Pre-Recordings Used In World-Wide Coverage

For the 2024 Paris Olympics, we spent 2 weeks preparing and shooting some content for the broadcasts. The Olympic Broadcast Service wanted to create some cool FPV content of a lot of the empty venues, so broadcasters could use those shots as introductory video during the broadcast. We used our compact BMPCC4k cinelifters for this job, to be able to provide the best quality and dynamic range for the HDR broadcast.

One-Take shots

For all of these venues, we created long one-takes in one form or another, usually starting the shot with a venue overview or athlete entrance, following the athletes routes through changing rooms, training areas and then the entrance to the venue. The venues consisted of Gymnastics (Bercy Arena), Athletics (Stade de France), Urban park (Place de la Concorde, Golf, and Canoe Slalom (Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium). For each venue we created a customised shot of the ‘field of play’ for each sport, and recorded multiple variants to give broadcasters a choice of usage. For example in Urban Park we connected all 4 sports together in 1 take, and in Golf we strung together the full 18 hole course in 1 FPV take, starting and ending with an overview shot of the course.

The Gap

For Bercy Arena this ment showing all the gymnastics courses and elements, but we wanted to do something extra. We wanted to fly through one of the Gymnastics Rings during our long one-take shot. Our normal small GoPro drone was too big for this, as the ring is only 18cm in diameter, leaving no space for the dron. We developed a smaller drone specifically to fit through, with only a few cm plan on each side, but making the shot possible!

Permits

Paris is one of the most difficult places in Europe to get drone permissions. Even though we were part of the olympics, during our recordings, the games hadn’t started yet and we needed to go through all the legal hoops with the french government. This process took about 6 months and lots of paperwork, but in the end we got it done, with the help of some dutch partners and OBS itself. This ment we did get to do some unique shots in locations that even locals have trouble getting permissions for.