It wasn’t until early July that Hotopp Associates CEO and Head of Creative Gary Wichansky, tabbed by the NHL to set up its hub venues, knew for certain that he would be working in Scotiabank Arena and Rogers Place. On the latest episode of “SBJ Unpacks: The Road Ahead,” our Andrew Levin talks with Wichansky about how the Seattle-based design firm, working alongside the NHL, was able to quickly construct the two hub-city production sets in Toronto and Edmonton with great success.
On what the NHL’s priorities were in setting up its hub venues:
Wichansky: The priority was going to be gameplay. We were really looking at camera coverage. When we’ve done design for sport, the challenge is always making it look good on TV, but not completely abandoning the live crowd even though you tend to prioritize the televised audience because it’s bigger. In this case with no live crowd we were really able to look at the camera blocking, what the intent was and what was really going to be seen. We studied a lot of hockey coverage. That’s why you see those first ten to fifteen rows that are all seat covers. We felt like, primarily, we didn’t want the entertainment experience that we were creating to be distracting to the prime focus, which was the hockey game.
On how to make two very different venues look identical on TV:
Wichansky: It’s two things. The first is as much advanced study as you can do. We did model. Even though we had some great information for one and slightly less great information for the other, we still 3D modeled everything. … On-site we had to be flexible. We had to walk around. We had a producer, technical director, production manager and art director in each city leading the teams, and the four of us in each place, working with the NHL folks, would really walk around and look at all the camera spots. We also looked at who was going to be in bowl in terms of the teams, where they and their management were going to be seated, and what the obstructions were. We adjusted as necessary, but really it was the hours and hours of prep work and conjecture up front.
On how the NHL has created a simple and sleek look on TV:
Wichansky: Sometimes the limitations are your friends. When you talk about budget, we couldn’t have made it end-to-end video. … Originally, in one of the iterations of the design the video walls wrapped all the way around into the end zones behind the goals. At some point because of hockey ops concerns and the batter’s eye of the goalie, budget driven concerns, the volume of content control, and just not wanting it to be too busy we converted those end zone LED panels to graphics. Then we had the idea to push them farther back looking at the camera angles and wanting to get more air.
