Cameramen on the cutting edge of sports filming, having just sailed across the Atlantic with the Volvo Ocean Race teams, will take part in an NUI Galway symposium entitled ‘Representing Sport’. The international symposium runs from 2-3 June.
The symposium is being organised by NUI Galway’s Huston School of Film & Digital Media and its School of Languages, with support from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
On 2 June, at 2pm, the lecture on ‘Broadcasting the Volvo Ocean Race’, supported by Inmarsat, the official technology sponsor for the race, will demonstrate how high-definition television (HDTV) has changed international sailing events and high-octane sports. With HDTV and other technologies has come the introduction of an 11th person, known as the media crewman, onto each of the Volvo Ocean Race boats. Their job during the 37,000 nautical mile trip is to send back a daily quota of words, photos and video via Inmarsat’s FleetBroadband from the race route, but they cannot partake in sailing the boat.
During the lecture Ian Walker, skipper of Green Dragon, will be joined by media crewmembers from Puma (Rick Deppe), Ericsson (Guy Salter) and Telfonica (Gabriele Olivo) to share their experiences of reporting the race to a potential audience of two billion.
Rick Deppe, an experienced British sailor and acclaimed videographer, whose credits include Deadliest Catch on Discovery Channel, has said: “My job is to keep the camera rolling and get some great shots over the course of nine months of action”.
The ‘Representing Sport’ symposium is jointly organised by Dr Seán Crosson, from NUI Galway’s Huston School of Film & Digital Media, and Dr Phil Dine, from NUI Galway’s School of Languages. Dr Seán Crosson comments: “From the fine arts, through print and audio-visual culture, sport has been an enduring subject of representation. This has increasingly been the case with the development of the contemporary global media industry, where representations of sport, from soccer to boxing and athletics, constitute one of the most popular subjects. Nowhere is the link between sporting traditions and technological modernity more apparent than in the state-of-the-art broadcasting of the Volvo Ocean Race”.
As well as considering the representation of sport in Ireland, the two-day symposium will focus on its representation across Europe and around the world. Presentations will be made on various topics from Roy Keane to French surfing culture to German identity.
While entry to the symposium is free, prior registration is essential for Inmarsat’s ‘Broadcasting the Volvo Ocean Race’ lecture. A full programme for the Symposium is available at www.filmschool.ie
