TNDV Teams Up With Jesse Collins Entertainment

TNDV, an entertainment-focused mobile and REMI production company, has partnered with Jesse Collins Entertainment to deliver a live broadcast celebrating the US military community.

The companies collaborated on Proud to Honor: Celebrating America's Heroes, a Ford Motor Company event conceived to recognise service members and their families and live-streamed exclusively on TikTok. The 75-minute programme was produced at the CMA Theater inside the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, with TNDV deploying its Aspiration 35 outside broadcast truck to stream the event to viewers around the world.

TNDV, one of three divisions of Live Media Group alongside Live Media and Gametime Productions, delivered an eight-camera production capturing live performances from The War and Treaty, Tyler Hubbard and Zac Brown, among others. The broadcast also featured interviews with Blue Star military families, sharing personal stories of service and sacrifice.

The production utilised Sony HDC-4300 cameras in hardwired, handheld and Steadicam configurations, positioned to capture cinematic images of both the stage and the venue. TNDV also made use of ultra-high frame rate capabilities to highlight interactions between military families, performers and hosts, including Bru on the Radio, a well-known radio host and social media personality.

Camera feeds were live-switched on board Aspiration 35, with graphics inserted in real time and the programme streamed to TikTok headquarters via the truck’s 10GbE infrastructure. Audio from the venue was multi-tracked using a Studer Vista 5 console and fully synchronised with the video feed through Aspiration’s Evertz NEXX router.

However, the production team faced an unusual technical challenge due to TikTok’s vertical video format, according to Chris Payne, TNDV’s Manager of Streaming, Remote Control Operations and Special Projects, who served as engineer in charge on Aspiration 35.

"TikTok presents a unique challenge due to the constraints it places on its format/aspect," said Payne, TNDV's Manager of Streaming, Remote Control Operations and Special Projects. "We usually deal with landscape video when we live-produce video content out of our systems. With TikTok, it's more than working with have a vertical media format that needs to be aspect-correct; it must fit a broad array of user devices for viewers."

The team considered rotating each camera by 90 degrees using specialised mounts or cropping the centre of each image to suit the platform. Given the size of the venue and the number of cameras in use, rotating the cameras was deemed impractical.

"The only viable option to was to send the center cut images direct to TikTok, which itself depletes the amount of real estate we have to fully capture the program for to the audience," added Payne. "It's hard to fit a large venue and larger stage show into that small of a window, and avoid having logos, donate buttons, and other graphics and branding elements conceal the performances. It takes A-List camera operators great and directors to make sure every shot is accurately framed, not only for technical aspects, but also to convey the best story possible."

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