If you've watched big-time football and big-time golf events, the odds are good that you have seen the work of Bob Mikkelson, president/founder of Winged Vision and a member of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame Class of 2016. The odds are also good that you've been impressed by what you have seen: Mikkelson has taken live aerial coverage of sport events to, literally, new heights.
Bob Mikkelson and one of Winged Vision's three fixed-wing aircraft.
He is in his element when inside a blimp or in the back of one of Winged Vision's three fixed-wing airplanes with an electronics rack, a 7-in. monitor, and a laptop controller for the camera and 40X lens in a gyro-stabilized housing. A live microwave signal is then sent to the ground, where another member of the Winged Vision production team ensures that it is received properly.
Mikkelson's true artistry is his ability to shoot an aerial show that matches what the production team is doing, despite his inability to see what is going on in the truck. He, in effect, produces and directs an aerial show that syncs up with the one being produced in the truck.
I follow everything they are doing live without a return and tally, he explains. It's a great way to keep you focused.
From Politics to Sports Coverage
Mikkelson's journey to the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame began not in the dusty confines of a TV-truck compound but rather the world of national politics. The Minnesota native set out for Washington as an intern with Hubert Humphrey while in grad school and then signed on as an advance man for Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign. He subsequently served as campaign press secretary for Minnesota State Sen. Wendell Anderson and then moved to the FAA as an aide to the administrator.
But, as he puts it, he was one of those guys who became unemployed at noon on Jan. 20, 1981, when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. It was a tough time to be a young Democrat in Washington, he says, so I figured I'd take a break for a couple of years and do something fun.
Out of a job, he did the best thing for someone who loves aviation: look to put his pilot's license to use.
It was clear I didn't have the experience for a flying job, but someone suggested I look at aerial camera systems. I went to the library across the hall from my old FAA office and began my research, he says. It was all military systems, but I saw something that made sense to me. It was the stabilized platform used in the AC 130 Spectre Gunship. It carried about six sensors and looked like you could easily mount anything in it.
With an idea and a copy of the Pentagon phone directory, Mikkelson hit the phones and wound up talking to the TV-Film Liaison for the Secretary of the Air Force and got a system to test. That Air Force system was an open frame that could easily hold almost any camera and lens. The 1984 prototype Canon 40X lens configured for -in. cameras turned out to be the perfect fit for the system, and it gave Mikkelson the ability to shoot tighter than with other aerial systems.
A Modified Military Camera System
With Canon's support, he modified that system so that it could be used on the Goodyear blimp, and it debuted that summer at a women's golf event for NBC and later at the Citrus Bowl. A few months later, with two systems from the manufacturer, Winged Vision was in business.
Fellow Sports Broadcasting Hall of Famer Mickey Wittman was a key driver of getting things like the Goodyear blimp up in the air for event coverage, and Mikkelson took what Wittman says is a good idea and made it great.
Mikkelson was in at the beginning of MetLife's golf coverage.
Televised golf can't be fully articulated without an aerial platform 1,000 ft. above the course, says Wittman, and Bob has an incredible ability to follow a golf ball and anticipate the next camera cut.
Ken Aagaard, then at NBC Sports, hired Mikkelson's camera system for six golf events in 1985, and, the following year, Mikkelson, with no camera experience at all, shot his first show, the Bob Hope Classic for NBC.
I really didn't realize that I had put together the most capable aerial system anywhere in the broadcast world, Mikkelson says. I really didn't invent anything. I just put pieces together from the military and the commercial broadcast world, and it worked.
Aagaard and Mikkelson set off on a 30+-year journey that continues to this day.
Mikkelson singlehandedly changed how we watch golf. Our principal camera coverage is from the blimp, says Aagaard, noting, It is not easy to follow a ball while robotically controlling pan, tilt, and zoom, on a moving platform that is operating at the whim of the wind and making sure your shadow doesn't fall in your shot or the noise from your airship isn't disturbing the players.
In 1987, MetLife started its blimp program, and Mikkelson and his golf coverage served as the foundation for Snoopy's 29-year run. His work is the standard and a key component of golf coverage today.
A Changing Broadcast Industry
He attributes much of his success to some broader industry trends at that time. The networks were changing how they did business. Many of the original families and owners that had created the broadcasting industry were leaving and turning the industry over to non-broadcast corporations.
The whole DNA of the networks changed, and that allowed outside vendors like myself, or John Porter and Peter Larsson with their in-car cameras, to step in, as the networks no longer wanted to own stuff, Mikkelson says. So a new generation of vendors were not only suppliers but also became the R&D shops for the networks.
In the early 1990s, he was the first to fly the new generation of ENG telephoto lenses. The first system he built for these lenses was developed with
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If you've watched big-time football and big-time golf events, the odds are good that you have seen the work of Bob Mikkelson, president/founder of Winged Vision and a member of the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame Class of 2016. The odds are also good that you've been impressed by what you have seen: Mikkelson has taken live aerial coverage of sport events to, literally, new heights.
