EBU Map Improvements

The map on our website, showing the locations of all our clubs and teachers, launched in August and was very well received. Newcomers could now find clubs in their local area without having to know anything about the sometimes unusual county boundaries. Students could see quickly what teaching was on offer in their region. Information was presented in a much clearer and more accessible fashion. And there was a lot less clicking to do all round.

But it wasn't perfect and, as one of the most popular functions of our website, we wanted it to be better. So today we've updated it with some new features.

We've made it look a little neater in places. The club and teacher markers on the map are smaller and look slicker. The old markers occasionally overlapped each other, obscuring the one underneath, and this problem is slightly lessened.

You can now do local google searches within the map by clicking on the control at the bottom left. So you can look up things like the chippies in the Bedford area, for that pre-bridge dinner.

Some people have expressed concern that the map runs slowly on older computers or computers without broadband. For those people, we provide a simple text version of all the map's information. Just click the golden link at the top of the page. You'll see a list of counties and clicking one will give a list of the clubs affiliated to that county.

We're now marking National Pairs heats on the map (and there's a menu item to show them as a list on the text version). They show up with a black corner rather than the usual white and the date of the heat is given below the sessions information. It might be a little hard to pick out black-cornered markers from white-cornered ones, so one of the checkbox options is to hide everything but the clubs with heats. This should make it very easy to find heats in your local area. If you're organising a heat and it's not on the map then let us know.

There are one or two other minor feature changes which I'm sure you'll notice as you go along.

A lot of these changes were made because some of you took the time to give me feedback and tell me about the things you didn't like or felt could be improved. I'm very grateful for that. Please keep doing so, either by email or by leaving a comment.

Bridging the gap to TV: Part Deux

Television Pilots can normally take up to a year to complete, but we have been very quick and managed to edit, add music, add very cool graphics, edit some more, and then finally finish our bridge pilot in just five months. In this blog, I am going to write a bit about what happened next. See part 1 here.

The concept of the television pilot is to get bridge on TV. This wasn’t a simple thing to do. Bridge is not an easy game to pick up, and to do this in a 30 minute show is no easy task However, Matthew Baylis – the deviser and host – came to us with an excellent idea of how we could manage it. As Matthew says, “…I wanted something that shows bridge in a really positive light and had happy, smiling people enjoying themselves. My own view is that previous attempts at television programmes have tended to be a bit stuffy and formal. The other thing I wanted was to draw in as big an audience as possible. It needed to be clear enough so that new players would be able to follow it and yet interesting enough for more experienced players to enjoy.”

To make sure we managed this, we have a commentary by Andrew Robson, professional graphics and a tone that is light, friendly and welcoming. However, there is still an air of tension in the play – just like you get in a club. Mostly it was important to see the players’ faces, which means the viewer gets to share in that smug moment when things go well and the anxious looks when things are going horribly wrong….

Our editor and director of photography, John-Martin White was in-charge of the post production. As he says, “Exercising both brain and will power whilst exploring silent communication with other people through the random element of the cards. How exciting! And, as a film maker, how difficult! You see, film thrives on dynamic actions and loud noises. But, with this pilot we have proved that it’s not always the case – the immense focus and clarity of activity was revealed time and time again as our four players battled. All for the pleasure of making their bids come to life. I was amazed.”

“We kept the feel of the bridge club. The silence of the pilot is only broken by the sound of crisp cards moving across and being flicked onto the table, with the occasional instructions to dummy from the players”. Added to these sounds was the excellent commentary from Andrew Robson and Matthew Baylis.

The post production was in two parts: firstly, we needed to get the commentary to be in line with the three games. We also needed to make sure that the pilot was crisp and well edited. John-Martin worked on this with a small team over a few weeks of summer and completed his work in September. Secondly, we needed good graphics, so that viewers (experts and beginners) could understand what was going on. We brought in graphics designer, Dylan Byrne from Bog Standard, who John-Martin had worked with before to create the various graphics required for the bridge games and the show. Over the four weeks of October with the guidance of Matthew Baylis and me, Dylan has painstakingly created the various graphics required for our show.

Happily we are now complete and we will be having a premier for our players and staff at EBU HQ on Thursday. So far, we have had good feedback from various people we have shown it to, so we’re quietly confident.

Our next step is much more complicated and I have already started to put out feelers to UK television channels about our pilot. We have to be very careful and it must be a drip drip process of which media sees the finished product. However, we have high hopes and I will update you with our progress as soon as we can.

Matthew concludes: “Now the pilot is done. Huge amounts of work from all involved – particularly the highly practical Matt Betts who made it happen – whilst letting all us arty sorts be well, ……. arty. We have learned lots more about how to make it work, which will help make the process of production very smooth. When producing it commercially the editing and vision mixing can be done on the day so the costs will be low. The graphics and the personnel are all in place and we now have the chance to make some inexpensive television that looks good and is all about…bridge! Now there are just two questions.

1) Does the pilot really appeal to the majority of new players (well, my 10 year old likes it!) as well as more experienced players (so does my mum!).
2) Can we sell it to a broadcaster during the credit crunch?

I think it could be two resounding yes’s”

Thank you to Matthew Baylis, John-Martin White, Dylan Byrne, Andrew Robson and Caz Stewart.

At the moment it won't be possible to view our TV pilot, because we need to send it to various media outlets first. However, at some point we will add a little teaser, so you can all have a look.