Blaze TV

In a team of four, we film every home game for the Coventry Blaze Ice Hockey team. We use three cameras for this, one is the ‘in-house’ camera that is connected to four DVD burners for the referee and team coaches, another is the ‘ariel cam’ situated above the fans to cover the wide view of the ice (the ‘in-house’ camera is next to this), another is down on the sidelines of the ice, in the corner which the Blaze are attacking towards, this is the ‘close-up cam’ for all home goals and attacks. We then use the ‘close-up cam’ to film interviews with the players, coaches and fans of the Blaze, Geoff Foster (BBC reporter) conducts the questions as he has the previous experience and the required expertise to do so. We then edit a 3 – 5 minute match report including the highlights of the game and interviews, and use an internet resource to rip relative music from. We then distribute on our own YouTube channel http://uk.youtube.com/user/CovBlazeTV . We also have a link from the official Coventry Blaze website www.coventryblaze.co.uk/ .

I think that this relates to all three of the themes Power, Spectacle and Memory. Power because of the power of YouTube and internet broadcasting itself, the sport has a direct relation to power, and the power of an audience … we would not have this job unless people wanted to watch the sport via the internet, which is our resource for distribution. Spectacle because our broadcast is a spectacle of the sport, the fans at the game have a spectacle of what’s going on, both at the game and then after via our site, and the spectacle of audiences interests, we can see how many fans actually subscribe to the channel, view the material and we can see their comments, which are also a certain spectacle. Memory because the idea of highlights are a memory of a particular match, the fans may have a memory of a part of the match that they can later access through our channel, and also YouTube keeps a memory of all of the views and subscribes which i earlier mentioned.