BCC Live is based in Boulder, Colorado, and a large amount of our day-to-day work involves interfacing with local businesses and projects to make killer videos or produce top-notch livestreams. We love working with people in our home state, but our team spends a lot of time elsewhere! This last weekend was no exception—our team split into four parts this time, to handle three events across the country and a broadcast at home simultaneously. A lot to handle for a small company? Sure! But as you’ve seen in earlier posts, we always have a plan and the top-notch crew to knock it out. Let’s see how we tackled this challenge…

The Canyons Endurance Run

First, an interesting challenge—a new event to us, with some unique challenges to take on. The UTMB Canyons Endurance Run in Auburn, California is an “ultra-trail” run with distances up to 100 kilometers and an ascent of up to 14,000 feet—a significant challenge for the athletes, and since we needed to capture footage along the course and a full recording of the finish lines, we had our work cut out for us! Oh, and did we mention that the weather wasn’t going to make it easy?

Streaming in the snow? That’s not normally in our wheelhouse. What’ll we do?

Well, we always find a way! Between transporting generators from point to point, wrapping up cameras to keep them dry, and figuring out the best ways to record or stream the race, we bridged every gap to get the content we needed. That’s how things go here at BCC Live—when a problem comes up, we don’t just give up on the project. Some improvisation and quick thinking might be in the cards, but we aren’t done until the client gets what they need.

Rock n’ Roll Nashville

Next up: a classic in our wheelhouse, another excellent Rock n’ Roll marathon in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee. Tennessee is one of our most-visited states between the multitude of events hosted in Nashville, Chattanooga, and elsewhere, so we were excited to visit once more and bring our best to the occasion. It promised to be a large event, as well—with over twenty thousand runners registered, it’d certainly be high-profile! What’s more, while the half-distance and full marathons would be taking place at the same time as per usual for these events, the 5K and an additional 6.15-mile race would take place on the same day, at around the same time. That’d require team members being in another location, using a whole additional string of speakers and figuring out a good way to load and unload them while the start of the longer races was underway. Tricky stuff when we don’t usually have many team members on site!

Yet again, it was time for “divide and conquer.” Our box truck was packed full of the gear we’d need for both start lines and we headed to the site to begin a full-scale juggling act. Everyone worked independently to set up portions of the event or run the show once things were in place, switching from place to place as necessary to make sure no one place was understaffed. Then, once it was time to pack everything at the start lines back up, we ended up ahead of the game with extra hands to speed things up! Though a tricky setup and some toasty weather tried its best to throw us off, it’d take more than that to keep BCC Live down.

IRONMAN Texas

Finally, there was the last event on the docket: Ironman Texas, a full-scale event that promised to keep everyone busy. Apart from the grand scale of the Ironman World Championships, full-length Ironman triathlons are some of the most challenging events for us, just because of how long race day is for us. We might be up and working hard in excess of 24 hours straight to pull off the perfect event! Now there’s a situation where a good plan is indispensable. Fortunately, the large scale of these events means we can send in a large team, and so six team members headed out to The Woodlands to execute another classic event.

What’s more, as a tentpole event for the Ironman Group, we had a full TV broadcast to handle on top of our standard event-production duties. (That’s our studio setup in the above image, with the hosts ready to provide commentary!) Between our broadcast team and the “boots on the ground” team, just about every team member was busy throughout the weekend.

One of the most crucial parts of these events is staying strong throughout. It’s not so simple as “keeping everything running until the end and then going to bed,” we must keep all of our audio equipment and livestreaming systems up and running, go out onto the course to shoot footage of notable athletes, and react to any unexpected changes all through the day and night, and then break everything down and pack it up for the next event, usually at around 2 in the morning. Everyone has to conserve energy as much as possible throughout the day and find the time for meals in between bursts of work, while keeping a vigilant eye out for any trouble that may arise. Unless you keep in mind the length of the day, you’ll find yourself falling asleep standing up! Luckily, with the right amount of mindfulness and some experienced leadership, Ironman Texas went off according to plan.

Long events or short ones, new ones or old, at home in Colorado or across the country, we here at BCC Live have the capability and willingness to tackle just about anything. Whether we need to send a small detachment of one to three team members or a full complement of seven or more to fill an event’s needs, our crew has the knowledge and the rapid-reaction ability to make it happen. When it comes to event production, nobody else in the country does it quite like we do. Having a small team of experienced and knowledgeable professionals means everyone is on the same page all the time and can be trusted to tackle any task that springs up. And with our robust base of information about past events we’ve helped put on, we can often just refer to how a problem was solved before (“Remember how we hooked up the start-line lights at Rock n’ Roll New Orleans? Let’s do the same thing in Nashville!”) and roll through without breaking pace.

The best part about our job is figuring out how we can apply the knowledge we’ve accumulated to new and exciting challenges. Events like the Canyons Endurance Run are a perfect example of that. Although a running race like that has very little in common with an Ironman triathlon, many of our strategies to tackle the event’s complexities were adapted directly from our plans for those events. We’d love to apply what we’ve got to the events on your docket, so reach out to us and we’ll get started!