Super Bowl LVIII: Van Wagner's Bob Becker on First Opening Night at the Super Bowl Venue and Prepping for the Big Game Evolving HDR workflow is among changes in the in-venue presentation this year By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Wednesday, February 7, 2024 - 11:36 am
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Van Wagner Productions President Bob Becker and the Van Wagner team will once again be at the center of a Super Bowl game presentation for fans in the stadium. This year, though, has seen some changes: the Opening Night was held in the stadium for the first time ever; Van Wagner's remote facility in Raleigh, NC, did a remote production for the NFL Pro Bowl in Orlando last weekend; and HDR workflows continue to evolve. Becker spoke with SVG about those happenings, working in Allegiant Stadium, and much more.
Van Wagner's Bob Becker: I still get choked up on kickoff after all these years.
This was the first year that the NFL held its Opening Night at the stadium that the game is played in. Are you guys involved with that show, and how did things go?
Yes, we always do that show. In the past, it was in an arena around town, and a quarter of our team would disappear on Thursday and just worry about that while the other part of the team stayed back and prepared for the Super Bowl. The biggest challenge for us - not only us but the Super Bowl events team, grounds crew, logistics, operations, other vendors, and everyone else - [was that] we had to put the brakes a little bit on the Super Bowl because we were in the same building. We used our full Super Bowl team to concentrate on Opening Night for a few days. But we have such great people that just get the job done, and it was an amazing experience and a full-on spectacle - quite frankly, the best Opening Night we all have done.
Did it give you a chance to kick some tires, so to speak, for Sunday's game?
Oh, for sure. We also had to create some new graphic renderings that said Opening Night. But we did find some gremlins in the system. Typically, we'd find them later in the week during something like cut-to cue or rehearsal. But we found some issues in the comms systems and some issues with the feeds. They are just normal, run-of-the-mill issues that we run into with any live event, but we figured them out early so we should have a perfect few days leading into the Big Game.
Each building brings something different to your production. How is this venue different?
Every Super Bowl brings its challenges because we're a group that comes in and takes over somebody else's control room and integrates with the staff and our show does not mirror the Raiders' show at all. The way the boards are configured, the way things are scheduled, the way things are called - it's completely different. That's always the challenge: you have an in-house crew that has been working for the Raiders for a whole season, multiple seasons or whatever, and now they have to adapt to a new show. Today is the first big day to start that adaptation where we come in and start laying everything out. We have five days and four hours to kick off [as of this interview].
The good news is, the crew was unbelievable during Opening Night, and that is the same crew that works the Super Bowl. Another positive with this building is [Allegiant Stadium Director, Production Technology,] Aric Carpenter and [Director, Technology Operations,] Justin Lang, who run the room and ran it in Minnesota when we did the Super Bowl in 2018. There's a lot of familiarity with them, and they knew what they were getting into when we came on board. They had things - cameras and systems - set up and ready for us earlier than we've ever had, partially because of Opening Night.
It's a beautiful stadium. Of course, we don't have an Oculus, but we have an amazing board here in the South and, on the North, two big boards flanking the torch. It allows us to have an unbelievable canvas to do a great show that our editors and designers and producers put together for the Super Bowl. Our VP, Productions, Brian Scott and his team have done an amazing job putting the complete creative package together. The fans will see quite a visual spectacle on Sunday!
The control room at Allegiant Stadium is HDR-capable.
This is an HDR building, and CBS is also doing HDR. How does that change things?
A lot of the buildings now are going with an HDR workflow, and our guys had to come in early in December to work with the staff here to dial in these boards to match the true colors. A lot of effort went into that, and kudos to our VP, Creative, Ryan Kehn and our guys for working with the Allegiant staff to dial these boards in for an HDR workflow because CBS is all-HDR and we share resources. That makes it seamless integration, and you're going to see high-quality video on these boards and without a lot of conversion on our end because we're all living in the same world.
How many CBS cameras do you have access to?
We can take as many as we want, but we'll take 17 live into the switcher and two or three times that live into the router because we have multiple EVS stations that do packages and replays. That team is taking in all the feeds from CBS and putting together these great packages.
How has the whole game presentation for this game evolved over the past 15 years? There was a time when it was a much more conservative show.
We often laugh because pictures from 15 years ago pop up on your Facebook feed and our Super Bowl crew was five people. This year, we've traveled 100 for the game-presentation show, and there are more than 90 of the local crew.
We have a small army for game presentation, and you ask yourself why is that? It's because the expectations today are to give the people here in the stadium an unbelievable exper
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Super Bowl LVIII: Van Wagner's Bob Becker on First Opening Night at the Super Bowl Venue and Prepping for the Big Game Evolving HDR workflow is among changes in the in-venue presentation this year By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
