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For ‘Road to …’, it’s about the inner workings

The Vidiots offices in Soho will look like a ghost town this week.

Acclaimed documentary producer Ross Greenburg has used these offices since November to create two “24/7”-style telecasts around the NHL’s outdoor games this season: “The Road to the NHL Winter Classic” followed by “The Road to the NHL Stadium Series.”

Greenburg’s team of around 20 documentarians has kept a constant, round-the-clock buzz in the offices during those four months, finally wrapping up production last week on the second four-part series for pay-TV channel Epix.

“I’m going to take a vacation,” series coordinating producer Johnson McKelvy said, still with two production weeks left on the schedule. “Ross and I have been working on this nonstop since November. I’m ready.”

A dinner after the Kings’ victory in Columbus on Feb. 9 was the focus of one day’s editing.
Photo by: GETTY IMAGES
Tucked into the fifth floor of a nondescript Manhattan office building above the Houston Street subway stop, the production company has the creative feel of a dot-com company from the turn of the century, with 20- and 30-something producers and video editors filling six offices as they download, process and edit the hours of video taken.

On Feb. 11, a Wednesday, all of the editing rooms were filled in the early afternoon. Wednesday marks the beginning of a six-day cycle for the production team. Video editors were working on the show’s first 10 minutes, and the show’s producers were debating the storylines that work the best.

“Wednesday is basically the day that we regroup,” McKelvy said. “I do a lot of checking in with our producers both in the field and other rooms based on the strength of what we have. We’ve been following stories. We’re heading into week three so we’ve got our character structure set up, and we know what we want and we know what we’re hoping for.”

The focus this day was on a celebratory dinner the Los Angeles Kings had following a win in Columbus, which marked the team’s first back-to-back wins in nearly two months. The Kings’ slump had been a dominant storyline for the first two shows, and Greenburg and McKelvy wanted to use scenes from the dinner to show what the mini win streak meant to the team off the ice.

“The dinner allows us to continue the story about how they are mentally as a team,” McKelvy said. “These scenes are basically just tapestries for us to be able to formulate our story.”

FANTASY

In-arena fantasy game?
That’s a Capital idea

The Washington Capitals saw about 250 users sign up for its in-arena fantasy game Feb. 19 against the Winnipeg Jets. The fantasy game was run through a partnership with DailyMVP and marked the first time the team made an in-arena fantasy game available to its fans.

“Finding out more about all the consumers in our business is absolutely critical,” said Jim Van Stone, chief revenue officer at Monumental Sports & Entertainment. Van Stone spoke at the Sports Industry Networking and Career conference in Washington, D.C., earlier this month.

“We know about 40 percent of the people who are actually in our building; those are the people who buy tickets,” Van Stone said. “But we don’t know these other people. We think this might be a compelling technology to help us acquire more data on who’s coming into the building.”

Fans at the game downloaded the DailyMVP app and selected players for the game. Winners were named each period, getting points on the Monumental Rewards Program that can be used to buy gifts.

“It’s about getting that person more engaged and hopefully having a much better experience,” Van Stone said.

SOCIAL MEDIA

When this finally happens,
lead or follow quickly

At least one NFL team expects to sell social media sponsorship deals within the next five years, according to Molly Arbogast, vice president of corporate partnership development for the Philadelphia Eagles and Lincoln Financial Field.

Speaking at the same SINC conference in D.C., Arbogast said teams still need to figure out how to make money from social media relationships.

“Whoever can crack the code with a social channel and say, ‘How do I make you my preferred connector to the fan?’ and get them to monetize against that, that’s a formula I look forward to either being a part of figuring out or following quickly when someone else figures it out,” she said.

— John Ourand
Oftentimes, the producers bet on early storylines that don’t pan out. This series introduced Chris Sutter in the first show. He’s the son of Kings coach Darryl Sutter and has Down syndrome. Watching the Kings coach interact with his son was heartwarming, Greenburg said.

“He’s a character that we would love to get back into our show,” Greenburg said. “But he didn’t go on the road trip. He’s somebody I would very much love to see again. But just logistically, it’s not working.”

In the Vidiots office on Feb. 11, Greenburg and McKelvy also were focused on Kings defenseman Alec Martinez. In the last scene of Episode 2, Martinez was injured and shown walking back to the locker room. The producers did not want to leave that story arc hanging, so Greenburg and McKelvy discussed how they would approach the injury in the third episode. They decided to focus on Brayden McNabb, the player selected to replace Martinez.

“Think of it like when you watch ‘Homeland,’” Greenburg said. “It’s like taking the subplot and carrying it through episodes, just like you would in a scripted series.”

For Greenburg, these types of scenes are what makes the “Road to …” series on Epix different from the “24/7” series on HBO.

“If we changed anything, we don’t spend as much time on the games themselves,” Greenburg said. “We try to get off the ice more and see the inner workings of these teams.”

Another change Greenburg has noticed: Epix makes more content available via digital clips than HBO. Greenburg noticed this change when subplots he liked did not fit into the series’ main storylines. As an example, he pointed to a short two-minute scene when Sharks defenseman Brent Burns did not want to do a radio interview but was coaxed into it by the team’s PR staff.

“What’s fun about Epix is that we hand it off and tell them to run with it,” he said. “They’re cutting those kinds of scenes for digital distribution that don’t make our show.”

HBO launched the “24/7” franchise in 2007. Greenburg said the different storylines for each show help keep these types of series from turning stale.

“The stories change; the team personalities change; the coaches are the leading actors in the series and they change,” Greenburg said.

Greenburg and McKelvy said they had to deal with one of the most challenging decisions this year during the “Road to the Winter Classic” when the Blackhawks’ 34-year-old assistant equipment manager Clint Reif committed suicide.

Reif always was going to be part of the episode. His death caused Greenburg and McKelvy to have several long discussions about whether they would use the footage they had and how they would address his death.

They decided to run with it and ended the show with video of an emotional Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville at a press conference. Greenburg correctly predicted that the coach would become emotional during the press conference and the cameraman kept a tight shot on Quenneville’s face.

“We didn’t want to disrespect him or his family or the Chicago Blackhawk family or the NHL,” Greenburg said. “They all thought we handled it perfectly. They trusted us to do it.”

John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.

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