The rest of this series explores the design process which happens for live production and the back-end technology that enables data driven graphics. It all comes together during live production in the hands of specialist Sports Graphics operators. We talk to UK based freelance sports graphics operator Gillian Smith. Gillian has worked on a huge range of sports at the very highest level all over the world for some of the industry’s biggest production houses. Her list of credits includes the Olympics, Premier League Football, F1, and Wimbledon. She shares unique insight into how this all happens out in the real world.

What do you actually do?

“I’m a live graphics operator for live broadcast, mostly sport, occasionally I dabble in some entertainment. At the most basic level, I have a set of templates loaded in some live production software, I have the run of show, and play the right graphics at the right time. However, especially being live, a lot of it is reactive and a lot of it is data driven.”

“By reactive I mean, especially with live sport, I am often scoring things. I am manually updating, because we think that is the fastest, most accurate way to do it. With tennis or football or anything like that, I am adding the goals, adding the points, physically doing it as we go.”

I didn’t think a human still did that.

“I love this. Everyone always says ‘I thought a robot did that’ but it is still the quickest way. AI is coming and it’s getting there, but a human is still the quickest and most accurate way to do it. For example, Wimbledon is amazing and they have this computer that has all the scores from all the courts, but there is somebody there, on every court putting these scores in as they go or the umpire puts it in.”

You do have access to the adjudication systems and the official sport scoring systems though, and live data feeds coming through and feeding the graphics?

“That is true, especially for football, now you have the Opta system, but it still takes a moment to update in the software, so it’s still quicker to put the goal in manually, and it’s always going to be which I love.”

“There are normally two roles with graphics and sport. Whatever the game is, whatever the sport is there is ‘match’, which is scoring, and there is ‘pres’ [presentation], which is basically everything around it in the studio, so performance and stat’ graphics, tables, the names of the guests and all that kind of stuff.”

“Within those there are templates which you fill it in, or if it’s a table, it’ll probably build from the software. There might be a very quick around with it, for example, especially when it gets to the crunch of the Premier League season or something like that, and they need the ‘as it stands’ table, that will be data driven and that will be very fast. But you still have to wait a moment for it to update before you can play it in. With some software, there can be a custom-built back-end data process where if you manually add the goal, it does all the calculations and then the table configuration for you, especially if it’s a smaller sport or smaller budget that doesn’t have the top end data feeds, that’s just another quick way of updating manually.”

So you need to be a bit of an expert on all the sports that you’re doing. You need to understand what’s going on.

“It definitely helps. If you’re scoring anything you really do need to know the sports. I’ve never scored cricket because even though I love it and I love to go and watch it, you need to understand that to score it. Football’s one of the easier ones you can pick up quite quickly, but it helps to know who’s offside or not. The more you do it, the more you learn it. Being a graphics operator, you can know your sport really, really well, but you still have to have the reactions. You have to know what the director wants. You have to second guess what people are going to want. You also need to understand the tools. You need to have a perfect storm where you know the sport, know the role and know the tools, and that’s when it all comes together in a wonderful way.”

What about real time statistical analysis stuff? You’re working on Wimbledon at the moment, and that’s a really obvious example; at the end of each set, they show a statistical analysis table of what’s just happened during gameplay. Presumably that is ML driven?

“The scoring is still done manually, except that rather than the graphics operators, Wimbledon provide their own scorers. Then that goes into a database that calculates what the stats are. The technology that follows the ball shows the exact moment it hits the court and that provides a whole other world of incredible data, and IBM are providing so much intel, so much data history, and can show us it’s his third ace or whatever. It’s the combination of the two. That all feeds into and populates our graphics.”

Is halftime analysis overlay also part of your role?

“It’s a slightly separate role. I do all the halftime analysis on a lot of things in so much as a combination of the stats people and the producer give me a run of clips that we’re talking about, and I will make it into a graphic, which might be a full frame template or a smaller template or just a little tag to say what’s going on.”

“There’s a slightly separate role that is where you have the players highlighted or an area shaded or that kind of thing. That is one that works more closely with talent. What normally happens is you have an operator who gets the clips in and they put the graphics on, and then the producer and the talent will normally say, hey, we want to look at this, this, this, and together they make sure that they have everything that the talent wants. I’ve done that role, but it’s kind of become its own, separate entity with its own separate software. I used to do it on BT Sports ‘Score’. The fun thing about this role is over time you do a little bit of everything, I’ve done AR, VR, 2D graphics, screens [real time screen overlays of time, scores, etc] and analysis stuff. You get to do a lot of different things.”

In terms of design process, there is a relationship between that early stage design process and the late stage operational process. Do you get drawn into that in terms of planning for production?

“Yes, if you are project manager or coordinator. Because I’m a freelancer, I’m a bit more, turn up work on the project and then kind of leave. However, there are some projects I’ve worked on for years, or I know the people really well, or where there is a bit more creative freedom, where I will make a graphic from scratch or I will tweak something if needed.”

“I think one of the biggest misconceptions, and it happens a lot, and I totally get it why a producer might ask, ‘can you just make this graphic look like this or do that or do this?’ But there’s a whole process that goes into building that graphic. For example, UEFA will have a graphics pack that is how they want everything to look. They decide that with designers and the designers give it over to developers or builders, and they will build it as templates in one of the specialist live broadcast production software packages that we use. After this many years of operating, I can do a little bit of everything. I can do a bit of Photoshop or After Effects, I can do a little bit of developing and building, but there are people where that is their sole role and they are far better at it than me.”

“Generally, most things I do, I turn up and am just you’re reacting to everything live. With the producer and the director, we have a production meeting for the project, so I know what they want. When you get to a certain level where you’ve done it for years, you know what to offer and you know what to have up your sleeve. For example, sorry I have tennis on the brain at the moment, for rain delays or something like that, I know to offer graphics to help them fill or cover the gap. There are all kinds of different skills that go with this role and I think all the operators have them to different levels.”

Where do the boundaries of responsibility lie in terms of integrity of data feeds?

“It very much depends. With a lot of the graphics companies I work for, it’s their own data feed. SailGP is a really good example because they are the graphics company and the data company. They’re integrating everything into their own system, so it’s their responsibility throughout. But there are always engineers to make sure that we have connectivity to the data. I think the key thing is where the data is integrating, that is where it becomes the operator’s problem.  I have to know basic troubleshooting and basic fixes. If the data goes down, there is normally somebody to shout to, but I need to make sure that my system is generally working… as long as my side is doing everything it can, then okay, that’s an engineering problem.”

Can we talk through the workflow and how that relates to the talent? And have you done much where the talent is actually manipulating graphics live using touch screens or tablets?

“Generally, talent will always go through a producer or an assistant producer. The easiest way to do it is for them to just see everything, especially if it’s the pre-match or the pre build up, it’s easier for them to just come and sit and contribute their ideas about what clips they want to talk about. But it always goes through the producer because it is always the producer who decides what we’re going to talk about. The operators are on the technical side of things rather than editorial, we make sure we’ve got the clips, we’ve got the graphics, we’ve got the stats, we’ve got the info. The stats guys work very closely with graphics because if you’re making something to illustrate the last 12 months of a specific player and what he’s been up to, they are providing that information, especially if it’s something more obscure. We work very, very closely with them. And they are quite frankly brilliant, because they just seem to have this encyclopedic knowledge of the sports that they’re working on.”

“Regarding the touchscreens and tablets to control things. I’ve been in roles where that’s fallen under my remit for the day, to set up or make sure it’s working, but that’s from a more technical perspective. Once it’s up and running generally it’s kind of fine. The technology is there but you almost just run out of time in a way. Doing an analysis segment that way is brilliant, but you need to rehearse and you need to plan it, and everyone’s got to have all the pieces together.”

“But we’re kind handling all that anyway because I always know what the story is going to be. If there’s ever a late goal or a late change and the whole story changes… like one of my favorite ever moments was when, I’m a Liverpool fan, and the goalkeeper and everybody went up the field to potentially try and get the goal and he did, he got a header and he scored. But it was the last minute of the game and it changed the whole story, so as well as us being like wow, that’s amazing, we have to remake everything very, very fast. Especially when you’re more experienced, you know to look out for these things anyway and you know roughly what the story is going to be. But that said, it is a skill set for the talent, they have to be comfortable talking and presenting and doing everything all at once.”

“It’s interesting because especially in esports, they’re using presenter tools more and more and you see the talent coming through esports, they all just know how to do these things. Maybe some of it is because they’re from gaming backgrounds, but it is fascinating to see because they use it more and they all pick it up so quickly. I think that’s one side of the industry that definitely uses the presenter tools.”

Does it make any difference to you in your role, whether you’re in a traditional studio environment or whether it’s a virtual production studio environment?

“It does. This week I’ll be doing a bit of virtual studio and AR if they need it, and live graphics, so I’m doing an amalgamated role. Theoretically, when the virtual studio is set up, it’s good to go. However, if the lighting changes or things change, I might have to make changes to the virtual environment. Depending on how heavily the production uses the studio, that might have to be its own role. You do also need an engineer involved, because I can do all the frontend stuff like making sure that it’s calibrated and keying and all that side of it, however you need a specialist engineer to do the more complicated setting up the camera to talk to the software and all that kind of thing.”

“I see the benefit of the virtual studios, but I also wonder if it’s a bit of a trend and we’re going to look back in 15 years and say ‘do you remember when everything was a virtual studio?’ I think AR is brilliant. I love that you can just pop up a graphic or a screen or a whatever anywhere in the studio. I think that’s so good. But you don’t need to have the whole virtual studio to do that.”

Do you feel threatened by AI?

“It’s definitely coming. I think I would be naive to not be concerned. Currently there are certain things where, as we’ve discussed, AI can be more accurate or more efficient than a human. But even if AI does everything, there are certain elements that it still needs to wait to be told, whereas as a human, you can see with your own eyes and know something. That is what I love about live TV. In live sport, there’s always last minute, unpredictable changes. And you can write all the code and all the programming in the world, but you can’t anticipate some of the weird and wonderful last-minute changes that happen. With mistakes, say somebody puts out the wrong team sheet. All of a sudden, we have a player that’s playing and we need that image. It’s quicker for a human to do that and more effective, more efficient. A lot of humans will know that this is that person, whereas with AI if a file says something, it must be a fact. That is a slight safeguard. However, there are so many companies who are looking to automate as many roles as possible.”

“Before Covid a lot of companies had a five-to-ten-year plan to bring people in off the road but the change felt like it was far off, and then almost overnight, everyone was remote working. It makes me slightly cautious because I know how fast things can change and how many companies are really trying to pioneer AI. Not just graphics, but so many roles within the broadcast industry. I can’t believe how much this job has changed in the years I’ve been doing it, so it’d be incredibly naive to think that it’s not going to change again with such a powerful tool.”

What does a typical day look like?

“As a freelancer I’ll get a call sheet that tells me where I need to be and at what time, and that could be anywhere. If I’m working abroad, they usually book travel so I just have to turn up at the airport and go. Then I get to the event or the studio and it’s like having a million first days. You do tend to know crews and people a lot more the more you do it and the more years you are in the industry. But there are still times that I’ll turn up and won’t know anyone else. I have to figure out where I’m going, get my accreditation, where I’m sitting.”

“Sometimes I’ll have to rig. So physically get the machines off the tender and plug them in, making sure they all work, making sure that I’m getting the right feeds from the engineers and it’s all doing what it should, and if not troubleshooting it. Then when I’m up and running, we have a production meeting where producer, director, and whole crew get together. They tell us roughly what the run of show is going to be. I’ll generally get a list of graphics, but if not, I work out from the running order what graphics I need. Prep everything to stats, and then get everything checked and double checked because you can be brilliant, but you’ll still make a spelling mistake or something. We’re all human.”

“Then, depending on the nature of the show, we’ll rehearse and then we’re on air and we’re live and very much just reacting to everything that’s happening. With sport, sometimes you don’t always know when you’re off air or when it’s going to finish, because you don’t know if it’s extra time or you’re playing late or it’s going to five sets or whatever. It’s all very fluid and I think the more you can adapt and react to what’s happening, the less stress you have.”