AE Live is a leading provider of television graphics. We offer graphics design, delivery, remote production, virtual studios and augmented reality solutions
AE Live (AE) is proud to be working on its 6th Cricket World Cup for the International Cricket Council (ICC). The pinnacle cricket competition, staged every four years, is being hosted at 11 venues in England and Wales from the 30th May.
AE has worked on all ICC Cricket World Cups since 1996, with the exception of the 2007 West Indies competition, providing core world feed graphics as well as presentation graphics for various rights holders.
The style for this year’s tournament has also been designed by AE, after proudly securing the Graphics Design contract after a competitive ICC tender process. Oliver Pearson, Creative Director at AE commented, “We have developed a design that takes the core brand principles and is vibrant, smart and dynamic with burst of colour. The composition and graphical elements keep things simple and make sure that the most important information is easy to pick out”.
Since securing this contract, AE’s in-house full-time design team have been busy building in excess of a 100 different graphics templates on Vizrt, for use on the world feed, including a non-branded version for matches involving India due to advertising restrictions.
On-site, AE’s four crews of six-strong cricket specialists will be a constant presence at every fixture of the seven-week tournament. AE will be delivering core match graphics, including data collected by AE operators, at every stadium, as well as a range of striking augmented reality (AR) content, using Spidercam and its Vector System at selected venues – The Oval, Durham, Trent Bridge, Old Trafford, Hampshire, Edgbaston and Lord’s. In addition to this, we are providing big-screen graphics and a range of presentation graphics for Sky Sports and Star Sports India during high-profile fixtures, which also include a number of multi-language feeds being produced remotely at Star’s production hub in Mumbai.
For the first time in Cricket World Cup history, AE will also be delivering player tracking graphics using ChyronHego’s TRACAB application. This optical tracking product enhances the editorial narrative of the broadcast by showing viewers the exact field position of players as well as a range of data points including running speed and distances covered. Stuart Coles, AE’s CCO said: “TRACAB is traditionally used in football and other sports. The ICC and others tend to look at us a tech partner, able to make ‘X’ work in a practical environment, not just a graphics partner. The ICC asked us for ideas and innovations, and we went and spoke to ChyronHego about how we could use [player tracking] on this event”.
Terry Charlton, AE’s Project Manager for the Cricket World Cup commented, “The scope for this year’s tournament has certainly grown, especially with the addition of player tracking graphics. We are very fortunate that we can utilise our global resources to help deliver such large projects. This is a very big year of cricket for us at AE, with the India Premier League, the Cricket World Cup and The Ashes all happening within the space of around half a year, I’m not sure many companies could deliver this volume of work in such a short space of time”.
2019 is certainly proving to be one of the biggest in the company’s history. In addition to cricket, AE will be delivering its second World Cup in September for World Rugby in Japan.