Since 1991, Sky Sports has brought a wide variety of sporting events from around the world to a vast audience. The Premier League, comprising
the 20 elite UK-based football teams, is among their most popular programming. Using Frame.io helps Sky Creative consolidate their
content and quickly create bespoke promos across hundreds of
live matches per season.
When, for the first time in history, the Premier League took a mid-season pause from November until Christmas to accommodate the World Cup in Dubai, Sky Sports decided to celebrate the restart of the season. By creating a series of commercials for their TV and social media outlets, they re-engaged fans across the UK and Ireland. Traveling to 15 different matches across the UK and interviewing supporters in Dublin, capturing the fans during the games and at a variety of different locations from train stations to their favorite pubs, and having 10 creatives weighing in on 30 hours of footage required organization and clarity. How were they able to give everybody access to what they needed without bogging them down in endless searches for the ultimate line, comment, or reaction?
The assistant editor went through all the footage, placing comments as markers into the Adobe Premiere Pro timelines according to themes, players, goals, rivalries, and more, gathering all the best bits. From friendly disagreements to predictions and unfiltered opinions, there was a huge quantity of lively soundbites to choose from. Uploading the Premiere Pro timelines into Frame.io with comments gave the creatives access to all of the logged and organized footage, which essentially worked as an easily searchable database of the content.
In the past, the team would have printed out transcripts and used a highlighter to identify selects—which meant they couldn’t hear the actual delivery of the line. The Frame.io and Premiere Pro workflow let them search for a comment, click on a marker, and play it back. If a director saw something they liked, they could drop a comment directly onto the clip in Frame.io. The directors’ comments were imported back into the Premiere Pro sequence, giving the editor a kind of ‘paper edit’ to work from. The result? The ability to save time by eliminating manual tasks, having more specific feedback, and getting through lots of footage to identify the best bits to create a compelling campaign.
There were many directors and creatives involved, traveling to different games and locations. When, for example, Arsenal played Man City, a creative could open the Frame.io project, go to the Arsenal match to search for superstar Erling Haaland, and find every reference to him, or to any of the themes they were tracking. They could create their own markers that were date and time stamped, and the editorial team could start building bespoke targeted promos in Premiere Pro.
Because the footage was being used for multiple ads across multiple games, the editors were able to deliver unique promos without having to search through endless hours of footage. Having Frame.io on the creatives' mobile phones also allowed the directors to review and provide feedback on cuts while on the road.
Keeping the assets organized and centralized in their Frame.io projects also allows the Sky team to search for moments that remain relevant to create new content, saving “an incalculable amount of time” by repurposing footage that might otherwise have been forgotten. In fact, toward the end of the regular league season, when it looked like Newcastle was going to move on to a champion's league spot, the creatives wanted to know what coverage they already had of them that might be usable. The ability to easily search through the footage in Frame.io meant the editors could quickly create a brand-new, 30-second promo without having to re-upload clips or shoot new footage.
Sky Creative continues to optimize their workflows using Frame.io. As the Premier League project developed, they took advantage of the transcription function in Premiere Pro. By converting their transcribed captions into locators and uploading them to Frame.io, they were able to create searchable content of lengthy clips very quickly, with minimal user interaction.
Sky Creative is able to create more streamlined, flexible ways of working, allowing them to continue to support the growing demands of Sky Sports’ increasing (and increasingly engaged) audience.
