Live From Super Bowl LIV: Fox Sports Delivers Sense of Place With Mega Studio Structure on South Beach Majestic campus erected and designed by Filmwerks is pumping out hundreds of hours of content By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Friday, January 31, 2020 - 11:17 am
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What's the point of producing a studio show on-site at a major event, if not to paint the picture of the host locale and to engross the viewer in all that makes it unique. That's the belief of Fox Sports' VP, Operations Rod Conti, whose team has outdone themselves with a set to behold on the sands of South Beach in Miami for coverage surrounding Super Bowl LIV.
Fox Sports' massive studio set activation in South Beach for Super Bowl LIV spans nine acres of production and operations workspace.
Midweek FS1 studio shows (like Skip and Shannon: Undisputed, First Things First, The Herd, Speak For Yourself, and Lock It In) along with game day staples like Fox NFL Sunday will all churn out hundreds of hours of content from the nearly nine acres of production and operations support workspace that Fox has stretched across the southern reaches of Miami Beach. And its all offering a fresh, fun, and eclectic feel for what makes this region of the country so special.
Sense of place is huge, says Conti, who has overseen many achievements in set design for Fox, including memorable structures at the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Moscow's Red Square and the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in Paris overlooking the Eiffel Tower. What's synonymous with that place? What's the first thing that you think of? When we were designing this, I said, this is what I want: Ocean Drive, art deco, palm trees, the sea. What do people think of first when they think of Miami. It's this beach.
A 55-ft. Technocrane not only supplies sweeping aerial images of the sets, it also is capable of display augmented reality graphics.
Along with its structural and scenic set design partner Filmwerks, Fox Sports has built what is essentially a temporary Fox Corp. campus that is worthy of the Big Game in both scale and scope. For the sports side alone, the network has erected a pair of 50-ft. by 50-ft. production stages bridges by a small demo football field area coverage is large 1.6 mm LED screens that measure up in total to more than 50 square meters.
How often do we get acres of beach front property to play with? laughs Conti. This is TV, we're used to working in tiny spaces in New York City or a convention center. This is primo.
Setting the scene of South Beach was far more challenging a task than simply plopping a set in the heart of the strip. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has worked in television production that placing massive structural weight and millions of dollars of gear and personnel onto beach sand isn't without its obstacles.
Plus, since Fox's set is set back a bit off of the street of Ocean Drive itself, Conti and his team are utilizing a pair of high-powered camera support systems to help set the scene. A camera on a Strada Crane extends as high as 80 ft. and if offering breathtaking sweeping aerial images of the sets while transitioning smoothly to views of the Atlantic Ocean. Meanwhile, back further inland, a two-point, wired FlyCam system stretches 600 feet along the street the gather in the colors and sounds of Ocean Drive.
The stages are loaded with gear, including a camera complement that featured a pair of RF Steadicams, a RF handheld, and a pair of Technocranes, one measuring 55-ft. high that's outside on the central football field and a 22-ft. fixture that's used on the southern-most of the two sets.
Each stage is supported by a control room towards the rear of the room. In fact, each portion of this full structure does an exemplary job of containing everything it needs within a organized footprint, while maintaining clean lines not only for the viewers at home but for those in fans being brought in for live audience of the many programs shooting live here.
There's more than 10 miles of fiber and five zones of PA speaker systems and one would hardly notice them unless that were pointed out. Set designers took extra care into incorporating real Miami Beach sand for authenticity, while laying down similarly-colored carpet and boardwalk-like wooden boards in the areas where there would be significant crew and talent foot traffic. Blending in the audio wasn't easy, but Conti found a solution he fell in love with, utilizing an Italian company called K-array to supply thin speaker systems that were installed in the corner walls of the sets, and a special flexible, snake-like speaker strip called an Anakonda that provided inconspicuous in-house audio for the studio audience.
We wanted to make it all work aesthetically but it's also completely functional, says Conti. Everything is storage or a mini studio of its own. It's clean. Plus, when you have those big high cameras that pull in cool shots, you can't be looking down at a mess.
More than 350+ production, technical and support staff are working here on this impressive campus that began going up way back on January 6. First arrivers raked and matted down the sand before it two approximately two weeks to build the structures themselves before set designers could even begin dressing them. Plus, weather that was unpredictable at time, caused Fox to have to be extra cautious with elements of the build out that could be more dangerous than others.
It was an ambitious timeline, but not overly tight, says Brad Cheney, VP, Field Operations & Engineering, Fox Sports. There were definitely spots where we had to play a little bit of catch up because of the wind.
Fox's campus at South Beach is supported by NEP Broadcasting's ND1 series of mobile production trucks. The
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Live From Super Bowl LIV: Fox Sports Delivers Sense of Place With Mega Studio Structure on South Beach Majestic campus erected and designed by Filmwerks is pumping out hundreds of hours of content By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
