SportsCenter

Behind the Glasses: With Daniel Ben-Kiki

Art Director Daniel Ben-Kiki (Photo courtesy Daniel Ben-Kiki)
Art Director Daniel Ben-Kiki (Photo courtesy Daniel Ben-Kiki)

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With the Labor Day launch of Scott Van Pelt’s midnight SportsCenter (#SCSVP), Front Row has been running a collection of posts bringing fans behind the scenes with Van Pelt and his production team. Throughout the “Behind the Glasses” series we offer a peek into a new SportsCenter that will present the world of sports through Van Pelt’s distinctive lenses.

Today, we meet Art Director Daniel Ben-Kiki, who has been with ESPN 12-plus years.

Hometown/Currently reside/School: Springfield, MA/West Hartford, CT/University of Connecticut

Top 3 teams: UConn basketball, New England Patriots, and searching for a new NBA team. Was a big Celtics fan until one day I realized I was mostly a fan because of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen (UConn guy). After they left, it occurred to me that I had no interest in the team!

In 25 words or less, explain your role on the SVP SC show: I was the Art Director on the show, which basically means I oversaw the creation of the graphics and animations. In the case of this particular show, that sometimes meant serious scrutiny of what color a moose graphic should be!

The best thing about working on the launch of a new show is: Seeing all of the pieces come together and actually get used in a real application. Planning can sometimes become somewhat abstract and you don’t really know what’s going to happen until you see the show on the air.

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In 140 characters or less, my favorite thing about SVP is: Him personally or the show itself? How many characters was that?! He’s a funny dude who reminds me of the heyday of SportsCenter.

If Stanford Steve were an emoji, he would be: I honestly don’t know Steve well so I suppose any bald emoji would do.

SVP_Gallery

So far, my favorite graphic for the show is: The segment of the open where the little SVP character is doing push-ups in an art gallery. This was based on a story we heard from Vice President, SportsCenter Mike McQuade about SVP randomly doing push-ups next to the anchor desk at a golf tournament during a commercial break.

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