</p>
<font color="#660000" face="" size="5">Lights, camera, action,</font>
<font color="#660000" face="Arial" size="7">JumboTron</font>
<font color="#FFCC35" face="" size="5">brings new dimensions to Bulldog football</font> <p align="center">by Bill Wagnon</p>
When Jackie Sherrill's Bulldogs took to the Scott Field turf against Vanderbilt in the season opener in September, dozens of people were feverishly working behind the scenes to broadcast the Southeastern Conference showdown to ESPN2 viewers across the country.</p>
Meanwhile, deep within the confines of the Leo Seal M-Club Center in the south end zone, another live production was taking place. In much the same way that the television crew was bringing the game into millions of living rooms, a group of Mississippi State employees was beginning its second season of broadcasting a different aspect of the game to those fans gathered in the Scott Field stands.</p>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Mississippi State was the first SEC school to unveil the "JumboTron" big screen technology when it hosted Memphis in its season opening game in August 1997. Since then, other schools have installed the big screens, including Auburn, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee in the SEC, as well as Florida State, Texas A&M, and Iowa, among others.</span></p>
The JumboTron concept is the brainchild of Tulsa, Okla.-based StadiaNet Sports, which uses the big screen concept at major college sporting venues to sell advertising to local and national groups.</p>
The Athletic Department entered into an agreement with StadiaNet last year, which brought the massive scoreboard/television big screen combination to Scott Field. StadiaNet funded the installation of the JumboTron in return for Mississippi State providing the manpower to operate it on game days. The university has control over programming shown on the JumboTron, with the exception of the advertising around and on the screen.</p>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Under the agreement, Mississippi State becomes owner of the JumboTron in 2007.</span></p>
The oversized screen that rises some 96 feet above Scott Field's natural grass surface in the north end zone has the ability to show instant replays, statistics, university and athletic features, advertisements, and highlights and scores from key national and SEC games being played around the nation.</p>
"The JumboTron has added another dimension to the tmosphere at Scott Field," said Athletics Director Larry Templeton. "It has given us the ability to keep Bulldog football fans informed in a unique way."</p>
The University Television Center, under the direction of David Hutto, oversees the operation of the JumboTron.</p>
"Our mission from Day 1 has been to look at how we can use the screen to enhance the game experience for the fans and not detract from or be more important than the game itself," explained Hutto. "We don't duplicate what you see on the field. We look for close-up perspectives of various aspects of the game that the fans don't have access to from their seats.</p>
The 27-by-24 foot JumboTron screen is made up of 338 three-foot by 8-inch units, each contain1ing 12 CRT cells. These 4,000-plus CRT's act as miniature television screens, each emitting various intensities of red, green, and blue to create impressions of natural color.</p>
"By varying the levels of red, green, and blue, you get a very realistic image," Hutto noted. "The CRT's are enclosed in hoods, so you get a very bright image during the daytime because stray light can't strike the tube. When you have thousands of these CRT's working together it gives the illusion of a clear, bright picture."</p>
Bennie Ashford, coordinator of sports television, oversees a crew of a dozen that brings the JumboTron to life on game days. And just as it is for the football team, game preparation for the JumboTron crew begins long before Saturday.</p>
"We begin almost immediately after the last game ends," said Ashford. "First we sit down and determine the advertising spot rotations and which feature packages we will use, as well as prepare historical feature packages."</p>
For five hours on Friday afternoons, crew members begin digitizing player head shots, MSU and SEC statistical leaders, replay reels, and other information of fan interest onto a server in the control room.</p>
"On game day, it's just a matter of checking to make sure the hardware is behaving, which is what we worry about the most," explained Ashford.</p>
Game day for the crew begins an hour and fifteen minutes before kickoff and lasts until an hour after the game. From the time the JumboTron is turned on until the last power switch is turned off, it's nonstop action.</p>
"It's like producing a television show-live," said Hutto.</p>
The JumboTron crew includes three camera people, one in the south end zone, one on a press box camera deck, and one roaming the sidelines. Producers, directors, and technicians man the Seal Center control room. Hutto helps orchestrate the action from the Press Box.</p>
With so many elements, communication is the key ingredient to a successful JumboTron broadcast, believes Ashford.</p>
"The Athletic Department completely scripts the game beforehand," he explained. "We know exactly when the teams will come onto the field, when Bully will perform, when the band can play, when the cheerleaders can perform. The control room, the press box, the camera people, and the band director are all wired with headsets so they can communicate."</p>
Such communication is important for Ashford, who, along with the TV Center's operations manager Ralph Olivieri, must make split-second decisions from the control room as to what appears on the screen at any given time. This makes for interesting work, considering that they never see the actual field of play.</p>
"Coordination is extremely important when the people in the control room have no idea what is going on outside," Ashford said. "Communication is what makes us successful."</p>
Games are broken into four distinct segments for the JumboTron. During pregame, everything is backed up to the master clock according to kickoff time. "This is where it gets interesting," said Hutto. "There is a lot of coordinating here between the band, the public address announcements, the cheerleaders, and the JumboTron. This segment is tightly scripted."</p>
The grand team entrance segment includes the now familiar JumboTron greeting of the Bulldogs, complete with animated fireworks.</p>
The third segment is the actual game.</p>
We follow the action and try to enhance the game," said Ashford. "We watch for the reaction of the fans and what they respond to and try to do more of what they like to build the spirit of the game.</p>
"Once the game starts, we pretty much have freedom to do what we want. The big screen is new to the college level, so there aren't a lot of rules yet. The SEC hasn't weighed in yet, but the NCAA has one rule, and that is not showing slow motion replays from two different angles."</p>
The final segment of the day is the postgame. After the game, Sherrill's press conference is piped to monitors in the press box for the media who can't make it downstairs to the interview room because of tight deadlines. An hour later, the crew has "torn down" the control room and started getting ready for the next home game.</p>
This is the best in in-stadium entertainment," noted Ashford. "But we are still in the infancy of operating a screen like this. Major league ballparks get over 100 shots a year, and we only get five or six. So we have to be prepared. Fortunately, nothing has malfunctioned during a game yet.</p>
"We are very comfortable with what we are doing now. As we get older, we will add more entertainment, including interactive things with the fans."</p>
Hutto also believes changes are in the future for MSU's JumboTron.</p>
"We always are thinking about what we can do with the JumboTron to get the fans more involved in the game and to make the fans come to the stadium," he noted. "We want to make the Scott Field experience as enjoyable as possible."</p>
<font color="#660000" face="Arial" size="7">JumboTron</font>
<font color="#FFCC35" face="" size="5">brings new dimensions to Bulldog football</font> <p align="center">by Bill Wagnon</p>
When Jackie Sherrill's Bulldogs took to the Scott Field turf against Vanderbilt in the season opener in September, dozens of people were feverishly working behind the scenes to broadcast the Southeastern Conference showdown to ESPN2 viewers across the country.</p>
Meanwhile, deep within the confines of the Leo Seal M-Club Center in the south end zone, another live production was taking place. In much the same way that the television crew was bringing the game into millions of living rooms, a group of Mississippi State employees was beginning its second season of broadcasting a different aspect of the game to those fans gathered in the Scott Field stands.</p>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Mississippi State was the first SEC school to unveil the "JumboTron" big screen technology when it hosted Memphis in its season opening game in August 1997. Since then, other schools have installed the big screens, including Auburn, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee in the SEC, as well as Florida State, Texas A&M, and Iowa, among others.</span></p>
The JumboTron concept is the brainchild of Tulsa, Okla.-based StadiaNet Sports, which uses the big screen concept at major college sporting venues to sell advertising to local and national groups.</p>
The Athletic Department entered into an agreement with StadiaNet last year, which brought the massive scoreboard/television big screen combination to Scott Field. StadiaNet funded the installation of the JumboTron in return for Mississippi State providing the manpower to operate it on game days. The university has control over programming shown on the JumboTron, with the exception of the advertising around and on the screen.</p>
<span style="font-weight: bold;">Under the agreement, Mississippi State becomes owner of the JumboTron in 2007.</span></p>
The oversized screen that rises some 96 feet above Scott Field's natural grass surface in the north end zone has the ability to show instant replays, statistics, university and athletic features, advertisements, and highlights and scores from key national and SEC games being played around the nation.</p>
"The JumboTron has added another dimension to the tmosphere at Scott Field," said Athletics Director Larry Templeton. "It has given us the ability to keep Bulldog football fans informed in a unique way."</p>
The University Television Center, under the direction of David Hutto, oversees the operation of the JumboTron.</p>
"Our mission from Day 1 has been to look at how we can use the screen to enhance the game experience for the fans and not detract from or be more important than the game itself," explained Hutto. "We don't duplicate what you see on the field. We look for close-up perspectives of various aspects of the game that the fans don't have access to from their seats.</p>
The 27-by-24 foot JumboTron screen is made up of 338 three-foot by 8-inch units, each contain1ing 12 CRT cells. These 4,000-plus CRT's act as miniature television screens, each emitting various intensities of red, green, and blue to create impressions of natural color.</p>
"By varying the levels of red, green, and blue, you get a very realistic image," Hutto noted. "The CRT's are enclosed in hoods, so you get a very bright image during the daytime because stray light can't strike the tube. When you have thousands of these CRT's working together it gives the illusion of a clear, bright picture."</p>
"We begin almost immediately after the last game ends," said Ashford. "First we sit down and determine the advertising spot rotations and which feature packages we will use, as well as prepare historical feature packages."</p>
For five hours on Friday afternoons, crew members begin digitizing player head shots, MSU and SEC statistical leaders, replay reels, and other information of fan interest onto a server in the control room.</p>
"On game day, it's just a matter of checking to make sure the hardware is behaving, which is what we worry about the most," explained Ashford.</p>
Game day for the crew begins an hour and fifteen minutes before kickoff and lasts until an hour after the game. From the time the JumboTron is turned on until the last power switch is turned off, it's nonstop action.</p>
"It's like producing a television show-live," said Hutto.</p>
The JumboTron crew includes three camera people, one in the south end zone, one on a press box camera deck, and one roaming the sidelines. Producers, directors, and technicians man the Seal Center control room. Hutto helps orchestrate the action from the Press Box.</p>
With so many elements, communication is the key ingredient to a successful JumboTron broadcast, believes Ashford.</p>
"The Athletic Department completely scripts the game beforehand," he explained. "We know exactly when the teams will come onto the field, when Bully will perform, when the band can play, when the cheerleaders can perform. The control room, the press box, the camera people, and the band director are all wired with headsets so they can communicate."</p>
"Coordination is extremely important when the people in the control room have no idea what is going on outside," Ashford said. "Communication is what makes us successful."</p>
Games are broken into four distinct segments for the JumboTron. During pregame, everything is backed up to the master clock according to kickoff time. "This is where it gets interesting," said Hutto. "There is a lot of coordinating here between the band, the public address announcements, the cheerleaders, and the JumboTron. This segment is tightly scripted."</p>
The grand team entrance segment includes the now familiar JumboTron greeting of the Bulldogs, complete with animated fireworks.</p>
The third segment is the actual game.</p>
We follow the action and try to enhance the game," said Ashford. "We watch for the reaction of the fans and what they respond to and try to do more of what they like to build the spirit of the game.</p>
The final segment of the day is the postgame. After the game, Sherrill's press conference is piped to monitors in the press box for the media who can't make it downstairs to the interview room because of tight deadlines. An hour later, the crew has "torn down" the control room and started getting ready for the next home game.</p>
This is the best in in-stadium entertainment," noted Ashford. "But we are still in the infancy of operating a screen like this. Major league ballparks get over 100 shots a year, and we only get five or six. So we have to be prepared. Fortunately, nothing has malfunctioned during a game yet.</p>
"We are very comfortable with what we are doing now. As we get older, we will add more entertainment, including interactive things with the fans."</p>
Hutto also believes changes are in the future for MSU's JumboTron.</p>
"We always are thinking about what we can do with the JumboTron to get the fans more involved in the game and to make the fans come to the stadium," he noted. "We want to make the Scott Field experience as enjoyable as possible."</p>
