by Brian Costa, Director of Digital, SVG News
It will be a beautiful blend of the past and the future on Thursday night as Fox Sports delivers a special, 4K HDR live production of the MLB at Field of Dreams game between the New York Yankees and the Chicago White Sox (7 p.m. ET, Fox) from the famous Field of Dreams movie site in Dyersville, IA.
At a new field constructed by Major League Baseball just for this game, Fox Sports has deployed a crew of more than 240 people and an arsenal of nearly 40 cameras, 50 microphones, and a commitment to deliver this game in a “cinematic” way that promises to make it quite different from a typical broadcast.
Yes, it’s a baseball game, but it’s more than that,” says Michael Davies, SVP, field operations, Fox Sports. “We want to make this like a movie. So we’ll use cinematic techniques to tell the story. If there ever was a made-for-TV type of event, this is it.”
“Normally, if this was the All-Star Game or the postseason, you’d throw all the tech at it,” says Davies. “That’s not this kind of game. We’re using technology to make this seem more like a movie. We looked at tools that could help us make this a more dramatic event.”
Among those tools are drones (three supplied by Beverly Hills Aerials), a two-point FlyCam aerial camera system spanning the 1,429 ft. from the movie site to the MLB field, two shallow–depth-of-field Megalodons (each equipped with a mirrorless Sony A1 camera and transmitted to the truck by CP Communications), and a DirtCam buried just off the left-handed–batters box.
