22nd Jan 2015
Thursday, January 22 – Day 8
Woke up with a little bit of a fuzzy head but the excitement and nerves of what was to follow helped shake that off.
Kick off was at 18:30 so I met Toby at around 15:00 to head to the ground with plenty of time to spare before the game began.
We didn’t have too much to do but we needed to get Toby’s accreditation sorted and film some vox pops with Aussies to be used ahead of their quarter-final later that day.
Today was my first day using a LiveU unit and we were sharing it with Mosh and her team over at the tennis, ridiculous I know…
First they overran so we had to run over to Rod Laver Arena to meet Niharika to collect it before busting a groove back to Melbourne Rectangular Stadium. The batteries were on their last legs so we had to charge it before using it, cutting into our time allotted to film and send back to Singapore.
That, coupled with the boss hovering over my shoulder, was making life a little stressful to say the least!
We managed to get the opening shot filmed and sent but the low batteries were causing problems again. We had to charge the unit as best we could before hightailing it into the stadium to film our pre-match stuff.
That was done in the final seconds before we had to vacate the allocated filming area and I was feeling pretty hot at this stage in my suit.
Anyway, we managed to get everything done and dusted and sent to Singapore to be used in the pre-show.
Then I got a call telling me I had to write a script which I would voice at full time send back to Singapore so they could run a highlights package on Fox Sports Central. This information was relayed to me 15 minutes into the first half…
To make matters worse, my boss had nabbed the one and only media tribune ticket we had so I had to miss the game and follow it from the press centre…
More filming was required at fulltime and I needed to get some more sound bites from fans to complete another piece and voice my script all while getting frantic phone calls from the tennis team as they needed the LiveU unit.
After all that was finally done I dropped the LiveU unit off with Mosh (just hire two) and then headed back to finish my day’s work.
Finally made it back to the hotel at which point it was approaching midnight and I was still to pack ahead of heading to Sydney for the fourth quarter-final. Finally got done after 01:00 and retured to bed knowing that I had to be up in just two hours to head to the airport… yay!