HRT - Ski World Championships

TV reporting for HRT

After doing almost a full season of CroSki TV for Croatian Ski Association, which episodes were broadcast each week on national television, Croatian Ski Association and Croatian Television (HRT) offered me a job in World Ski Championships held in 2015 in Vail/Beaver Creek (USA, Colorado). Since HRT had not scheduled to send neither journalists or camera crew, although it was first planned, hiring me turned out to be more simple and economic solution. Task was daily reporting from Croatian camp, filming and preparing clips for usage in news program. Besides that there was a request to make two 5-minutes reports: one immediately upon arrival in order to show event venue and to give insight in Croatian representation; the second one as an overview just before championship's end. Nika Fleiss was again a journalists with her unique contribution in each report.

Transcontinent flight required that gear is as light as possible and easy to carry. Therefore camera, sound and lens were put in cabin baggage in my reliable Lowepro Runner 450 photo backpack, while Sachtler Video 15 carbon stand was in flight case to make sure that it arrives complete. Since it was a full ENG project, Sony FS700 camera had to be as compact as possible. It was mounted on shoulder rig, with Kinotehnik viewfinder on top and Rode shotgun microphone on camera itself. For interviews I used Rode Reporter microphone with help of Sennheisser G3 wireless set and Sennheiser clip-on mic. So to say - classical ENG. After all materials have been recorded, job wasn't finished yet. Editing was still to be done and finally uploading all that to Croatia in order to be broadcast. Edit was done on Apple Macbook Pro 15” i7 laptop, with 16GB RAM and SSD disk. Workflow was very smooth and I have to admit that in two, pretty dynamic weeks I had no problem what so ever with equipment that sometimes was "on" for almost 10 hours without shutting down.

Work conditions in USA were very specific. Beaver Creek has a high altitude, even bigger than 3.000 meters. Although I usually never suffer from high-altitude problems I have to mention that carrying all that equipment daily and sometimes twice a day was quite exhausting. Very dry air left some consequences and for the first few days I was dehydrated and my nasal mucous membrane suffered as well. Croatian team, unfortunately, didn't achieve the results we were used to in the past years. But interesting inside footage certainly made races coverage and studio shows more valuable.