Orienteering Race World Championship in Savoie (France)

Published in

Portfolio Marc Wieland

7 min readApr 19, 2016

One of the greatest experiences I had so far in video production was at the orienteering race world championship in Savoie (France) in 2011. Our company had the opportunity to produce the worldwide television feed there. The world championship lasted for a week and included several races in different distances and surroundings.

A lot of work went into the preparation before the event. There were so much to plan and to make sure that everything is ready at the event. The viewers on the television just can enjoy great images and follow life events, but there’s so much behind the scenes to do. That’s exactly what I wanna show you now.

They helped us out

Because this event would be too big for the small company I worked at, we teamed up with the main production company of the swiss television, the TPC. They also own the gear and knowledge to produce such events. The company sends us our needed gear for the live production, which included one outside broadcast vehicle and two trucks full of cameras, tripods, wires, etc. and some more cars with trailers.

Our available vans for the television production

Because the TPC also owns the people with the right knowledge and experience, they send us also 10 people to help us out. My company additionally hired some freelancers for the event, most of them were cameramen. In total, we had around 25 people to produce the event.

My jobs

Over the period of a week, where we stayed in France, I had two jobs. The first and main one was to make sure, that all cameras are connected to the broadcast van.
The second job was to shoot footages for a short making-of movie.

Assembly operator

Being a part of the team, which were responsible for the technical stuff outside the broadcast van, was a new and exciting job for me. As an assembly operator, my task was to make sure that all wires are misplaced correctly so that all signals can be transmitted from A to B. This task may sound easy, but trust me, this isn’t that easy. You need to have a lot of experience to do this right and in the easiest and fastest way possible. Luckily we had some people in our team, which were extremely experienced at this topic.

Introduced to the task

On the first day the race took place in the city of Chambéry (France). This competition in the city was perfect to learn tho know the team and also learn the task. Because in the city, the camera positions were not that far away, the job was easier compared to the following days. Perfect to get ready for the job.

The challenges

After the race (sprint) in the historic center of Chambery, our team went up the mountain to La Féclaz, were the rest of the races took place, namely the short-, middle-, and long distance and finally the team competition.

Because the races took place in different areas every day, so that the runners don’t know the track, we had to work hard to be prepared for every race. We always had to mount the wires for the race a day before, while another race was still in progress.

Above in the mountains, we were faced with absolute different conditions than in the city. Standard coaxial cable, which we used at the beginning of the week, weren’t possible to use. Because the distances were just too long. So we had to use optical fibre cable and create backbones at different positions to connect the cameras. Very similar to the internet connection to houses in a town. Mostly fiber cable and the so called “last mile” with coaxial cable.
At the new location above in the mountain we had the double amount of cameras in use. Between 8 to 12 cameras in every race.
Because it isn’t possible to transfer power over glass fibre cable, we had to set up a mobile current generator. Sometimes in the middle of the forest. And how you got there? Right, by hiking (including the heavy generator on the back). But this wasn’t enough. We also needed some 200m cable reel next to the backbone to connect all camera from there. By the way, a full 200m cable reel weights about 30kg and if the cable is laid out on the ground, it even gets heavier because of the friction.

Over the whole week, our team of 4 people, misplaced 35km of cable by hand. Maybe half of the laying-up could be done with the help of a car and a trailer, which made it significantly easier for us. With this help we hadn’t to carry the wires, we could just misplace the wires at the right position. The other half of the laying-up had to be done without the help of any machine, because of the surroundings.

To help us find the right camera positions, we’ve stored these in a GPS before. Because we tried to use as little cable as possible, we took the direct way from the backbone to the camera positions. This meant the way the GPS displayed us (air-line distance). Through a forest this isn’t always the easiest thing to do and also not the easiest way at all. But we all didn’t know the environment, so we just walked straight across everything. Sometimes via a steep stone wall or over an overturned tree. The only advice I had for myself was to never release the wire and just walk. We walked behind each other in a distance of about 50–100 meters. Otherwise, the wire would be extremely heavy to pull. All members were connected with a radio set, so we could call when we weren’t able to cross an obstacle or something else happened. Most of the time intervisibility to the team members weren’t possible because of the thick forest.

Some cameras were that far from the broadcast van away, that we had to set up a wireless peer to peer connection to connect the camera. One camera, for example, were placed on a mountaintop, which gave us the opportunity to shoot some incredible “beauty shots” during the event.

When all wires were misplaced and the connection check was made, our job was done and we also were done. As you can imagine, this was physically hard work.

Some technical stuff

A camera is connected trough a single cable to the broadcast van. Video, audio, communication in both ways and also camera remote is transmitted between this two points. People inside the van are controlling the aperture, brightness and color temperature of the camera. The cameraman just has to control the camera movement and the focal length.

The cutter talks with all people in front of the cameras and cuts all available videos in a order together which makes sense and is interesting and logically to watch.

The director is sitting next to the cutter and coordinates the output feed, which is sent directly to the satellite. From there all television transmitter could grab the feed and broadcast them home to you, for example. The director also has to talk to people, who creates infographics. These are embedded on top of the video feed, for example, the results or split times. Sometimes, like in our case, all cameras are recorded on a hard disk. This allows to create playbacks or even shift some scenes to a later time (as a playback).

The last person in the van is the audio engineer, which is responsible for the sound. He/she fades the sound between the cameras and sometimes also include some background sound, for example, a bird sound in the forest.

Job done

Every morning before the race, set including cameras, tripods and communication tools were prepared for the cameramen to grab and bring them to their positions on the race track.

Some positions had amazing gear, which also included a lot of work to get ready. Some people of our team went to these positions to help out and get the camera ready as fast as possible.

A 200x objective at the top of a hill to get nice close-up shots.

When some images were shown on the big screen, we knew we had done our job right. The common television consumer doesn’t know or remember this. But until you’ve got amazing pictures on your screen at home, most of the time there’s hard work behind it. It hasn’t to be a live production, it also could be a nature video. Remember this when you watch something the next time.