Cortaca Giving Day Livestream
Coordinating, Creating Packages for, and Producing Live Hits for a Massive Undertaking of a Live Event in NYC | Fall 2022
Chrissy Guest’s Special Topics: Live Event Production course is known as one of the most intense offered at Park. In a standard year, students are tasked with the planning and execution of two or three livestreams. This entails scripting, shooting, coordinating, engineering, and crewing the multi-camera coverage. The semester I took the course, we set out on two usually large undertakings. The first was the Inauguration of Ithaca’s 10th president, La Jerne Terry Cornish, and the second was the Cortaca Giving Day Livestream.
Cortaca is the annual football face-off between the Ithaca Bombers and the SUNY Cortland Red Dragons. The match-up is one of the most prominent in NCAA Division III football, so much so that in 2022 Cortaca would be held in Yankee Stadium in NYC. Ithaca College’s Division of Philanthropy and Engagement holds the Giving Day Challenge, a fundraising drive, concurrent with Cortaca. Our class was brough on to produce a 90-minute livestream just before the game to stir up interest.
Lauren Mitchell and myself were the production coordinators, responsible for communicating with all involved parties and pulling together our schedule for what would be an extremely busy weekend. Some of the involved parties were…
Ithaca College’s Division of Philanthropy and Engagement
Ithaca College’s Office of Marketing and Communications
Ithaca College Television
Park School of Communications
Ithaca College’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance
Yankee Stadium
YES Network
Marquis Marriott
Hilton Newark Airport
Major League Baseball
Bronx Community College
Stout NYC
Stan’s Bar
Arthur Avenue Catering
Ithaca College’s Office of Marketing and Communications
Ithaca College Television
Park School of Communications
Ithaca College’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance
Yankee Stadium
YES Network
Marquis Marriott
Hilton Newark Airport
Major League Baseball
Bronx Community College
Stout NYC
Stan’s Bar
Arthur Avenue Catering
We had a crew of 21, which we typically distributed amongst three teams, though personnel of each would shift to accommodate skillsets and whatnot.
Aside from coordinating the production, I had a handful of other roles. I produced, hosted, and edited a segment called So You Think You Know Campus.
I did the motion design for a VO segment that would zip around a map of NYC and show the off the crazy logistics of the weekend.
I also produced the live hits at Stan’s Bar (the Ithaca alumni bar) on game day. That was a real trial by fire – I found myself running through the streets of the Bronx to buy batteries from a pharmacy, then ripping apart an XLR connector assembly to reverse-engineer it while a train rattled by overhead, then navigating through a sea of shoulder-to-shoulder drunk alums.
I try to help out wherever I can, and so on top of my stated duties was a grab bag of small components that I worked on or assisted with, from last-minute graphics to camera work, technical support to crafty runs.
Live Event Production was a wild ride (the bottle of Tylenol in that last pic says it all). It felt like a whole degree had been crammed into one course and blasted at us with a firehouse. The Cortaca stream is responsible for some of the most difficult days of my life, but it also taught me more than any other class.
