NBC News’ reporters and programs are preparing for election night. The tech teams at 30 Rockefeller Plaza are also preparing with rehearsals and creation of graphics.
To help deliver timely election results, analysis and pathways to victory, the NBCU News Group’s design, production and operations teams are using new and updated tools to enhance the storytelling of reporters, anchors and journalists on election night.
“When you go to a Broadway play, you don’t go home humming the scenery. This is all about the music, the editorial,” said Marc Greenstein, NBCU News Group’s senior vice president of design, production and operations. “Our hope is our technology, our creativity, help explain the editorial better.”
How to coordinate election night data
TV and streaming news combine many elements: scripts, videos, graphics, teleprompters, live shots and more. Election and polling data, as well as the NBC News Decision Desk’s projections of winners, greatly increase the number of moving parts.
“If you think about all the different tools it takes to put a television broadcast on air, there’s all different control systems for everything,” Greenstein said. “There’s no unified way to make all that work in concert with each other.”
To help coordinate efforts, Alex Bassett, NBCU News Group’s senior director of production technology, oversaw the development of Sync, an application built in-house that coordinates graphics and data across NBC News, MSNBC, Telemundo, CNBC and Sky News studios. Sync helps generate graphics for different control rooms and programs using the same data.
“We have probably 100-plus people, 100 different graphics channels, all different storytelling devices and then on-air,” Bassett said. “It underpins that teamwork part that we value.”
Bassett said that for big “wow moments,” Sync will ensure all channels will receive information about key races in unison, informing viewers faster and simplifying back-end work.
Expanding studio sets with VR/AR technology
Advancements in virtual reality and augmented reality can turn TV studios into sets with virtual windows. Cameras can push past the anchors and fly to a 3D model of the White House. NBC News’ election night sets have green screen backgrounds, and all studio cameras will have trackers to allow for the AR set extensions.
Using video game technology like Unreal Engine, which powers Fortnite, NBC News built virtual 3D models of locations like Capitol Hill and 30 Rockefeller Plaza. But melding anchors and correspondents with those virtual environments is “still a little bit in the Wild West,” said James Matarese, NBCU News Group’s senior managing art director of real-time graphics. He said much of the technology was not built for real-time broadcast applications.
“This gives us a lot of flexibility. It allows us to do things that we just cannot do with a physical environment,” Matarese said. “It’s a lot of technology, math, physics to sew it all together.”
Check Out 30 Rock’s Election News Center
Get a behind-the-scenes look at NBC News’ and MSNBC’s global headquarters in New York ahead of Election Day.
Going above and beyond for the ‘Super Bowl’ of breaking news
NBC News has been preparing for 2024’s election night for years, building tools, updating cameras and fabricating new sets. Greenstein said the innovations are necessary to draw in viewers. They help make the evening “our Super Bowl, our World Series, our Olympics.”
“There’s a lot of moving parts when we talk about elections,” Greenstein said. “Thousands of graphics. We’re using six studios in this building, eight control rooms. We have over 50 cameras, almost 200 render engines of graphics.”
But Greenstein said all of those exciting visual elements need to be 100% accurate and serve the editorial content.
“There is zero margin for error on this,” Greenstein said. “We literally will test not only every single graphic [to ensure] that the data from our election system flows into the graphic properly, but then we test each different graphic type. We hold our standards as NBC News to the most important thing we do. More important than how we look on air is [getting] the information right and [if] are we properly passing that on to the viewer.”
Special thanks to NBC News and MSNBC Special Projects Director Adam Mancini, NBC ArtWorks Creative Director Ventura Castro and NBCUniversal Tech Production Managers Gree Vreeland and Robert Melendez.
