In an ideal week I would run 90 miles - not work 90 hours in an office that’s about 90 degrees.

Therefore, last week was far from an ideal week. It was one of those weeks that could have been made a little more pleasant by getting out for a few easy lunch-hour runs to break up the day, but instead my days were broken up by trips for fast food and more sitting, which just compounded the disgustingness that working for 15 hours a day in an air conditioning-less office/press box will force upon oneself. But, while my current running endurance is I’m sure all but vanished by now, last week definitely kicked up my endurance for sitting in an office chair and staring at a computer screen.

All things considered though, at least last week didn’t drag along like a 90-hour week sometimes can. That’s because from Monday morning at 7:45 a.m. when I arrived at work until the end of the uber-hectic week at 8:00 p.m. Saturday night, there was always some mega-important, super-urgent task to be working on. And all because of this:

The new 1/2 million (or so) dollar videoboard at Rex Stadium on the campus of Adams State College. I’m currently the only person trained in the operation of it and all the computers that allow you to do cool things with it. This guy (I’m pointing at myself right now), is the only person currently trained on it.

Back in April, almost a year later than originally anticpated and planned, the new jumbotron-esque videoboard at our football stadium was completed and Daktronics sent down a rep to train me on it. In an ideal world, we would have several people trained on the thing, but an ideal world doesn’t exist and can only be viewed through the mind’s eye. The training was a 3-day crash course on the functionality of the three computers (Venus 7000, Tri-Caster Studio and Daktronics Stat Machine) that feed information to the board and how to control the instant replay function. That part was relatively easy, just a lot to think about and one of those many things in life that you know you’re only ever going to get a real sense of by actually doing it in a pressure situation. However, the not so easy part was obviously going to be the office hours spent creating content to use on the board.

Just two weeks after training on the board I was in action running it for the football spring scrimmage. Smoothe may not be the ideal word to use for it went, but it wasn’t bad. Running replays on the board was fairly easy and intuitive, even. However, I left that scrimmage feeling rather nervous about the 18’ x 10’ expectations hanging over my head for a pinnacle event: the Colorado High School Coaches’ Association All-State Games that we were hosting on June 11. (Before the videoboard was even operational, we had pitched our brand new stadium and videoboard as one of our best reasons to be selected as a first-time host).

So that began a 2-month habit of half the athletic department asking me how preparations for the videoboard were going and if it was going to look good. Clearly, the truth (“I don’t know”) wasn’t going to suffice, so a fib (“Looking great!” while giving them two thumbs up) became my general response. That may have been my truthful feeling were it not for the fact, that there was still so much going on from the typical sports information side of things that I really had no time to even begin working on much for the videoboard before the week before the games, minus some playing around and learning how to use Adobe After Effects for the purpose of building AVI graphics to use on the board rather than the ho-hum non-personalized graphics that come with the system - they might seem to me worth using if they were at least close to our school colors, but I should never have hoped to have been so lucky.

But let’s flash forward to June 6, the day that I could finally start focusing on the All-State Games videoboard work that needed to be done, since the week before was spent on getting ready for the ASC Hall-of-Fame weekend. This set off the week of nothing but direly urgent tasks, which included but was not limited to: making still graphics of each of the All-State Games athletes (and sizing them for a PowerPoint-like presentation as well as for the videoboard), creating name-plate overlays for the Friday night awards presenation, creating advertisements to be run on the videoboard, compiling video and music clips to be used during gameplay to keep the crowd involved, and much-much more.


Sample of the slides I created for over 250 student-athletes and coaches, along with innumerable changes to and updates to slides during the course of the week. Definitely made this job a little more difficult on myself than it needed to be, but I wanted to make these slides look good, not like something thrown together at the last minute, even though they more or less were.

Sample of name plates that I was using for the speakers during Friday night presentation. It took me forever that figure out why the first 10 designs we tested on the board had the bright green outline around the lower-third graphic I had created when we laid it over live video. Turns out the red wasn’t a sharp enough color to have a “clean cut,” so had to add a black outline around the edges.

Luckily I had created this one while playing with Adobe After Effects duirng a rare bit of down time in April. This 16 second screen-saver took me about 8 hours of work to make. Fortunately, after having learned some of the intricacies of After Effects, I’ve trimmed that time down to about 3 hous for a good 15 seconds of moving imagery for the videoboard.

I rushed with just hours before the game started to make touchdown graphics for each of the teams in the game (North vs. South). The North touchdown I think is pretty decent, but I was out of ideas and time when making one for the South, so I’m not at all proud of it. Had I been able to really take the time to sync up John Madden’s “Whoop!” with the words coming onto the screen, maybe I would have liked it better.

Likely my biggest regret of the week was forgetting to load this gem of crowd prompt into the system for the game. D’Oh!

Despite the hectic nature of the entire week and the long hours of working under hectic deadlines, I ushered out the week feeling pretty positive about the videobard for the Adams State football season. We learned a lot of things trying to run it for a whole game, like you need way more than 20 video clips to be played on the thing for the sake of entertaining the crowd (50 likely would have been a better number), trying to keep track of 3 camera feeds and deciding which to run live on the scoreboard and which to capture replay from is about 100x harder than doing the same with just 2 cameras, and when you get a good shot of an over-the-shoulder touchdown catch where the player was barely able to drag his foot in the end zone and can replay it frame-by-painfully-tense-frame… it makes the entire week worth it to hear one half of the crowd go nuts and the other sound deflated.

And just for fun, here’s a quick breakdown of the week in terms of hours worked:
Monday: 8 AM-11:15 PM (approx. 1 hour lunchbreak)
Tuesday: 8 AM-Midnight (approx. 30 minute lunchbreak)
Wednesday: 7:45 AM-11 PM (approx. 30 minute lunchbreak)
Thursday: 7:30 AM-11:45 PM (approx. 30 minute lunchbreak)
Friday: 8 AM-1:30 AM (ate at desk while working)
Saturday: 7:30 AM-8 PM (at at desk while working)

Total: 92 hrs 45 min.