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Making it on the big screen

It’s all fun and games until you get put on the Kiss Cam with your cousin.

It was fall 2011, and Caitlin Taylor was attending her first Utah State football game. The Las Vegas native was visiting her cousin Tony Brown, enjoying a 54-17 beatdown against Weber State — until a bit of half-time entertainment caught the relatives on camera.

“We were just looking at the big screen you know, laughing when the old people kiss, laughing when people do not know they are the screen,” Brown said. “And then I saw my face with my cousin. My initial reaction was to escape and get out of the camera frame, but I got caught up in the aisle and was stuck.”

20 seconds passed. The camera operator didn’t flinch.

“As people were yelling at me and booing me, I was shouting ‘She’s my cousin, she’s my cousin!'” Brown said. “The people that heard my cries stopped yelling and started laughing, but there was still a lot of booing going on from the rest of the stadium.”

The cousins had fallen victim to the stadium’s Kiss Cam, a standby time-filler used for breaks in football and basketball games. The excuse to kiss another was, in this instance, unwelcome, much to the displeasure of the rest of the student section.

“I would rather be known as the kid who failed at Kiss Cam than be known as the kid who kissed his cousin,” he said.

Brown’s uncomfortable appearance on the Kiss Cam wasn’t an isolated incident. Several students have been caught sitting next to family members, plutonic friends, and even best friends’ boyfriends.

“I went to an Aggie basketball game with two of my guy friends last year,” said Elise Frederickson, a USU grad. “The one sitting closest to me had just kissed my best friend the week prior. When the Kiss Cam zoomed in on us, I panicked and told him to kiss me on the cheek and we got booed.”

There is no law mandating a kiss must be shared between couples shown on the Kiss Cam, but from the way USU’s storied student section responds to those who refuse, kissing may be the easiest out.

“Throughout the game I was getting some angry texts from people that recognized me on screen,” Brown said. “The following week, people would stop me on campus because they recognized me from the Kiss Cam fail.”

Layne Lawson, a videographer for Ciscom media — the company in charge of everything on the big screen during games — has been filming USU fans since fall 2014. He described the process of selecting fans in the crowd as being mostly random.

“They give us a heads up when that portion of the program is coming up,” Lawson said. “They’ll say, ‘Next media timeout we’ve got Kiss Cam. Find couples in the crowd.'”

Lawson added that since student couples are generally more fun for the crowd, he tries to find particularly interesting pairs in the Hurd. Frequently, students appear on-screen that have no intention of kissing each other. That doesn’t stop Lawson and his fellow camera-operators from having a little fun.

“There was a couple in a game earlier this year. They must have been really good friends,” Lawson said. “They wouldn’t kiss each other. We have that happen about every other game. We’ll leave it on them to embarrass them for a minute and then switch it off.”

Despite the potential for embarrassment, Aggie fans like Brown still see the humor in the tradition.

“I think the Kiss Cam is super funny,” Brown said. “I like how our school has so many True Aggie Nights and the Kiss Cam at every sporting event. Basically, it’s just another way of guaranteeing ‘first base’ if you attend USU.”

— logantjones@aggiemail.usu.edu

Twitter: @logantj