When Alex Rolls and his team found out Nine had secured one of ten bespoke units at the Trocadero for its 2024 Paris Olympics studio, the last thing they were expecting was something “essentially the size of a shipping container.”
Rolls, who is Nine’s head of creative and innovation at Wide World of Sports, told Mediaweek that while small, the Olympics space allowed for a “perfect opportunity.”
“When we realised the specs and found out they had given us a seven by seven-metre space, it was the perfect opportunity to push Nine into a new area that I’ve been interested in, that being virtual sets and extended reality,” he said.
“After we got the specs, I jumped on a plane and went to the UK to see the English Premier League productions with their virtual space in action.
“That trip to the BBC Studios in Manchester gave us the confidence that this would be the way that we wanted to go.
“We went into the virtual direction because a seven by seven metre space for 22 hours a day for 17 days on Nine, no matter how good your set designer might be, it’s going to look small and it’s not going to be worthy of the event.”
The physical space has a real-life window of the Eiffel Tower as a backdrop, and Rolls knew that having presenters in front of “one of the most iconic landmarks in the world” was key.
Nine is using Unreal Engine technology to power the virtual space – a computer graphics game engine created by Epic Games, the developers of Fortnite. The engine is widely used across the games industry, and now also powers Nine’s extended reality.
Unreal Engine 5 is the newest iteration of the technology, and ESPN in the US was one of the first broadcasters to use the technology for a broadcast in early 2023.
While Nine is using the technology to make the most of a small space, ESPN utilised a tool in the engine called ‘Project Avalanche’ which allows broadcasters to design and show a graphics package in one environment.
ESPN collaborated with @EpicGames on a new highly-stylized graphics package for the @RoseParade
It is the “wrapping paper of the whole two-hour presentation.”
Watch its debut now on @ABCNetwork
More: https://t.co/lLDVNHZOUJ pic.twitter.com/X2WOe4kdww
— ESPN PR (@ESPNPR) January 2, 2023
“These powerful render engines can give you very close to photorealistic capabilities, just like we see now with video games.
“The realism is astounding. The lighting, the shading and the objects you can create or just getting better and better.
“It’s an exciting new space that Nine is moving into because we haven’t used gaming engines before to this level within a sports broadcast.”
See also: Paris 2024 Olympics TV ratings: Monday July 29 sets weekday records for 9News and Today