Foreman Field will offer feast for eyes and ears

NORFOLK

When Old Dominion kicks off its football season Sept. 5 against Chowan, the renovated Foreman Field will be as wired as the 20,000 people on hand.

The old lady - the stadium was built in 1936 - has 56 miles of new fiber optic cable running through and beneath her, part of a grand plan to give fans a video and audio show to remember.

ODU has invested $1.5 million into the stadium's audio and video production systems - not counting the approximately $1 million for the 30-foot-wide jumbo video board.

At the heart of the installation and implementation has been Rick Lovelace, who started working in ODU's IT department 15 years ago. For someone whose primary job once was setting up work stations for faculty and staff, this is a dream assignment.

"This is all about taking it to a whole new level," said Lovelace, manager of communications research and support. "Where there was a time when we were working with analog systems and copper wire, we're all HD now, with fiber optic cable that's no thicker than a strand of hair."

The investment is designed to provide premium sound and stunning graphics. As Dwayne Smith, Classroom Central Senior Engineer at ODU, explained, "It is so fine-tuned that the sound level for every fan in the stadium should be the same, whether in this seat over here or that one over there."

The intent is not to "blast" people out of their seats, but instead to provide the clearest, crispest sound possible.

"It's all about evening it out," Lovelace said.

Gone are the days when six huge speakers - monstrosities that looked like they came off the roof of Jake and Elwood's car in The Blues Brothers - serviced the stadium. Back then, the sound quality was so bad it seemed the public address announcer was working in a cardboard box, under water.

"You'd get blasted with too much sound at one end of the place, while at the other end, you couldn't hear what was going on," Smith said. "And there was a lot of reverberation."

There are 51 new speakers throughout Foreman Field. Yet, the sound is designed to be neighborhood-friendly, too.

"The goal is to isolate the sound effects within the field while accommodating the local residents," Smith said. "We also hope to isolate the sound away from the field and keep it only in the stands."

Much of the programming of the sound system and video boards will originate from the Constant Center, which has benefited from the refurbishing of Foreman Field.

"The audio/visual system at The Ted is seven years old and needed an upgrade anyway," said Lovelace, who was also instrumental in the initial development of the audio/visual there.

"And we didn't want to build a second control room at Foreman Field. It just wouldn't be economical. So we will run much of what goes on at Foreman Field from the control room at The Ted."

The new programming system is not limited to events at Foreman Field or The Ted.

"We will have the pieces in place to run productions anywhere on campus," said Bob Fenning, ODU vice president for administration and finance. "We'll be able to operate from the baseball field to the Webb Center."

As for productions at Foreman Field, a crew of three programmers will work in a small control room in the west end of the game-day building beyond the south end zone. Three more programmers will man the controls at the Constant Center. Three camera operators positioned throughout Foreman Field will help provide live video.

Replays, graphics and live shots will be shown on high-definition televisions throughout the stadium and on a jumbo screen that has a virtual pixel-sharing component that is expected to produce resolution four times greater than what fans are accustomed to. The technology boasts the ability to produce 280 trillion colors.

It's not HD, but it's brilliant.

"The colors and brightness will make it pop," Lovelace said. "The same type of board is being installed as we speak at U.Va."

Doug Higgons, general manager for Global Spectrum, which operates events at the Ted and Foreman Field, said that his programming crew will use the football team's four preseason scrimmage games to work out many of the kinks.

"We'll kick the tires during the first scrimmage, then we'll practice our live video replay during the second," he said. "We'll have a dress rehearsal of sorts with the third scrimmage and then run a modified rehearsal during the fourth."

He promises, though, that no matter how grand the production is on opening night, it will only get better.

ODU hired Big Screen Network Productions, which produced graphics for the past 23 Super Bowls and the last three NCAA Final Fours, to help with its graphics and animation. Big Screen, which has offices in Los Angeles and Raleigh, N.C., will be on site to produce each football game.

"Starting 90 minutes before game time, we'll be in the entertainment business," Higgons said. "By the time we get to our fourth home game, it will have all matured.

"We won't have any game footage to incorporate on opening night. A lot of it will be graphics and still photography to start. But after a month, we'll be incorporating game footage in our graphics and introductions of players.

"It will be dazzling."

Rich Radford, (757) 446-2463, rich.radford@pilotonline.com