I had the opportunity to talk to Devin “Kratyr” Hoot about his work as a member of the NAL’s production team, his time working Flashpoint 3, and more.
From my understanding, the NAL talent, the casters, the analysts, are now in a physical studio as opposed to a virtual one, which they were in last year. How has this changed the way that you guys produce?
It actually affects a lot. I think it’s one of those things that’s very unseen. I’m pretty sure that the number of names on the call sheet almost doubled when we introduced the talent, being in person. And I’m not even talking about the talent themselves, I’m talking about the extra crew that we had to bring it around the talent. One thing, for instance, is we have to get people to build the set, and then the other one is we have to get people in charge of operating the cameras, making sure that the exposure and color settings are good. Things like that. We also have to get hair and makeup as well for the talent. We also have production assistants, making sure that talents comfortable, they get their waters, their coconut Red Bulls.
So is that studio in the same esports arena that the players are competing in? Or are these separate locations?
Yeah, so basically, we have our control room in Los Angeles and the set is in one of the studio spaces in the same office. The players are still in the Las Vegas Esports Arena. That’s the only part of the production that’s actually there
So kind of taking a step back from the NAL production for a second, how did you get to producing for the NHL and for FACEIT?
Its a long, drawn out, over time thing. I started out kind of how a lot of people start out, just running through the amateur level circuits. And then something happens, you meet the right people, months later, they go and work professional gigs. Then from there, I met a couple of people and I got the opportunity to work on the Challenger League broadcast, back when it was run by ESL, and back when the level of production was significantly lower than it is now. But it got me connected. Honestly, the the pandemic and the actual transition to FACEIT as the main tournament organizer for North American Rainbow Six were are two pretty big factors, in what helped me jump onto that. Obviously during COVID people were relying a lot more on remote production, which is something that I was already doing
It was also the fact that I could be presented to FACEIT like, ‘here’s the guys who’ve been doing remote production for Challenger League already’. At the time, there wasn’t as fleshed out a plan for Challenger League, especially because like with COVID, they were just trying To get NAL off the ground in time
So talking more about the production for the show, I think it’s safe to say that the Six Invitational had some huge steps up, from the quarterfinals on. For example: showing multiple perspectives at once, so that you could see what both players were looking at in a 1v1.
Once they moved to the actual, onstage portion of the tournament?
Yeah. I’m wondering from a tech perspective, is there a reason why we can’t emulate that on with the NAL, given its a LAN league? Is that because the FACEIT production studio is based in Los Angeles and the players are competing in Vegas?
That kind of thing doesn’t make it impossible, but yes, it does make it a lot more difficult. Because every feed that comes from Vegas, for instance, like we have all the cameras pointed at the stage, showing the team desks and we have the observer feeds, and so on and so forth. Those each have to be an individual like remote sends to the Los Angeles studio. And so then it becomes an issue of bandwidth and also having extra observers and extra machines that need to be set up by Las Vegas and tested. It just comes down to like, manpower and just the level of coordination that we can do when we’re working in this semi remote environment.
So as cool as those shots are, that’s limited to when everything is on LAN in the same location?
Right
Branching off to kind of talk about the Flashpoint event that you worked on, how was working a different game?
First of all, that was my first and only Counter Strike event that I worked so far. Honestly, it felt like I was kind of being opened up to an entire new world of esports and also production. To be completely honest, I feel like Rainbow Six can sometimes be in a little bit of a bubble with how it thinks things are done and should be done. Whereas Counter Strike is in a beautiful spot of just being completely open. The Source 2 engine is completely open source and anybody can just make whatever they want for it.
So for instance doing replays for [Flashpoint 3], I had a tool that would automatically record all 10 POVs and archive every single killcam and every single death cam. So when the analyst desk asked me to get a package on a certain player, I didn’t even have to go back and use my own like replay feed, I could just use that tool and just get it from there. It only required one server, it wasn’t even extra observer machines that we had to split up on our end.
There was also the fact that we had three observers, maybe four total for Flashpoint. One of them was the main program observer, the other one was the dedicated replay observer, the third one was a backup, and the fourth one was at the caster desk, so the casters can look through the game. The thing about the replay observer is that it was watching the demo on a seven second delay, so they could see everything that was going to happen, and then go back and kind of like have a second chance to catch it all on camera. So it’s as if I had all 10 player cams anyway. And like we didn’t actually need all 10 machines.
I’ve always viewed Siege as not necessarily behind when it comes to production, but slow to adopt new things. And some of those challenges, obviously, just because of the engine, we don’t have the Source engine. It would be hard to implement the floating cameras that you see in Counter Strike, because that’s a whole new mechanic that Ubisoft would have to add in, rather than simply being there and being open source for someone else to do it for them.
Obviously, Counter Strike has been around for way longer than Rainbow Six has. And it’s also the fact that most of these tools that get developed aren’t developed by Valve, they’re developed third party by the community. I mean, HalfLife advanced effects, that’s like a staple of any Counter Strike production or content creation, is technically illegal according to the Valve Anti Cheat. You can get banned by using it. You literally have to run Counter Strike in offline mode so you don’t accidentally queue Valve servers and get banned for using it. It’s this very open ‘anything goes’ kind of world, which is great. But, there’s also something to say for having a more controlled ecosystem, like what Riot does with League of Legends.
You mentioned briefly there auxiliary content, making pieces of small content pieces. Is that something that the NAL is trying to put more effort into? Given how close, relatively speaking, Las Vegas is to Los Angeles for a media day or two, in comparison to Europe or APAC. Does that advantage of being so close offer some benefits to creating that auxiliary content?
If you watch this Stage, I think you can already see. We have our initial preseason media day, and that’s where a lot of our interviews from the first few playdays come from. But if you notice later, there have been interviews that we’ve gotten throughout the Stage. One thing that’s nice about having, even if it’s remote, having a dedicated facility where the players are, helps when it comes to wrangling players for those kinds of content interviews. Now, there’s definitely been a push, now that we have the talent with us and the players in Vegas, we can both kind of corral them into a spot and be like, ‘Okay, we want you to do an extra interview for content’. On the last play day, there was a graphic that had a quote from Canadian. I think that one that one was over Twitter DMs. But there are definitely content pieces that we get like the Soniqs talking about why their Stage has been so rough this time around. That footage we get from the auxiliary interviews that we’re doing.