The Open For The Ages
Using technology in order to recreate world’s most famous golf moments
The Open For The Ages
This year, in order to celebrate what would have been yet another iconic golf championship, The R&A created, juxtaposed over the same dates of this year’s original, but delayed edition, a special online event. The Open For The Ages was created as a celebratory event and built solely on advanced technology – using archive footage from past Championships at St Andrews, in order to recreate the drama of an Open. Imagine The Open’s best moments indexed in time, its winners over the years, and then turn them into a huge piece of filmed art, reimagining history re-written, games replayed, as time had no matter.
Born from History
The Open For The Ages was born from real archive footage, but then re-written into a fictional Championship. Technology in creating this one-time, historical movie, included historical data sets, players ‘career records and performances as relevant metrics. Keeping its traditions alive, the online Championship kept the tradition of potential winners, all cheered and supported via fan vote, in order to reach the final-round program. The final result was then turned over to the 10K fan base to a vote, via The One Club and social media platforms.
Technical Input
Tec:Agency was honored by supporting the R&A’s unique initiative, a world-wide premiere in sport, by having its input in all digital experience. We first received a request for organising an online event with pre-established scores. In the larger puzzle of this project, we transformed The Open’s website in order to stream a unique round, as if all the previous were already played. We prepared a strong infrastructure in order to host 250 logins / second, so no issue would be experienced while accessing the stream. The online stream was available after logging in. We constantly tracked our servers and made sure a backup was in line.
Leaderboard testing was also a priority – over 1K files were generated, and part of our team had to make sure that the leaderboard scores were synchronized with the streaming. We had three testing sessions prior to the event, and the last one included all teams – TEC together with R&A’s whole team.
Where past meets present
This project was an unimaginable one. The core of it all was the film prepared for the streaming, the 1000 hours of edit time of all 250+ pieces of archive footage. Digital enhanced the experience by integrating modern graphics and various enhancements to original footage.
The Open For The Ages meant for us rewriting history, alongside the R&A’s team. Meant being actively involved in a fantastic, maybe once-in-a-lifetime digital challenge, which will continue The Open’s tradition – that of creating history for more than 150 years.