Diary of a Live Producer: Chapter two

Jet lag is a bitch. For the first time in my life or because I can’t remember the last time I felt like this, battling the jet lag I’ve experienced on returning to the UK from my time in the US has been hard. Annoying to say the least. I haven’t seen a great deal of productivity from myself and it’s not a particularly great feeling. A little bit of honesty here, full disclosure, for a while back there I wasn’t loving life or my job. I’ve come out of that now and all I want to do is good work. I want to create again. It’s been a while since I’ve felt so engaged with my work and I’m not fully back in tune with my intuition for how to go about achieving what I want to achieve but it’ll come. In the meantime, I think I’m doing ok. (btw, this whole thing is honest but it’s a figure of speech preceding a real truth for what it's worth). Shout out to Georgia Hampson and Craig Barrett pictured above.

So yeah, jet lag has been a bitch this week. As I sit writing this portion of my week down now, it’s just nearing the end of the first half of the community shield at the King Power stadium and we’re losing 1-0 to a very well taken goal by TAA (if you know, you know). We’ve completed the first part of our live deliverables for Matchday Live and it’s a damn good day to be at a football match.

BUT... A weird thing happened before the game when a fan approached me in an aggressive manner and forced his opinion onto me that he thought it was a travesty why the community shield isn’t being played at Wembley to which I replied, “there’s a pretty big game there tomorrow” (woman’s Euro 2022 final between England v Germany… Go lionesses!), he replied “without men’s football, there’d be no women’s football”. Oh well! I guess you can't please all of the people all of the time. We’ve still got work to do!

On a personal note, I got to do something I never really get the chance to do which was vox-popping with the fans outside the King Power stadium. Introspectively I don’t think I have a great voice for speaking on camera but what I lack in vocal ability I make up for in enthusiasm and energy, so I’ll take it on as a fun experience and learn from it. It lets me connect with the fans, which is something I like most about the job and something I’m trying to get more and more onto Matchday Live.

Anyway, fast forward a few days now and I think my jet lag is well and truly gone and our Lionesses have brought it home! We’re European Champions! C’mon England! Congratulations Ladies!

My focus now switches to the Premier League opener between us and West Ham and my goal this season is to produce more content for the live shows that can also live on the rest of our platforms as shareable content. This is proving a challenge as I want to get away from the typical football club type of stuff. As I mentioned above, I want to include more of the fans who are the main people behind any football club. Without them we all wouldn’t have jobs. As part of this initiative, I’ll be championing the inclusion of fans across our big games and big occasions. We’ve made a good start getting in two fans to help kick-off our season opener v West Ham with some topical debate covering some exciting points. You'll be able to see this on the show in the hour before the match and on our social media platforms instagram, twitter and facebook.

From a production point of view, I’m now working in a process wherein I need to trim off all the excess fat and get exactly what I want to get for the purpose of my live show. It’s a tricky direction to have to go in because time is of the essence in live production, but I still want to produce good quality work. This means executing the basics of film and video production whilst understanding that you might have to go without things like proper lighting, a full crew, turning around a basic edit, which is good enough but ideally you’d of preferred more time and then doing it all quickly. It’s always a challenge but it’s exciting and is improving my other skill sets such as communication, organisation and planning.

So, this weekend we open our premier league campaign with an away match against West Ham. No easy feat but I’m sure we’ll get the result we deserve. I won’t be working across this one as I’ve made other plans. This feels like a new way of working to me because as a department we’re trying to move in the direction where everyone need not work on every single match. Again, this will test and help my organisational and planning skills to develop as the season goes on.

If you made it this far? My score prediction is West Ham 1-3 Man City. What’s yours? Comment below!

P.s This week one of my colleagues Callum Lambert put into action his project for a Man City Fantasy Premier League bi-monthly show. He’s put a lot of effort into it and if the first studio recording is anything to go by then it’ll be a roaring success this season. Nedum Onuoha and Shaun Wright-Phillips along with FUT FG kicked us off and it was hilarious! Great work… I’m committed to play FPL each game week so looking forward to the next episode!

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