News

 Lateral Linking Broadcast recently provided support to the wildly successful television production of the Best Job In The World.

 

The project was conceived and run by Tourism Queensland and saw more than 34,000 people from around the world apply for the position of caretaker on Hamilton Island, one of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

 

The best 16 applicants were flown to Hamilton Island to begin the televised selection process in early May. The event attracted major international media attention and journalists from around the world flocked to the island.

 

To cater for the media influx Inner Sanctum Media (ISM) was appointed to set up the broadcast centre and turned to Lateral Linking Broadcast to manage broadcast engineering operations.

 

“We knew this was going to be a big event and wanted to ensure it ran as smoothly as possible,” explained ISM production manager Lindsay McNeill. “We were not in a major city – we were on an island off the Great Barrier Reef with one flight a day so we had to ensure we built as much multi-skilling and redundancy into the operation as possible.

 

“We selected Lateral Linking because we needed someone with a wide range of experience and their proven ability to work in a team environment. They certainly worked outside of the job description to help co-workers, broadcasters, the applicants and the client in a very demanding environment.”

 

ISM built three FinalCut Pro edit suites around an EditShare storage system to handle news, internet content and broadcasters’ needs.

 

A two position pool-side studio was built and ISM also provided two XDCAM HD camera crews to follow the candidates all day, every day as they were put through tasks such as snorkelling, sailing and blogging.

 

Material from the shoots was ingested to the EditShare, edited and finished daily as 2x10 minute Video News Reports (VNR) for ANZ and international broadcasters. A one-minute profile piece on each candidate was also produced every day.

 

All internal video operations were in High Definition format and down-converted to Standard Definition for output.

 

Journalists and producers were able to take advantage of a non-linear workflow by using two EditShare viewing terminals to view and copy HD QuickTime versions of the VNRs to USB memory sticks. The files were then easily edited by each broadcaster to suit their individual reports.

 

 

What had not been anticipated were the record-breaking demands for live transmissions from the location.

 

“Originally we said 30 transmissions would be a huge success but by the time we finished operations we had completed 86,” said McNeill. “And they weren’t just small pieces - the Canadian broadcaster CTV had three hour blocks each night for live crosses to its breakfast show so we effectively turned into a 24 hour operation.”

 

A further example of the media intensity was provided by London based Reuters Technical Manager Peter Brosnan who coordinated all feeds and transmissions for the media centre. Brosnan had just covered the G20 Summit in London for Reuters where the world media produced 27 feeds in a day. By comparison the day that Ben Southall was announced as the successful applicant for The Best Job In The World the media centre handled 44 feeds.

 

The event also saw a unique spirit of cooperation when Reuters agreed to release their exclusivity of the event and allow Associated Press Television News (APTN) to access all the VNRs and have the live announcement sent to them at the same time.

 

“Reuters covers 85 percent of the world broadcast market and APTN covers the rest with some overlap so we achieved global blanket coverage,” said McNeill. “Reuters also allowed non-broadcasters access to their VNRs on Reuters live platform web site. In the end the Best Job rated as the 10th biggest news event in last 12 months and that includes the US elections and attacks on cricketers in Pakistan. Tourism Queensland was absolutely delighted and the result was well beyond their expectations.”

 

Lateral Linking Broadcast Managing Director Greg Roberts said “the Greatest Job was an exciting project to work on. Once I co-ordinated the edit suites so they were all outputting material to the same technical broadcast standards it was then a matter of keeping up with the daily demands. Staying on an island in Queensland sounds great but we were part of team working around the clock.” - record number of live transmissions