World Athletics Championships 2023: Bringing a Reality TV Edge With a 1km Long Wirecam, Q Room Cameras, More

Live from Budapest: Bringing a reality TV edge to the World Athletics Championships 2023 with a 1km long wirecam, q Room cameras and more By Heather McLean

Wednesday, August 30, 2023 - 10:07

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With the structure designed and created by West End Rigging, and the camera set up provided and operated on site by Luna Remote Systems, the 985m-long wirecam for the World Athletics Championships race walks and marathon that runs along Andr ssy Avenue to Hero's Square is a feat to be marvelled at

Storytelling is a key focus of the World Athletic Championships 2023, and to that end, World Athletic Productions - a joint venture between World Athletics and ITN - has rolled out a number of innovations that helped bring more dramatic pictures and more behind-the-scenes drama to rights holding broadcasters.

World Athletic Productions decided against using any helicopters for this championships for sustainability reasons. Instead, to get those aerial shots it used a drone, plus wirecams inside the stadium including one capturing the horizontal jumps to track the athletes' lateral movement, and in a world first, a one kilometre-long wirecam running along Andr ssy Avenue to Hero's Square for the race walks and marathon.

In addition, small cameras were installed on buggies transporting athletes from their warm up areas to the stadium, and for an added sense of jeopardy, the new q Room and its cameras captured the drama of athletes awaiting their results.

Speaking from the National Athletics Centre stadium in Budapest overlooking the Danube, Mark Fulton, executive producer for World Athletics Productions, comments: I think this World Championships, I think we've really excelled. I think some of the close-ups that you've seen of the athletes, some of the reactions that you've seen of athletes, I don't think I've seen some of the images [ever before] like we're seeing at the moment. I think everybody's worked really, really hard and I think the storytelling and the narratives are just building themselves.

The 1km-long World Athletic Productions' wirecam's camera head used is a Sony P50 with a Canon CJ45 lens which can go remarkably tight on shots. The gimbal is a Shotover M1 with six-access stabilisation which makes it solid as it zips along. Altogether just the camera, lens and stabilised head come in at a price of around Euro 400,000

Marvellous wirecam

With the structure designed and created by West End Rigging, and the camera set up provided and operated on site by Luna Remote Systems, the 985m-long wirecam that runs along Andr ssy Avenue to Hero's Square is a feat to be marvelled at.

The wirecam towers are 40m high with the cables attached at the 34m point on the tower ends. The lowest part of the wire is 21m above ground level, which drops in the centre due to the payload of the entire dolly and head which comes to 80kg.

Additionally, the lines attached to each tower provide a massive 1.2 tonnes of pressure on each of the two lines, creating 2.4 tonnes of pressure pulling each tower inwards. To counter this, each tower has 60 tonnes of ballast holding it back.

For stability, the dolly speed is restricted to 10m per second, which is 22 miles per hour or 36km per hour for this set up, however the system has a maximum tested speed of 30m per second which is equal to 67 miles per hour, or 108km per hour but that requires a winch to be deployed at each end, rather than the single winch being used in this case.

The camera head used is a Sony P50 with a Canon CJ45 lens which can go remarkably tight on shots. The gimbal is a Shotover M1 with six-access stabilisation which makes it solid as it zips along. Altogether just the camera, lens and stabilised head come in at a price of around Euro 400,000.

Fulton comments on what the 1km wirecam enables the team to do editorially: If you think about a 10-kilometre course, if you have a 1km wirecam, 2km of that course is covered. And then when you look at the city itself, the city is so beautiful, there's no point in putting helicopters; you'd get a nice skyline, but you want to be down at street level and seeing the beauty of the city and the athletes running through the streets.

He adds on the 1km wirecam: It's solid as a rock. It's got a stabilised lens. I think when we watched the race walks the other day when they used it, you just get some amazing images of looking down over the top of the athletes as they come around the carpet and the shadows that you get of it is just [beautiful]. I think it's one of the big successes of these championships.

On the 1km wirecam, Jenny King, head of technical production at ITN, says: The main areas we've been looking at are the wirecam set ups. Just focusing on the marathon race walk, which is a beautiful area of Budapest at Hero Square, we've got a 1km wirecam, which runs from the top of Hero Square all the way down, which has covered the men's and women's 20 kilometre walk which we've already broadcast. Then it will be used in the marathon itself and the 35K.

It is elements like that which are really enhancing the coverage, I think, continues King. As the athletes come round Hero Square, we've got a specially designed camera on a gimbal which sits on the back of a buggy to get some really nice angles of the athletes coming around. You can really see the architecture of Hero Square, so that's been really nice.

Freelancer Graham Holmes is responsible for the electric bikes and also put together the buggy in Hero's Square. He took an electric buggy and added a Steadicam arm with a camera on the back of it for dramatic shots that shoot up through the athletes into the backdrop of the impressive architecture of Hero's Square.

The new electric buggy cam in Hero's Square gave ama

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