BIG PICTURE SKY: FORMULA 1
SKY GETS BACK ON THE ROAD FOR FORMULA ONE
COVERING THE NEW GLOBAL FORMULA ONE SEASON IN THE MIDST OF
COVID IS A HARD RACE FOR SKY TO PREPARE FOR. TIM DAMS FINDS OUT HOW THE TEAM PLANS TO NAVIGATE THE ROAD AHEAD
season is a major challenge for broadcaster Sky. The 2021 season kicked off on March 28 in
A
Bahrain, and plans to take in 23 races around the world before it concludes on December 12 in Abu Dhabi. In between, F1 will visit countries such as Azerbaijan, Brazil, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Russia and the United States. Even the prospect of producing such a global
event caused Sky to pause and think, weighing up its commitment to the sport and fans against the need to keep its production team safe. “We would only consider going to those races if we felt we were doing everything right,” says Billy McGinty, Sky’s director of content for Formula One. “The safety of our people is our priority.” Sky had learnt plenty about how to adapt to
produce sport coverage safely from its experience on Premier League football, which restarted on June 17 last year, and then the delayed 2020 season of Formula One , which kicked off on July 5. “From a Sky perspective, the last seven months of 2020 were crucial,” says McGinty. Sky had also put
a remote production workflow in place on Formula One three years previously, allowing it to send out a smaller number of staff to each race.
TEAM WORK 42 staff will now travel to each race, including the presentation team, technicians, camera operators and engineers. They will serve Sky’s three Euro- pean markets, the UK, Germany and Italy. Between 12 and 20 people will remain in the
UK to work from Sky’s Osterley studios to help deliver the UK production remotely, including the director, producer, graphics operator and assistant producers, with similar numbers on the ground in Italy and Germany. “We were fortunate that
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televisual.com Spring 2021
t a time when international travel is so restricted by Covid-19, producing coverage of the global Formula One
we were already way down the track of remote production,” says Andrew Ferrans, Sky’s senior production manager for Formula One.
GETTING THERE One of the biggest challenges for the production team is how they safely travel to the races. Instead of booking commercial flights, Sky now flies its F1 crew out by charter plane, which it shares in a socially distant fashion with other teams of the travelling F1 circus. Ditching commercial flights was necessary for two reasons: there are few commercial flights available at the moment, and the health and safety regulations vary from airline to airline. Accommodation is an issue too. “We spent a
“WE WERE FORTUNATE
THAT WE WERE ALREADY WAY DOWN THE TRACK OF REMOTE PRODUCTION”
lot of time vetting hotels,” says Ferrans. Sky has a long connection with many hotels on the F1 circuit that it has built up during its nine years of covering the sport, but it lost a couple of venues that it would have liked to stay at again because they could not guarantee the broadcaster’s safety protocols. Once on the ground,
the routine of the team is different too. No-one heads off out to eat independently, but all dine in the hotel together
– spread out right through a dining room with no more than four people at each big table. “It feels like a very strange wedding,” says Ferrans. “The space you require in a room is almost getting on to the size of a small ballroom.” It means that none of the crew can really
escape for a change of scene very easily. “It’s been hard for everyone – no one takes it lightly,” says Ferrans. “We live with each other in a much more confined way. But you have to make the best of these things. And one of the things that has come out of this is that the team is much closer.” Everyone working on Formula One – from the
drivers to the media - is also part of a bubble, with each team divided into its own bubble and tested
regularly. “We are all related to each other by a test no older than five days,” says Ferrans. For the Sky team, there are stringent
hygiene processes in place – including daily temperature tests, and regular Covid tests, and one way systems round buildings.
Interviews are
conducted with masks on, observing strict social distancing rules.
PRESENT AND CORRECT For the production and presentation team, work- ing onsite is a different experience. Gone are the days where a crew could ask if a driver could do an interview at short notice. “Our opportunities are restricted. Everything has to be cleared and checked now,” says McGinty. The race presentation is bolstered by features and content produced remotely ahead of time by
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