People and Pop Culture
Closing Shot: One Legendary Moment
To tell the story of the ‘NFL 100 All-Time Team’ at the Super Bowl, the league called on The Famous Group for a mixed reality tribute that highlighted the past and offered a glimpse of the future of the stadium experience.
As the greatest players in NFL history gathered on the field, viewers at home on television and in the stadium via video boards could watch the mixed reality tribute unfold.the famous group
Some 100 million viewers who watched the ambitious mixed reality tribute to the “NFL 100 All-Time Team” as part of Fox’s pregame to Super Bowl LIV experienced a seven-minute presentation billed as the longest, most sophisticated and most-viewed mixed reality presentation in television broadcast history.
This wasn’t tech for the sake of tech; it was using emerging technology as a storytelling vehicle. The mixed reality elements, including displaying large virtual monitors and intermixing live cutaways to the legendary players and coaches on the field, enhanced the moment’s historical significance rather than distracted from it.
“Along with it being very technologically advanced and making use of the entire stadium, at the end of the day it was the story that we told that really hit a lot of the heartstrings of both the audience and the players,” said Andrew Isaacson, executive vice president of The Famous Group, which was hired by the NFL and worked with NFL Films on the project. “Our storyline was always centered around the players.”
The project required more than six months of preparation and involved more than 40 people primarily based at The Famous Group’s Culver City, Calif., headquarters. NFL Films played a major role by writing an organic script that allowed for grouping players by team and position and also for more poignant moments, such as recognizing great first names.
Isaacson and The Famous Group partner Jon Slusser said Tim Tubito, the NFL’s director of event presentation and content, deserves recognition for a months-long vision that came to (mixed) reality at Hard Rock Stadium before a crowd of 62,417 that watched the same presentation on the stadium’s video screen that fans saw on their home televisions.
As Isaacson said, “We knew from the roar of the crowd that we had something magical.”
The Famous Group authored another viral moment on Dec. 12 when it created a mixed reality display of a giant computer-generated raven invading M&T Bank Stadium during a Baltimore Ravens-New York Jets game. The pregame Super Bowl presentation was even more ambitious, and signals the dawning of a new age of marquee event entertainment.
“It’s just the tip of the iceberg for what you are going to see from mixed reality,” Slusser said. “When you start to think about the creative applications, both from an entertainment and a revenue-generating standpoint, there is no way you can have big live events in the future without having this technology. It will be an industry standard the way graphics are an industry standard in today’s broadcast.”
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