The champions of this year’s Roland Garros have been crowned! Having provided host broadcast facilities for the US Open in New York, the WTA Tour, the Western & Southern Open, and the ATP Masters 1000 in Rome, Gravity Media is honoured to conclude a run of back-to-back work on five major tennis events with the French Open!
The French Open’s main draw went on air on Sunday 27 September and ran until Sunday 11 October. The Gravity Media team in France provided coverage for 12 of the outer courts simultaneously with three cameras on each court as well as the full crew including cameramen and directors. The team supplied a flypack for the big screens of the stadium with two users using the referee video system. Seventeen of the courts each had three conference rooms which the team supplied equipment for including four beauty cameras, two interviews with teams set up, and one interview with teams and a green screen.
Gravity Media was also on air for France Televisions providing the RF coverage at the 124th French Open. The coverage extended the cameras’ ability to travel around the four hectares of the tennis complex, but also have access to indoor areas, to capture the player’s reactions from wherever they may be. For France Television, the Gravity Media team covered one court with four cameras, including two robotic heads, with Vibox solutions, replacing the old outside broadcast vans.
Gravity Media also helped the FFT to set up a studio on site and was on air for Eurosport with ‘the Cube’, taking pictures from France and other Eurosport Studios, and feeding them back to the Cube studio in London.
Meanwhile, the team at The Production Centre in London facilitated ITV’s remote production of this year’s tournament. ITV 4’s daily output saw John Inverdale anchoring the coverage from our in-house studio alongside a wide-range of pundits, including former World No 1 Jim Courier contributing remotely via a wraparound video wall. ITV also used The Production Centre’s state-of-the-art galleries and edit suites throughout the two weeks of Roland Garros.