Meet the guys flying the SkyCam at this year’s Super Bowl

[ResidentialBusiness]

For two guys about to fly a camera rig 30 miles per hour above the heads of clashing players, Alex Milton and Vinnie Scaffidi seem utterly at ease. Despite the fact that some 100 million people are about to watch their work in real time during Super Bowl LIX, the SkyCam pilot and operator, respectively, are not daunted. They’re ready. They got to New Orleans around 10 days before the big game. They’ve set up. They’ve rehearsed. They’ve got the entire season under their belt. And, well, now is the fun part.

“It’s exciting to get to the end of the year and everyone’s playing for real,” from the camera people to the production crew to the players themselves, Milton says. “Everyone’s doing the best they can. So when it comes, I’m like, ‘Yes, all right, here we go.’”

You’ve likely seen their work before in one of the hundreds of games they’ve shot. That’s because SkyCam pilots and operators occupy a bit of a rarefied space—Milton says there are only around 20 pilots and 20 operators—and the best and most experienced tend to work in tight-knit teams like these two, where instinct and symbiotic connection combine to capture some of the most dramatic moments in sport at large. 

[Photo: SkyCam]

EYE IN THE SKYCAM

Contrary to what you might think, SkyCam is not a drone, nor is it automated. A pilot “drives” it. Or rather, they technically control the four taut cables that the 45-pound camera head is mounted to, which spool in and out as the pilot moves the rig around the stadium in real time. (Those cables are a feat of engineering in their own right—though they’re thinner than an iPhone cord, they’re made of braided kevlar and can hold up to 800 pounds each, and they have the ability to carry fiber optics and electrical signals.)

Milton, 38, was raised in upstate New York, and now lives in Moab, Utah. He got into television by way of “lifting boxes and unloading golf carts.” He says he networked his way to the folks who ran and built jibs. After getting an operating job, he started working on his pilot’s license, and word of his dual interest reached the SkyCam team, who invited him for a tryout. 

Scaffidi, meanwhile, operates the Sony HDC-P50 1080p HDR camera on board the SkyCam. The 66-year-old was raised and lives in New York state, and has a deep background in sporting events. In the ’90s, when remote robotic cameras cropped up for hockey, basketball, and other sports, he was right there—and when SkyCam needed camera controllers, he was there, too. “Now he’s just operating a robotic camera that happens to be flying,” Milton says.

Despite its technological advances, SkyCam is a relatively old system. Inventor Garrett Brown—the guy who also won an Academy Award for creating the Steadicam—designed it in the early 1980s. It debuted in a football game a few years later, and took a more prominent role in the sport in the early 2000s, delivering viewpoints not unlike those in the popular Madden NFL video game series, and offering perspectives that on-field cameras can’t replicate. Milton says SkyCam was initially used for replays, but in the modern era it constantly appears on live broadcasts, and the list of shots keeps growing—so much so that today’s football viewers have come to expect it.

“Now, everybody wants it,” Scaffidi says. 

“I feel like we’ve crossed a line,” Milton adds.

[Photo: SkyCam]

TALENT, IN TANDEM

At this point, Milton is on his sixth Super Bowl. Scaffidi says it’s his “ninth or . . . tenth.” The pair says that you generally start at the bottom, in, say, college games, and work your way up from there. Directors and producers take a shine to certain people’s styles—the way they fly, the way they shoot—and often end up requesting specific pilots and ops. After a while, “As long as you’re doing your job well, that’s your seat,” Milton says. 

“Everybody’s very comfortable with each other, and we know what they expect from us and what we expect from them,” Scaffidi adds. “As the games escalate, eventually you get to the Super Bowl. And we never like to say the Super Bowl is just another game, but that’s kind of what it is. At the core of it, it’s still essentially a football game.”

So they do what they do. They sit shoulder to shoulder in an operating location overlooking the field, with a feed of their SkyCam. Scaffidi uses a rocker switch to zoom, a rolling wheel to focus, and a stick to pan and tilt the camera. Milton sits with his face 6 inches from the screen and uses two joysticks; one controls the direction of the rig, and the other the camera elevation. Fox Sports says that at the Super Bowl, Milton will be capturing the main action at a height of 12 to 35 feet, while another team operates at an altitude of 55 to 90 feet for broad shots.

“Vinnie and I are listening to a headset, listening to our announcers tell a story,” Milton says. “We’re trying to match their story as best we can visually.”

If the announcers reference a player, the pair finds him. They also think ahead to where the game or conversation might lead next—and they go there. If someone turns their back to an on-field camera, the team glides in place to offer a fresh angle, racing back and forth between the main plays.

“We’re just moving all over the field and trying to sell all kinds of shots,” Milton says.

Meanwhile, the two are constantly communicating in a stream of consciousness: “That guy ran off; where did he go?” As one person looks, the other counts down the clock and tells him when the ball is about to be in play. “Wait, who just landed that tackle? I’ll watch him; you shoot the player who got injured.”

The two are very much a bonded pair who know each other’s instincts—and the game for viewers at home is all the better for it. Milton says SkyCam tries to keep continuity between its pilots and ops, and so do the networks. 

“Alex and I can almost do this in our sleep, we know each other so well,” Scaffidi says. “It just shaves off a couple of seconds here and there. And that can make all the difference.”

A SkyCam Wildcat crew preps for an NFL game at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, in December 2024. [Photo: Matthew Huang/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images]

A FLOW STATE

Sure, shit happens. Milton says that in his 13 years working for SkyCam, two cameras have hit the field from technical issues—one from loss of power, and one from a computer crash, essentially. But none have involved player contact, and it’s always been when the field is empty. (Safety is “the utmost responsibility” at all times, he says.)

Milton and Scaffidi try not to dwell on the possibilities, and they scale their approach to how the system is performing on a given day. 

“When I’m really confident and everything’s working really well, and everything’s in place, we’re jamming, man. We’re getting right in the huddle. We want to see eyes,” Milton says. “And then when you’re a little nervous and you’ve had some equipment issues, you start backing off those things, taking a menu item off. . . . You can’t just run the camera the same all the time.”

Like the sport of football itself, camera operating is highly manual. It has not been automated—and the process is surprisingly human.

“I dirt bike and mountain bike. I love motorcycles. I really like machines and feeling connected—and I feel some major connection to this camera, and how it moves, and how it feels,” Milton says. “It’s a flow activity for me. Vinnie and I, when we’re flying—not that we are the camera, but we’re really feeling it and really working together—that’s the coolest part of this job.”

In a game that thrives on elemental bonds to achieve the extraordinary (this year, Jalen Hurts and AJ Brown, Patrick Mahomes and DeAndre Hopkins, Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase), perhaps the remarkable thing about SkyCam is not the action viewers see but rather the team behind the scenes.

View the full article