A Visit Behind the Game-Day Production at Gillette Stadium

Heading to Gillette Stadium has historic implications when thinking of all the classic New England Patriots games that have taken place on the gridiron located in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Thinking of those huge, massive moments, it only makes sense that The Kraft Group delivers an LED video display to match. In the newly constructed north end zone, the largest outdoor video scoreboard sits just below one of the tallest lighthouses in New England.

Naturally, Daktronics delivered this feat of size and technology, so we visited with the control team tasked with bringing the new technology to life on game day. The duo of Abbey Thistle, Director of Event Presentation and Fan Engagement, and Jen Gahan, Manager of Game entertainment and Fan Engagement, sat down with Matt Anderson and myself to talk all about it. The following is a short highlight of that podcast conversation.

Matt Anderson
You mentioned growing up liking sports and getting into the industry with communications…what enticed you to stay with it?

Abbey Thistle
I think the thing I liked the most was the influence over the fans. And even to this day, that's my favorite thing. It's that reaction that you get from the fans when you do something. And I remember there was this video that we used to play at the Broncos and they I don't even know they might still do it, but we called it Renegade and we would turn off all the displays for like 10 seconds before playing a video and the place would go bananas! They would be just stomping their feet and you could just hear it reverberate.

I remember being like, “This is so cool!” And we’re doing this. We’re affecting that. So, to this day, that’s my favorite part, just being able to influence the fans’ experience and what they’re seeing.

Matt Anderson
And what about you, Jen? What was your first entrance into sports?

Jen Gahan
I kind of sparked interest in production and things like that in high school, taking a TV production course and thought, “This is cool.” All this behind-the-camera stuff, I wanted to give it a go. So, I went to Emerson College and got my degree in TV and video production.

Taking that into sports, the Boston Red Sox had open calls for day-of-game employees. I had no idea this whole department existed. I like sports, I’m a massive sports fan. And now I’ve been immersed in this thing that we didn’t hear about in college. And I’m so lucky I stumbled into it.

Justin Ochsner
That sounds like the colleges and even high schools we’ve talked to, we hear that they’re making these broadcast classes and telling their students that they don’t have to be athletes to be involved in athletics. They could be interested in art or graphic design and get into designing for the video board.

Abbey Thistle
To combine two passions, like what could be better than that? It goes with the design for video boards as well. Having experience in designing specifically for video boards, I think that’s extremely important. Because Daktronics is involved in sports, you know how to design for sports and video boards. Because not every stadium has a 16:9 board. They are all different pixels high by pixels wide and designers might not always understand how to design for that and make it look good.

Take our board for example, it’s not 16:9. Gone are those days. We’re figuring out how to display something that’s 1920 or 1080 pixels without blowing it up on the display and seeing degradation and things like that. We’re not the only team that’s had this problem, there’s got to be a different way, a better way. That’s fun to figure out but challenging at the same time.

Justin Ochsner
Does that resonate with the change leading up to this year and everything that’s changed?

Abbey Thistle
So, when I first started here, there was an SD control room downstairs in the bowels of the stadium that was used for the New England Revolution games, even though we had an HD video board at the time. And then for New England Patriots games we brought in a TV truck for productions. And those two teams were the only games we did at the stadium.

Since then, we’ve added at least 10 other ticketed events to the stadium. So we’ve gone from 20 events with an SD control room and two people running it to a massive new control room with probably 40 people in it on game day plus our other control room that has all of our Daktronics LED systems in it. We’ve almost doubled the camera operators, doubled or tripled our staff, our boards are 3 to 4 times larger than they were and we’re just doing so much more. We’re truly a 365-day stadium. I honestly can’t think of a single day where we haven’t had something here.

To hear more from Abbey and Jen on their work at Gillette Stadium and how they use our technology to bring that stadium to life for events, click here to watch the full video podcast or click here for the audio version.