SCAD in the Super Bowl: The Collaboration of SCADpro and CBS Sports for Super Bowl LVIII
Written by Gabriel Rein, Photographs courtesy of SCADpro.
“When we saw our graphics, we were screaming louder than every time there was a Taylor Swift fan cam,” said third-year User Experience major, Belle Duffner, referring to Super Bowl LVIII and the animated graphics contributed by SCAD’s very own SCADpro program in conjunction with CBS Sports. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Belle and learning about the challenges of such a large-scale project, and the valuable lessons learned along the way. While Super Bowl LVIII has left the headlines in the media, the power of producing a project such as this is timeless, offering SCAD students, across majors, a wonderful opportunity to also learn from their peers.
One of the lessons for Duffner and her team included the equipment and physical portion of the project. “We had to be working with CBS’s cameras that they were implementing on the Allegiant Stadium,” said Duffner, explaining the project goals. “So that meant we needed to have a point of contact and we had to understand how these new cameras they were implementing were working. We had to base our AR (Augmented Reality) models to really conceptualize what that 3D space looked like with these new perspectives.”
This larger-than-life mission had the entire team breaking past their limits and constantly asking themselves, “How could we change our perspective to see our models being projected on the field and then on the audience?” According to Duffner, the answer was simple. “Sometimes we had to push our barrier, and in this case, it was go big or go home,” she said.
What set this experience apart – aside from it being broadcast to over 200 million viewers – was the direct collaboration between SCADpro and CBS Sports which got students the opportunity to experience a high-intensity project with tangible stakes. “In classroom settings where you are experimenting with AR it is a set and planned setting,” said Duffner, “But for this project, we just had to hope for the best. That’s what makes it unique. We had to take such extreme lengths to understand and calculate how these graphics would look and feel and could simultaneously incorporate into a live and unpredictable game.”
SCADpro classes and projects are known to be rigorous and demanding, but Duffner’s enthusiastic response encourages other students to go for it!
“I was pretty nervous hopping into such a big SCADpro off the bat, but I had Seniors around me who would advocate and say, ‘This is an experience you won’t get anywhere else.’ If you are a student who’s eager to tackle not only the hard skills that you learn at SCAD but also the soft skills of interpersonal communication that you will learn through these projects, this is an amazing place for you.” Duffner then elaborated on how instrumental this project was in preparing her for her life beyond college, “When you go into those career fields and you’re working with other people, you will have to have cross-collaboration with departments outside of your own. SCADpros are an amazing place to start establishing those skills early on.”
At the end of our interview, Duffner described the most unexpected outcome of the project: the sense of community and purpose that she fostered with her peers. “After taking a break from SCADpro, it was really wholesome to get outreached by my peers from this project and saying, ‘Hey guys, let’s do a Super Bowl party together.’”
