Does anyone feel really positive about how we currently announce teams before matches? Does a MC need to walk in front of each team and say their number while a different person announces their team name /every/ /single/ /time/? I think it’s important to recognize teams and fill a bit of time between matches, but is there anything else we can try? Team provided pump up videos? Auto generated graphics? Anything?
I definitely agree. Kinda gets stale after the tenth time and then you have to listen to it 60 more times. I think a video that a team gives or some sort of short compilation of how the robot has done during the season would be nice. I would like to see FIRST try some trial runs of doing something different in a couple of events, see how that goes, and get some feedback from people at the event and watching the livestream. I think that in general FIRST should be doing small experiments like they are doing with the detroit champs load in to see if maybe the status quo isn’t necessarily the best way to do something.
6 Likes
In 2017 many PNW district events filmed short 4-5 second video clips of each team’s driveteam before the match which would appear on the screen and livestream (along with a name+number overlay) as that team was announced. I was quite a fan of that.
20 Likes
Maybe something like team avatars, but instead it can be a short clip from a team’s reveal or of their driveteam or something?
1 Like
Yeah that sounds like a great idea. After thinking about this a bit more I realized that this would probably put a lot more work on the A/V crews at events and either having teams submit their own videos or using reveal videos would probably be the easiest thing for them.
I highly doubt that this will happen this season as the events I’ve watched have had A/V troubles and I doubt they would want to add onto their workloads. Instead I think a great trial run for something like this could be Chezy Champs or some other big offseason event. Ideally there would some framework where you could just click a button on the computers at events and it would play the videos for the teams in that match. I think this would make FIRST much more likely to adopt this as it would put a lot less strain on the A/V crews and not hurt the rest of the event.
I’m not really informed on how the A/V stuff works at competitions so I’m sure somebody with much more experience than me could speak to the implementation much better than I can however I think that it is a solid idea.
1 Like
Do you have any clips of this? This seems like a really cool idea but I’ve personally never seen it done before.
1 Like
I know PNW has been pretty creative with A/V stuff in the past such as doing a bunch of highlight reels and doing some sports style analysis of matches but I haven’t seen them do anything special for intros. Maybe I just haven’t seen it yet because I tend not to watch PNW too much.
2 Likes
This sounds cool in theory, but I would like to note how many teams don’t submit an Avatar currently. We’d end up with a lot of whatever the default intro video is for teams.
I do think having teams submit short videos that could be used before a random match of theirs would be interesting. Then you aren’t trying to announce each team with a video, you just highlight a team from the match. If you never submit you never get highlighted, but you don’t have to sit through a bunch of default videos then.
This would work well for small events, but starts to cut into how often sponsor names get announced for large events (where the number of teams approaches the total number of matches played). That wouldn’t be good from the business side, not sure how you work around that.
8 Likes
I remember those – they were great! Always fun when the driveteams got creative and funny with their video. I really hope something like that gets brought back in the future!
1 Like
As someone who has been a trained, in-season game announcer for the last four years (taking a break this year), I will point out that this is the official FIRST HQ training. Number, short name, maybe one fast detail. And I’ve watched events where we can’t even get that right.
Which is not to say that there is no other way, but it does have to be pretty foolproof (for the sake of MCs and GAs that don’t live and breathe this stuff) and it needs to be pretty quick (for the sake of match cycle times).
1 Like
The only times I’ve ever felt particularly bothered by team introductions is if a) the announcer is just not very good at it, on the order of messing up numbers/names, adding too many details, or just not being all that interesting, b) In the first several matches where we have to sit through each team’s laundry list of sponsors before we can go to the next team, or c) during playoffs, where we’ve already seen the same alliances introduced multiile times by then.
1 Like
I don’t take issue with the way that team introductions occur during qualifications, where you need a reminder of each team on the field. However, during eliminations, especially towards the semifinal and final rounds where there’s only 5-10 minutes between plays, the team announcements get old fast.
3 Likes
The current way they announce teams works but just because it works doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.
if there was no introductions there could be 5 more matches and at events where there isn’t enough time for all quals they waste time announceing teams
Introductions are usually done while the teams are still getting connected to the field, so introductions don’t actually waste time at all.
12 Likes
Sometimes they do it while a team is setting up sometimes they don’t. It really depends on the teams there, how much time they have, and what the announcers want to do.
I would love to see the idea of the team submitted avatars making it in the audience scouting display magnified. There are more matches than there are teams at every event, so I like the idea of doing individual team “highlights” every match after the first round.
Teams submit information about themselves and they become the sole all Star of that pre match event. They can cover recent awards, fun facts about the team, recent endeavors off the field of competition, etc.
I go back and forth on this a lot. FIRST (Blair and his team) make some pretty tight training for these positions, and it’s not a bad idea. The counterpoint is that it’s probably the most creatively inclined volunteer role that also is public facing. Those with experience should be trusted with an artistic license to elevate the team experience.
As a GA/MC, this part always gets to me as well. The invention of the GA Tool has helped a lot with providing some more info to shake them up a bit. However, there’s still only so much you can use. I do wish we could find some way to not make the playoff intros so monotonous.
I know these events are focused on the in-person audience first, but something to consider is that introducing every team in every match allows the VODs to be self-contained. So when it’s shared with those outside of FIRST or those who didn’t watch the entire day’s broadcast, they’ll know who’s in that particular match.
1 Like
I completely agree, I have tried to experiment with different ideas at TRI before. I think this is a good place for off-season events to experiment and innovate.
I don’t mind filling time but I hate it when the field is green, teams are ready but the MC is still on the field doing the intros and the event is behind schedule.
As the AV systems get better at events I hope we see, chairman’s videos, reveal videos, team interviews, quick tutorial videos, inspirational videos, etc all played before matches instead of team number, team name, dance/hand signal, etc.
1 Like
As an emcee, most of my “match intro” time is spent waiting. Either for an appropriate time to start match intros or waiting to start the match. Compound those times with the actual team introductions and the average intro time is roughly several minutes long.
Personally, I think it would be interesting to replace those 4-5 minutes with some RSN-style pre-match analysis. This allows you to not only introduce the teams, but also talk a bit about them and their robots and add some strategic entertainment to the event. A benefit of this is that this style of introduction can be started after scores are announced from the previous match to save time. If time permits, post-match analysis of the previous match could be used, too.
It’s already part of an emcee’s role to know the teams at the event and to have a stage presence. I don’t think talking about the teams in a strategic analysis manner would be a far stretch for many emcees.
12 Likes