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Joe Kivett on Card Stunts
President and Producer of CardStunts.com, Joe Kivett, has an interesting hobby that he has shared with virtually every sports fan.
He is the producer of the massive card stunts seen at events ranging from the unveiling of the new $5 bill to the Super Bowl.
Joe joins us for the April Interview to give us the scoop on Card Stunts.
Gameops.com: How would you describe what a "Card Stunt" is?
Joe Kivett: When I say "card stunt" most people act like they know what one is. If I sense they don't understand, I explain it like this:
It's when at a major sporting event we give every fan a card, which they hold up on cue and it forms a beautiful photo or backdrop in the stands.
Card Stunts can be as small as 100 cards or as big as 80,000.
Gameops.com: How many people do you need to make it work?
Joe Kivett: It depends, there are two types of card stunts.
One I call the billboard stunt. That's were we take an intricate image like a company logo and we literally blow it up the size of a billboard, cut it into small squares and then mount it on hard gator board. You can do those about as small as you want with very few cards.
The other type is called a Dot Matrix card stunt. That's a larger stunt where each card is an individual color. This is the much more common Card Stunt.
If we are doing the billboard type I may be holding a card that is a part of a person's eye. If you do the dot-matrix version each card is one solid color, like a pixel.
Gameops.com: I read that you do a limited number of these stunts per year, equaling about 6 card stunts. Do you normally do 6 large scale ones and some smaller ones, or are you counting everything?
Joe Kivett: Usually we'll do one or two small projects each year. This year we created a small Card Stunt for a Garth Brooks concert and a small one for a San Francisco Giants game. And when I say we do six a year, we really do six projects a year. This year those 6 projects included 16 card stunts. (Normally we do 2 card stunts per event). We created 7 stunts for one event in Alberta, Canada.
We can do a high number of stunts by giving fans multiple cards and a cue sheet. At the World Championships of Athletics we gave fans 3 cards, so they had a palette of 6 colors to work with.
They then followed a cue sheet and we created seven stunts. We could have created even more.
Gameops.com: I am most familiar with this in football. You mention the concert and the baseball stunts, so this obviously works in any venue or event. Is it better in football just because of the size?
Joe Kivett: We've done baseball, basketball, concerts, and World Championship of Athletic. The real key is that you need to have a sold out crowd. We could do a high school event or the Super Bowl, as long as the stands are full, we can do a card stunt.
Gameops.com: Let's walk through a game day from your perspective. I assume you have some staff there, or are you using some local staffing?
Joe Kivett: The way this works is that we ship the cards to the venue a day or two before the event we coordinate with a local team. The local teams provide us with 50 volunteers who help us put the cards in the appropriate seats. We sort the cards and work with volunteers who tape the cards to the seats.
Gameops.com: And you package the cards in a way that offers teams and sponsors an additional way to reach fans?
Joe Kivett: Normally for outdoor venues we put the cards in plastic bags and tape them to the seat. If it rains or if there is high humidity the card is protected. The bag also allows us to add a sponsor sample or coupon to the package for each fan.
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