To the Edge: Producing and Broadcasting Summer X Games 2011
As a hybrid live/broadcast event, the X Games franchise is the closest thing we have to the Olympics, only better, because ESPN has near-complete control over the events and seems to enjoy taking the "extreme" philosophy at the heart of the games to the limit.
Video Walls
An iconic fixture at any X Games are the "Video X" assemblies, made up of five 3', 3" DAK 13mm cubes arranged in a large X design, which sits almost 10' high. It's the symbol of the show and is used regularly as the establishing shot for intros and cut-aways on screen. "We initially came up with the idea during winter so the structure was mounted on skis for easier mobility on the snow," Sternberg recalls. "It has since been modified to an A-frame support so that can be secured to a riser or truss structure."
A video component that's become part of the X Games' topography is the "huck" used at Big Air during Summer X and the Superpipe at Winter X. It's a tall cylindrical tower made up of a curtain of LEDs comprised of 24mm Barco MiTrix, transparent, modular LED displays with an ultrawide viewing angle. Each curtain panel is about 15'x7.5', and they're stitched together to achieve a 360-degree circle. The panel is supported by a steel ring cantilevered from a 30' truss upright with the structure measuring 27' high and 6' in diameter. The huck usually takes a day and a half to build.
The Huck hovers over Big Air
"It's used to graphically measure what riders and skaters have just accomplished, and it works for the live audience as well as those viewing at home," says Sternberg, who watched as the huck evolved over the last several years. It was nurtured from an idea she and Molly Macdonald, the director of event production, toyed with at a National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas, using materials provided as a demo by Element Labs at X Games 13 in 2007. It's now as iconic as the Video X lights, the equivalent of using the Empire State Building if Big Air was ever played out on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street in Manhattan.
As a hybrid live/broadcast event, the X Games franchise is the closest thing we have to the Olympics, only better, because it happens at least twice a year instead of biannually-or more, if plans to hold more Euro versions starting in 2013 stay on track. And because, instead of a complex and often political international Olympics committee that can take four years to move a pin two centimeters, ESPN has near-complete control over the events and seems to enjoy taking the "extreme" philosophy at the heart of the games to the limit, meaning that, as Ron Semiao intended it, X Games will always be a live event first, pushed as hard as possible to the edge, just so they can take ever-cooler video of it—in 3D.