Doha 2017: Day-5. Preparing for the Championship
Friday night was a late one at the Qatar ExxonMobil Open 2017. We crowned the doubles champions, Jeremy Chardy and Fabrice Martin…then Novak Djokovic won an absolute thriller over Fernando Verdasco, saving five match points to force a deciding set. With his straight-sets win over Tomas Berdych, Andy Murray became the first player in the 25-year history of the Qatar ExxonMobil Open to reach the Final four times.
During the evening’s matches, I was approched by Yannis Michalandos of Jumpzone Productions. He and his team had been working the overnights all week, preparing for Saturday’s Championship Ceremony and 25th anniversary celebration. I’d already cut some voiceover for the ceremony, but now he needed some kind of instructional video for fans explaining the LED Pixmob wristbands that would be a critical part of the production’s stunning visuals.
He wanted the piece to feel like an airline in-flight safety video…so after some explanation on how the wristbands worked and the significance of each wristband’s placement, I quickly wrote-up a script. Yannis then enlisted the help of several tournament greeters, a camera team from Ucom, and we put together this instructional video on the fly (above) – around 12:30am the night before the Final.
The fans did great! Here’s how the ceremony turned out…
