Sharing my Commentary Notes
The more you do something, the better you get at it.
The IPL is over, so is my vacation, and I am back at it!
I took some time to reflect on the IPL, and it’s amazing that I was able to do LIVE commentary from home. I was talking about it to someone from my parent’s generation today and they were amazed, even though I’ve already started taking it for granted. I showed them this video of how the entire set up looks, how just a light, a laptop, a pair of headphone and miles of LAN cables can connect three broadcasters in three different locations, over one live broadcast.
Now, to the notes. I always do my research before commentating on a game, and for games that I’m doing with bigger organisations, they make our job easier by giving us large stats documents (thank you, stattos) from which we can draw our insights. Besides these, I also use other sources of research, so as to give me a more all-round view. Then I compile the best of that info into hand-written notes.
(I don’t always use hand-written notes. More and more I save my notes on a device, so I can revisit them easily later, so that they are searchable. But I was using hand-written notes for every game this IPL.)
And that’s what today’s post is about notes.
Here’s a note from the first phase of the IPL, back in April.
There’s a lot of squiggles, poor handwriting, over-writing, and the data that is there is unclear, there’s no format to it that makes it readable and easy to find in an instant, which is exactly what we need to do as commentators.
Here’s a photo from the later in the first half of the IPL:
There’s more structure to it. There are sections for different kinds of data, making it easier to find. I tried a crude method of highlighting, which I improved by the end. The data is clearer, the handwriting neater, which usually represents a clearer mind (I’m going to do a dedicated post on handwriting later on.)
Now here’s a photo from the second half of the IPL:
You can see the difference. There’s a lot more neatness, which makes it readable, but that’s just the aesthetics. There’s a little more structure, but not as much as I would like. There are dedicated spaces on the page for particular bits of data, which I know will always be in that spot, across every match.
And here are my notes from the Playoffs, after getting a chance to refine the process for almost two months:
So much better. There’s a clear format, which is consistent across pages. There’s a lot more info, without looking cluttered, which makes it easy to find that info. Even the overwriting is neater than it has been in previous versions. The crude highlighting system is replaced by flags which point me to the relevant data quickly.
The evolution is clear. I didn’t take any classes on this. No one coached me. I didn’t ask anyone for help. I just evolved my own processes, simply by doing things over and over. I’m very lucky that I get to improve by doing something that I’m paid to do. And for those of you who want to get paid to do what you love, keep doing it is the advice from today’s post. And that’s what I’m going to leave you with today. Less words, more pictures.
Well, not quite leaving you. If you want to get to know me a bit better, I’ve got a treat for you. About a month ago, my friends and I trekked to a popular trail in Pune, spending about four hours in the hills. I made a video of the journey, which my team has edited nicely into a vlog. This video is on my other channel, where I plan to post more off-beat content.
You can hear my huffing and puffing. Been on a few more treks since then. The more I do it, the better I get. Building up my trekking endurance for something quite special, which I’ll tell you guys about in a future post.
Till then, take care, and happy T20 World Cup.