online order came in just this last week.

In the community

Once the local schools went out for summer, I volunteered at the Pike County Public Library's summer reading kickoff, which included a concert with world-renowned children's singer/songwriter Steven Courtney and his Band of Friends. The concert and a few others I volunteered at this summer were sponsored by the Friends of the Children's Room, a teen-led group I presided over in high school that raises money and awareness for children's programs and resources at the library.

I was the M.C. and auctioneer for a fundraising children's art auction held by the Friends of the Children's Room, and helped the library with its PR efforts for a proposed dedicated library tax to ensure adequate library funding.

Two PBS affiliates contacted me this summer looking to obtain copies of Controversy on the Delaware, a short documentary I directed and co-produced in high school. Ken Burns has a documentary on national parks premiering on PBS in the next month, and my documentary uncovered the shocking and widely unknown history of the Delaware Water Gap, a national recreation area at the northern part of the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

WVIA in Scranton, PA has added a copy of Controversy on the Delaware to its library, and Thirteen in New York City is currently reviewing the film.

I also attended a handful of school board meetings this summer. I still publish a blog about the school district, and though I've slacked off a bit on keeping it as updated as I used to, it still serves the community as an outlet for exclusive information and multimedia about school board affairs.

Back in 'cuse

This week I moved back to Syracuse for my junior year. As a peer adviser at the Newhouse School, I've been helping out with the freshmen class that's coming in. And there are a bunch of exciting things around the corner with CitrusTV, most notably our foray into HD with the capability to broadcast 720p on the campus' Orange Television Network cable channel. At some point in the next week I'll post an update about what's going on this semester.