Live From the 37th America's Cup: Director of Production Leon Sefton on the Responsibility for Innovation Sailing is a complex sport for a lot of people, and we try to make it easy for viewers to follow' By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Friday, October 18, 2024 - 10:20 am
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Serving as director of production for TV coverage of an America's Cup is no small feat: you need to not only coordinate production crew and operations at a land-based production-control facility but also keep on top of video and audio signals sent from yachts and chase boats more than 3 km away. Director of production for this year's race, Leon Sefton has served that function for the 36th edition in New Zealand and for the Volvo Ocean Race, Olympic sailing at the 2016 Rio Games, and other races. SVG caught up with Sefton as the racing action was about to begin last weekend in Barcelona.
Director, Production, Leon Sefton (right) and Technical Director Chris Carpenter at the America's Cup in Barcelona
What has been your impression of the technical leaps in the production this year?
This America's Cup, we've tried to take things forward as it's our responsibility as host broadcaster to challenge ourselves as to how to make sailing, as a TV spectacle, more engaging and more understandable. Sailing is a really complex sport for a lot of people, and we have to do our best to try to make it as easy as possible for viewers to follow. That's the challenge which, over the last few Cup cycles, the respective production teams have really taken on.
For example, the America's Cup in San Francisco, delivered a graphics breakthrough bringing augmented-reality graphics to viewers and, for the first time, could create a digital field of play. Suddenly, viewers could see the racecourse and who's ahead. That was a massive leap forward, not just for sailing but also for TV graphics because, up to that point, people playing with the AR graphics were doing it in stadium sports.
Big leaps forward don't come every cycle, but at this America's Cup the big thing has been WindSight IQ, which is making the invisible visible. The genesis of that project was in New Zealand with Brent Russell, our technical director. Brent demonstrated that the technology could work with LiDAR, and, in New Zealand, we did a test and showed that, in theory, we could point a LiDAR out at the course and make a graphical interface that could show the wind. Then we brought in Capgemini for the heavy lifting: they set up three LiDAR stations here that overlap and built the mathematical models to take that data to enable us to create a graphics interface.
We did a test event here in Barcelona and had an interesting moment when we had the concept and brought in the team, all the equipment, and turned on the system. When it came to life and worked, it was a real eureka moment. A lot of us are lifelong sailors so to suddenly see the wind, where the high-pressure areas are, the low-pressure areas are was a massive breakthrough. Bringing that to air was taking our technologies and stacking them on each other.
How so?
It starts with a helicopter and the Shotover camera system, which is a high-quality stabilized broadcast camera shooting the action from the sky. On top of that video, there is optical tracking from Bolt6, whose system has learned the shape of the racecourse, the shape of the race markers, the yachts, our TV-camera boats, the skyline and Barcelona. Bolt6 looks at that and can create an AR field of play. On top of that, we add WindSightIQ and a sailing simulator that can look into the future and lay out what the yachts might do based on the known parameters and performance of the yachts and what the wind is doing. In a way, [fans] sitting at home know even a little bit more than what the sailors know as far as how things will play out. But that was the goal: give people information and engage them. The more information people have the more entertaining it is.
How do you think the use of LiDAR could expand?
Right now, playing with LiDAR, we're working in the two-dimensional. The ultimate goal would be to have multiple LiDARs taking additional slices of the windfield; with a mathematical model, you could turn that into a three-dimensional view of the wind with even more detail - not just speed and direction but also sheer. But, at the moment, we're working in a two-dimensional plane, which has been remarkable because, in the past, the way of collecting wind data was to have physical wind buoys out on the racecourse. To accomplish what we've done with LiDAR, you'd have to have tens of thousands of buoys out there. This is a really elegant technical solution to a very, very complex problem.
Another big advance is the use of a hydrogen-powered camera chase boat. How has that improved the production?
The drive to bring hydrogen foiling chase boats into the event is a nice next step to honestly say we're using clean energy. That's a big deal, but also the speed that the racing now plays out at is so fast in order to keep up with the action, we have to foil as well. So it's not just hydrogen [to be clean], but it's the ability to stand up and foil that has been a massive game-changer for us. Previously, we used displacement catamaran hulls, but, here in Barcelona, because of the proximity to the shoreline, you can get quite aggressive waves. While the AC75 race yachts can cope with that and can stand up and fly above it, it's a big problem to chase them in a camera boat. First, it's very hard on the people and the equipment, but it's also quite dangerous. And having the hydrogen foiling chase boat allows us to keep up with the yachts as they are sometimes doing over a hundred kilometers per hour.
The other th
