How the World Juggling Federation Fills Empty Seats for Broadcast Television

Jason Garfield founded the World Juggling Federation (WJF) in 2000 with the goal of getting the sport of juggling into the Olympics, and the organization has produced its competition programming for ESPN since 2004. Every broadcast needs the same production value as any other televised sport: multi-camera coverage, animated leaderboards, opening titles and a crowd that reads as full to a TV audience, work Garfield has historically built almost entirely in Final Cut Pro and After Effects. This year, Runway let him rebuild missing camera coverage, animate the show's full graphics package and recreate a sold-out crowd from a single night of real footage, work he'd previously have needed rotoscoping and masking to attempt, if he could attempt it at all.

A full house on night one, seats to fill on night two

Garfield's two-day WJF event in the Netherlands drew a packed house on the first night, with the audience filling the stage's front, left and right sides. The second day was scheduled earlier and much of the crowd was still arriving once cameras started rolling, so the side angles from that day showed rows of empty seats.

“It's either don't use those shots and you're limited to really one angle with nothing to edit from, or put people in the seats.”

— Jason Garfield, Founder and President, World Juggling Federation

He'd tested Runway the year before but set it aside because video models at that point weren't adhering to text closely enough. When the empty-seat problem arose, he returned and realized he could use it to add people into his existing footage while preserving the rest of the shot.

Rebuilding a crowd, frame by frame

Garfield built a contact sheet of the camera angles he already had covered, then prompted a drone-style flythrough into the tent, revealing the stage and audience. He also fed in footage of a competitor entering the stage, so the model could recreate his movement from the angles he needed for the edit. Early attempts using Seedance were usable but inconsistent; results improved once he started using Aleph 2.0, which let him take the exact source footage and add people to it without changing anything else in the shot. Because juggling moves too fast for the broadcast's 30-frame-rate footage without flickering, he exported clips in slow motion before bringing them into Runway, then used Topaz to rebuild the frames he'd dropped.

Footage featuring AI-generated crowd fill footage

His bar was simple: to anyone watching, the second day should read as full as the first. It cleared that bar on every shot but one extreme wide angle, which went back to After Effects.

“There was a lot of experimenting with different prompts. I'd paint certain areas white and tell it to fill that space with people behind the person.”

— Jason Garfield, Founder and President, World Juggling Federation

Replacing the work between the shots

The crowd work was only one part of the post-production Garfield had historically handled in Final Cut Pro and After Effects: every broadcast also needed opening animations, competitor profiles, leaderboards and scoring graphics. For the graphics, he developed a pipeline of several image generation steps followed by a single video generation step.

He generated a profile card for one athlete until it worked, then used it as the reference for the other competitors and their stats. After compositing all three cards into one still, he paired it with a camera flying in on a crane and prompted the video sequence around it.

The same generate-and-combine approach produced show titles, leaderboards, a rematch scoreboard that distinguished the red and green scores, and pyrotechnics around the stage, even though there had been no fireworks at the event. And for leaderboards, he fed in a screenshot of the judges' printed scoring sheet rather than retyping scores into an After Effects template.

He also developed a Photoshop-and-Runway workaround for broadcast title-safe margins, and the competitor names that had taken days of prompting to spell correctly the year before worked on the first try this year.

“Adherence to text is better in Runway than anywhere else. If something can't get a name spelled correctly or present a score the way I type it in the prompt, that’s a dealbreaker.”

— Jason Garfield, Founder and President, World Juggling Federation

Building the next broadcast from this foundation

The finished special ran about an hour, cut together in Final Cut Pro from generations capped at roughly 15 seconds each, and Garfield produces the entire broadcast package alone. The crowd fills change how the WJF will shoot its next event, not just how it will edit it. When turnout is thin near the stage, Garfield will frame differently instead of relying on generated people, and when a crane is outside the budget, he can generate the coverage it would have provided.

For next year, he also plans to start graphics from this year’s successful generations, including the competitor cards and will keep using Runway for leaderboards and scoring graphics, which is currently the most time-consuming part of his edits. He also plans to use Runway to handle full-screen wipes and transitions, which he currently builds in After Effects.

What began as a way to rescue thin crowd coverage has become a production foundation for WJF: a one-person team can carry successful graphics forward, generate coverage when a shoot falls short and spend less of the edit rebuilding the mechanics of a televised sport.