X CAMS IX
ESPN's all about keeping your eye on these guys.
By: Ken Gordon

Todd Grossman has been in-line skating and skateboarding since he was 10 years old and is an accomplished action sports athlete. He's even a former X Games competitor, having retired from competition in 1998. But now he's back on skates and back at X Games IX-only this time, as a cameraman. Make that a FollowCameraman, a cameraman unlike any the X Games has ever had before.

You see, Grossman also studied film at USC and is an experienced videographer. Based in Hollywood, he recently directed the making-of feature for (what else?) the XXX DVD. He's shot on skates before for other projects and recently did some work for Fox Sports. It was that work that caught the attention of the X Games producers. The X Games twist (and there's always an X Games twist) is that Grossman's FollowCam is a live feed-something he's never done before.

Grossman is such a good skater that he doesn't even think about being on them. When he's out on the Park Course, he says, all he's thinking about is being a cameraman. Feeding live, however, has added a new set of challenges. For one thing, he has a director talking in his ear, telling him where to go. For another, this is an enormous course and these are the best competitors in the world that he's trying to keep up with. On top of that, he's on the course constantly, all day long. As a competitor, he would spend most of his time watching and resting as the other skaters did their runs. Now, Grossman does all of the runs.

And if that weren't enough to deal with, ESPN was using an analog microwave link to relay his video feed. That's not so easy when the transmitter is affixed to the helmet of a dude zipping around on wheels. So ESPN put a shotgun receiving antenna on a Spider crane and had an operator point it at Grossman at all times, following him around the course as if it were a spotlight.

Still, Grossman had to work extra hard to maintain the link. "It's an enormous course. It's deep, and there's a lot of crevices" in it, which create holes that disrupted the transmission. He and the rest of the production team had to figure out where those holes were, but it was up to Grossman alone to steer clear of them. One more thing on his mind, as it were, was the sugar pack analog transmitter affixed to the top of his helmet that he had to try to keep pointing upward, towards the receiver, at all times.

Many of these problems were solved the next day with the arrival of the mysterious fifth digital link. When I ran into Grossman later in the tunnels under the Staples Center, he was delighted with the results. The digital link alleviated the need for the antenna operator, not to mention the sugar pack, and allowed him more freedom to move around the course and just focus on his shooting. "It was great," he added with a smile.

Grossman's FollowCam is a Sony VX2000 fitted with a fisheye lens. The fisheye gives him a forgiving, wide angle that helps him keep his target in frame, even if he gets close to the action-which he of course does. A battery pack worn on his back powers both the camera and the transmitter-whether the analog sugar pack on his helmet or the digital encoder/transmitter, which is also worn on his back. He's also wired with a personal radio, with an earpiece and a mic clipped to his collar to enable communications with his director. Those are the tricks of his trade-on-blades. Those plus a whole lot of Gatorade.