It’s been a week since my last post — the longest that I’ve gone since I’ve started this. Sometimes you have a week where you have your hands on the new toys and really having a good time at this site. Other weeks you spend a lot of time at a whiteboard and with a calculator trying to gather facts and figure out numbers when faced with a important decision. This week was the latter. Thanks to those who continued to check out the site and have sent great feedback and questions.

First things first — the main video boards and scoreboard above have arrived and are in the process of being installed. Since I’ve been working closely on this part of the new arena for close to two years, I thought I’d be prepared to see the assembled screens up close. I wasn’t. I was floored at “how black” the black was on the LED modules on the video display.

This “Black Package” technology from Mitsubishi is really going to create some amazing pictures and bring out the fabulous work that the game presentation crew creates. As an aside, one of the things to realize is that with the small size of the screens at Mellon, the video graphics and editing crew has to be careful with how they put things together to make sure the fans in the seats can actually see what they created. The size of the video screen directly affects the impact that a video has – it’s common sense. Now that’s not to say that they are turning out sub-par work by any stretch — rather quite the opposite. But this video board is going to let you really see some of the fine detail that they put into everything that they turn out and better represent some of the subtle elements — player expressions for example — that you might not notice on the screens at Mellon.

Saw the first concourse facade and TV today in the upper concourse. You see that there’s a TV built right into the concession stand. One of my biggest pet peeves at Mellon is missing action while standing in line for something. No need to worry at Consol Energy Center – we have you covered.

Which leads me to another point that I’d really like to stress. That is, that one of our main focal point was to let the fan stay connected to the game no matter where they are in the arena. It’s the reason for the open concourse design, and it’s the reason that we have so many TV’s in so many different areas.

Lower bowl seats are going in, as well as the retractable seats. Follow the link below to a new photo gallery.

April 23 photo gallery.

After being involved in almost every game presentation for the Pittsburgh Penguins the past 11 years, I find it oddly disturbing to be sitting at my desk passing the time at 6:00PM on a game day.

While I’ve been working on the Consol Energy Center project for the past two years, it’s only been three and a half months since I’ve been focused solely on the project and been given a temporary pardon from most game night duties. As a result, I’ve been able to skip a few home games and spend some quality time with the kids that would otherwise be spent at Mellon.

So while I’ve appreciated the relaxed game nights, I’m now trying to adjust to something that I’ve been so used to for the past decade or so that I’m now actually having withdrawal symptoms: the 6 O’clock butterflies.

6:00PM (or 6:30 for the regular season) is when the doors open and the fans begin to slowly filter into the building. For some it’s a chance to sit and relax and get ready for pre-game warm ups. For me it’s the time when my stomach tightens and I start pacing the building.

As I said in an earlier post, during the playoffs you are constantly editing and re-editing, and then tweaking, and the re-tweaking all of the things about your presentation. At the game Monday, the puck hadn’t been dropped but 10 minutes and the editors were already working on content for tonight’s game. The game producer is taking all sorts of requests and directives for things that need to go into the game and constantly changing his format from hour to hour.
The light show is tweaked, rehearsals run and then run again, timings are run through until we all know the videos off by heart.

But when doors open, it all ends. No more chances to fix. Time to roll with what you got. And that’s when I get sick to my stomach.

Did we think of everything? Did we get it right? Will the fans like it? Do the bosses like it? Did Billy get the timing right? Were there any special requests that we had to take care of? Are the cryo guys here?

So I walk. And I ask the producer if everything is ok. I go look at the videos at the editors’ desk to make sure there were no mistakes. Walk out to the big screen. Look at the video for a few minutes to make sure all is good. Something pops into my head and I call the producer and ask him if so and so is all set up. I go look to see if Jeff Jimerson is there. If I don’t see him, I go ask the guard at gate 2 if JJ has come in. If not, I walk out to Center Avenue and look for his car. This leads to more neurotic text messages to the producer to ask the same things I’ve probably asked twice already. I’m a notorious triple checker, and I’m sure it annoys the heck out of everyone I deal with.

At some point I’ll start pacing the concourse again, looking for things to worry about.

Yes, it’s crazy. But it’s the way I’m wired. And I kind of miss it.

The banner raising home opener this past year may have been the thing I was most nervous about. We had so many visual elements in the show that it was easily the most complex show we’d ever done. But I was focused on one thing, and one thing only – the mechanical clamps that released and let the drapes drop down. If I would explain to you the ramifications of one of those things failing, I would probably heave all over my keyboard.

After 10 years of shows, and two runs to the Stanley Cup Final I can honestly say that one had me shaking. Never before any show I ever was a part of did I shake. But I did that night. We worked with local lighting company Three Rivers Entertainment for that one, and I walked up to Wade Shaner, the director for the show about 15 minutes after doors opened. The conversation went like this:

Me: “Wade, is there anything you can possibly tell me that will make me feel better about these drapes dropping like they are supposed to?”
Wade: “Nope”
Me: silence.
Wade: “Look, we’ve done this 12 times before with this kind of system. All 12 times it’s dropped”
Me: “So we’re number 13?”
Wade: “Yep”
Me: “Great”

But hey, it all worked. It took a team of 30 people – producer, control room people, stagehands, lighting techs, house electricians, house utilities, SMG management, Pens management – to make that all work flawlessly. And it did.

Weird thing standing on the ice with that amazing crowd as loud as can be, and the situation, and the circumstance around the event – and then two minutes after it was done I was sitting by myself in relative silence at Gate 5 for the next 20 minutes just trying to get myself back to normal.

So the 6 O’clock butterflies. Not the most pleasant thing in the world, but for some reason I find myself missing them.

After much pleading and begging the guys at PensTV put up the Matthew Barnaby video from the video vault.

http://penguins.nhl.tv/team/embed.jsp?catid=19&id=65920

“I can’t believe we start the playoffs on Wednesday”

I heard that about 5 times today from 5 different people when I was at Mellon Arena.   Playoffs are an interesting time when you work for an NHL team due to the short time-frames you have to get work done and the uncertainty of the schedule.  Whereas you may have weeks and even months to get ready for the home opener, in the playoffs you may only have a few days.   Couple that with the overbooked month of March we seem to have every year, and the crush to get ready for Round 1 Game 1 can wear down even the most seasoned of veterans in the business.
 Here’s a small inside look at preparation the TV and presentation people will deal with for the next two week to two month.
 
Lights, cameras, cryo-jets.    If you were at the regular season games last week you saw some big lighting sets hanging from the rigging of the dome.  We had brought in an additional 60 or so lighting fixtures fort the last game at Mellon and in a perfect world, they would still be hanging there.  
But it’s not a perfect world and the circus came to town and all the lights went out.  As I write, I’m sure the trucks are being unloaded with a completely new light rig that will hang over the ice at Mellon for one last playoff run.   So the lights will be hung after practice.  They all need rigged, focused, and ultimately programmed.  You’ll have a lighting director and game producer probably at the arena until the wee hours – if not until dawn – syncing up the lights to the music for the opening sequences.  Downstairs a video editor will be constantly churning out new versions of the opening video and running them upstairs so the programmer can make adjustments.  Makes for a long night.

We also like to use the cryo-jets to blow smoke on either side of the runway when the team hits the ice for the start of the game, and those all need to be installed and tested for safety before Wednesday nights pregame.   Any time that the Penguins change the music or the length of the song, adjustments have to be made to the lighting programming 

Opening Videos.  It’s not unusual to run the same opening video during the regular season for several months at a time with only minor changes.  In the playoffs, it basically gets blown up every round, with significant changes from game to game.  With playoffs, come storylines. And with storylines come better chances and ways to engage the home crowd.  Add the fact that we also do a full video for full-ice projection and you are making serious modifications from game to game.  Now remember the deal with the lighting.  With every change to the video and music we make, the lighting programmers have to adjust as well.  Lots of late nights at the arena for two months.  Not to mention that these are very long animated files that have to be rendered.  So it’s not unusual to work on something for hours, render it out for an hour, only to find that it doesn’t line up the way you need it to and have to go back and redo it.  Sometimes 5 seconds of changes turn into 4 hours of waiting.
 

Trib Tron.  We all love the big screen.  It’s one of the best things about the Penguin community.  But it’s another screen to do programming for.   An editor will start with about a 10-15 minute loop of logos, videos, player headshots, etc at the start of the series.  With each game, he adds recaps.   And more videos.  And then more games.  And so on and so on.  It’s a daily grind to keep the latest stuff playing out there.  We also have all of the infrastructure additions we make to ensure that it’s a positive experience for everyone that attends.

If you recall, last year there were some problems with some of the transmission of home playoff games – with one game even going out for more than an entire period.  Because we run extra cables down there tied directly into the scoreboard and trucks, the people on the lawn were the only people in the Pittsburgh DMA to see that game last year in its entirety.  Fingers crossed to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
 
Presentation changes.  Corporate sponsorship is a big part of any pro sports team.  It must be there for teams to survive.  But with the way budgets work, there’s usually less sponsored elements in the playoffs than the regular season due to the fact that you can’t quantify how many home playoff games there will be.   This changes our entire approach to the game.  Not only does the music get harder, faster, edgier – but the videos do as well.   There’s a palpable difference in the crowd during the playoffs and regular season.  Even if you’ve only been to a few of each you can tell that.  We try to play off that, to enhance it, to promote it.   Plus every team wants to play off the story lines.  The Max “Ssshhh” for example, the Fleury save on Ovechkin.   Big moments, and they get a lot of play the rest of the playoffs.  
This all sounds easy, but with the crunched schedule it’s a race to get done nearly every home game.

Scale it up.  With the playoffs come more TV networks.  With that comes more cameras, cables, TV Trucks, etc.   Temporary camera positions are built.  Extra cable has to be able run throughout every conceivable crack and crevice of Mellon Arena.   One of the things I’m most looking forward to at Consol Energy Center is the face that we have an abundance of camera positions and cables, hopefully making the playoff prep a little easier.

Basically, it’s the regular season on steroids.  For a regular season game against Ottawa we’d normally have two TV feeds – home and away.  For playoffs, we’ll have home, away, US national, and Canadian national feeds in.  And if you are playing Montreal you end up with French Canadian national on top of that.  All of these TV networks, with all of this cabling, cramming into the same, undersized areas.  It’s tight.
The uncertainty.  We all love the NHL playoffs.  There’s simply nothing better in my mind than watching these guys battle for two months for the Stanley Cup.  If there is one thing that I could live without though, it’s the uncertainty of the schedule.  Watching elimination road games with no idea if you have to prepare for another home game, or even if you have to start prepping for another round.  You end up hitting refresh on web scoreboards every 15 seconds trying to find out when and where you play your next game.  Because what happens in those road elimination games, win or lose, completely changes how your presentation will be for your next home game.  And when a round is complete and you are waiting to see what day you play?  Agonizing.  4 hours saying “why have they not released the schedule yet???”  Texts back and forth until the wee hours.  Using every source you have to try to get inside info. It’s the most brutal thing about the playoffs for me.
 
Everything else.  The world doesn’t stop for the playoffs.  In spite of it being our focus, it’s still business as usual with everything else.  Web video (plus we travel crew to road playoff games), marketing stuff, new arena meetings, etc, etc.  They all still keep rolling, and they all have to fit in somewhere.

In short, when you work in this business you are rarely “not busy”.  Even the summers are packed.  But during the playoffs on a daily basis, you find yourself saying things like, “how’d it get to be 8 o’clock already?” and “it’s 2 AM?  What?”

So it’s one big long rush.  Because you get so wrapped up into it all the highs and lows of the team affect you that much more.    By the end of it, whether it was three weeks or two months, you are completely spent and ready for silence and a long vacation.  But ultimately, it’s worth it.   It’s the playoffs.  It’s what it’s about.  And it’s the best time of the year.

Think everyone has posted their thoughts, pictures, and videos on the tour we did this past Friday with members of the “non-traditional” media.

• Hooks Orpik from PensBurg got his review up this morning.  
• The crew from The Pensblog took a video camera along. I’m afraid to see if the inappropriate comments I made show up anywhere.  Just remember that the camera adds 15 pounds, and they had approximately 15 cameras there.
• Tony from The Confluence made the trip up to catch the final game at Mellon Arena, and was along for the tour as well.  See his recap here.
• We didn’t invite Brian Metzer, President, CEO, and Prime Minister of From The Point.  He was looking for reasons to avoid doing his Morning Links, and we were a convenient excuse.  Read Brian’s recap here.
• It was a pleasure to finally meet Sean Leahy from Puck Daddy.  Another guy that made the long trek in for the tour.  Check his view out here.
• Finally, Mondesi’s House beat everyone to the punch and was the first to give his thoughts.

Thanks to all who came out for the tour.  We really had a great time and I’ve had fun reading all of the different thoughts and opinions on the building.

I swore I would never make a post that started with the words “sorry for the lack of updates this week”, but I’ve lied before (only three times in my life) and now I’ve done it again.

This was one of those weeks where I never felt like I got on track.  Every time I got settled in to get work done there was a phone call or email or some other distraction that kept me from being productive.  I was at the site a lot, and I’m starting to see a lot of ‘finish’ work going in, but I never really got a chance to to take some quality photos.

Fear not.

Yesterday, we invited the people behind Mondesi’s House, The Pensblog, The Confluence, PensBurgh, From The Point,  Puck Daddy, and HockeyBuzz to tour Consol Energy Center with us.  We toured every level of the building and even brought Jeff Jimerson along in the event they didn’t get enough wow factor.

It was a great feeling for Tom McMillan and I to open up the doors to some very important voices in the Penguins and Pittsburgh sports community and to get their thoughts and opinions on Consol Energy Center.  My only regret is that everyone we invited could not attend, but maybe we get to do this again before the doors open for real.

For me personally, it was a great opportunity to see the first reaction of people making their first visit to a building that we’ve been working on for nearly three years.  You put in all this time and thought to something, and always in the back of your mind there’s that tiny voice of doubt making you question your decisions.  It was very gratifying to be able to answer almost every single question they had with a “yep, we thought of that and……”

I had a lot of fun – not only with the tour but finally getting to meet some people that I read on a daily basis.

Late night post here, but I’m too wound up to go to sleep now so I thought I’d try to do a substantial post.

First off, thanks to everyone that’s been checking in and for all the great emails. The site has really done a lot better than I expected, and I’d like to thank all of those people out there retweeting and linking the site.  There’s been a lot of great questions that I’d like to elaborate on, but I don’t want to reply on the blog without permission.  So if anyone has any questions, and would be kind enough to let me share the answer on the site, feel free to email away and let me know if it’s ok to post the response.

I would like to apologize for not writing as much as I would like.  We’re just at a very intense part of the project and I’ve just been having a hard time carving out the time to write.  I’ve posted some neat things, but believe me that it’s the tip of the iceburg(h).

I was talking to a colleague on the phone this morning while driving to work and I asked her if she thought people like her and I were born with some mutated gene that caused us to relentlessly push forward to try to figure out new things and never rest for a minute on what we do.  Like we’re pre-wired to give ourselves ulcers and sleep deprivation syndrome to get projects done and always try to break new ground.  She laughed.  She could relate.

I have a hard time explaining to people why it is that we put in the time and effort that we do.

In essence, it’s all your fault.

Yes, you.  The fans.  The people at the games.  The people that stand out on the lawn in a spring thunderstorm to watch a game with a couple thousand of your closest friends.  The people who are not afraid to try something different, something new.   It’s mostly your fault.

It’s an incredible rush when you’re a part of something that a group of people instantly relate to.    Standing in the Pens runway during the home opener this year, watching this happen with knots in my stomach, and then getting the biggest rush in the world when it all worked and the building went insane.  Thinking 8 weeks back to when we started planning it and hoping every day that it would have the effect we wanted.  It gave me chills to hear the reaction from the crowd.

The big screen.  Envisioning what it could become when I made that first call.  Then standing up on the apron of the arena and looking down at close to 10,000 people and the mini-community they had created in this little Penguins City on the front lawn.  It’s an awesome feeling knowing you played a role in that.

The immediate reaction to a technology like Yinzcam.  Thinking of all the hours we put in with Priya’s team and seeing the enthusiasm they had to bring a better experience to fans and then seeing it all work as planned.

It’s addicting.  Downright addicting.

I’m so thankful that we have such a great team, a supportive senior management and ownership team, and a great fanbase that gives us the platform to do all of these neat things.

So this overshare tonight is brought to you in part by something that we tested out for the first time tonight during the game.  We have a lot of ideas.  Some good, some bad, some downright awful.  But every once in a while something comes along that in my opinion is an absolute game breaker.  You see something, and it immediately spurns 100 different ideas and implementations.  You know it’s going to be special.

Game breaker.

Now there’s details to be worked out, NDA’s to adhere to, blah blah blah so I have to stay vague for now.  Know this though:  I’m not alone in my approach to things at the Penguins.  We have a whole team of people that think the same way I do, and we’re always going to work to bring you cutting edge stuff.

We’re all addicts, after all.