One thing this shot is sync the sound and visuals. In reality because of the slower speed of sound (around 340m/s) the noise of the rocket wouldn't be heard until the rocket was significantly above the tower. You also hear various other pieces in the sound that indicate it wasn't recorded on site.
This is one of the things I really notice in movies. Whenever something explodes in a fight sequence (eg Marvel movies[1]) the sound matches the explosion exactly. I find it annoying although I suspect the average movie-goer would be put off if the sound was realistically delayed.
Reminds me that explosions in space in Interstellar were silent (as they should be).
I hope this kind of thing catches on. If a movie shows a distant explosion and its sound is heard at the moment of the explosion, you don’t really think about it. But when they treat the sound accurately, it really grabs your attention.
I loved the detail in Interstellar where the audio from EVAs is muffled, like you're hearing what the occupant of the suit would be. The Expanse also does this to some degree.
Pretty sure that awful Sandra Bullock movie Gravity was quiet as well. Except that they made the awful choice to have Sandra Bullock screaming, moaning, and making all sorts of groans which came across as stupid and melodramatic. If she had been calmly radioing "Houston, vehicle breakup. Houston, pressurization loss. Houston, emergency EVA" it would have been better.
So, you'll notice that humans had that sort of flattened affect you're looking for in Kubrick's 2001, but he placed it in contrast to HAL, which for most of the film is the only character who communicates with an emotive affect.
You need some emotion, some performance. Kubrick got that and managed to achieve this in 2001 by combining the emotional austerity of spaceflight with an artificial intelligence who, in an inversion of expectation, is the emotive one. Then he exploited this for the climax, the loss of HAL's personality, being.
Lacking a HAL like element, especially in a film that has one actress, you can't make the humans dull, you need some emotional experience to attach to. In the context of Gravity, that means dramatic calls and the sounds of her human presence. People don't go to the cinema to listen to an ATC feed.
Probably because they insisted on not using any CGI and doing everything with practical effects instead. I think this is an absolutist take and I would have preferred they used a bit of CGI were it's warranted. Like that nuclear detonation for instance. I couldn't explain why, but compared to the archive footage of nuclear explosion, it just felt wrong.
Years ago I got to watch the last night launch of the Space Shuttle from a parking lot in a hotel some miles away. It was like watching a high-speed sunrise, and the sound followed several seconds later after the Shuttle had already gone into the clouds. It was really something the way the sound rumbled in after we'd already seen the launch.
Yeah, I actually misremembered that scene as being the opposite of what GP described, as the pressure wave was the thing that made the biggest impression on me back those years ago - it's the other thing that's very rarely modeled when things in movie explode.
Not sure about rocket launches but in energetic explosions the shock wave moves faster than sound for a certain distance, until the shock slows down and the sound catches up.
They don't per se, the precursor wave travels through the ground at the speed of sound in whatever medium (usually rock in nevada tests), which is about 5x the speed of sound in air.
If you haven't watched this entire series you absolutely have to. It totally changed the way I think about things and I can't think of a single person I've recommended it to that wasn't totally blown away by it. Even now it's super interesting and entertaining, even at around 40 years old.
I'm dreaming that someone will remake Connections some day. The quality of the recordings are quite bad, and while I think retelling the stories with a new production would be great in itself, I'm sure there's many new stories that could be told with additional research.
I think Robert Murray-Smith would be a great host. He has some of the same energy as Burke and he has some history-related videos on YouTube that has some of the same style of storytelling.
Kathy Joseph would be great for the research side. Her book "The Lightning Tamers" is pretty good at describing some of these weird connections and interesting stories throughout the history of electricity.
I used to have the VHS tapes of Connections 2 and Connections 3. They got more gaudy as the series progressed. They were less about the progression of technology and more about being shiny and spectacular.
> Television is entirely different. I remember walking around the world with a film crew, sometimes 15 people, and pointing at a bush and saying, "What am I doing here?" That's very time-consuming and expensive, and we no longer need that kind of thing. This time, there's no money. [...] Nobody went anywhere, so we didn't get up and catch planes all the time. And nothing got in the way of the story except me. All I did was stand and talk. Because of the structure, the nature of the production style, the story can move more densely and more quickly than ever before.
I don't know if I agree with him that it's a good thing. One of the things I loved about the original Connections was the experiential aspect of it. James Burke in front of a green screen is just James Burke in front of a green screen.
After watching his videos every day for months now I am still not sure where on the "technical genius" to "free energy advocate" spectrum I should place him.
I mean most of his builds are technically correct (e.g. most of his generators produce a voltage), but he often glosses over details that in practice make the idea unfeasible (e.g. a voltage does not help you if the generator can not provide enough current).
Other times he is just wrong ... just because whales and "tree-spinning-things" have similar "wings" does not mean that you can blow up the same shape to a wind turbine size.
(The reason behind that is that the smaller you get the more viscous air becomes (relatively) ... flies and other small insects literally swim through the air because of that. Imo that could be an explanation why the tree-spinny-things have a similar shape, they are just small enough that they "swim", too.)
I have similar thoughts on Robery Murray-Smith, however I remain subscribed because "Rule Thinkers In, Not Out"[1]: he says enough things that are new to me that I find him worthwhile to listen to, even if I have to subsequently think hard about it and verify it before I trust it.
Can you help me understand why air is (relatively) more viscous the smaller you are? Does it have something to do with the volume (mass) of an object growing faster than the surface area available to support it in the air? Or is it something else?
> I'm dreaming that someone will remake Connections some day. The quality of the recordings are quite bad, and while I think retelling the stories with a new production would be great in itself
I think that "quality of the recordings" thing is just something you have to learn to get over. They're not actually bad.
If you look on YouTube, you can find up-res versions of Mitchell and Webb that look amazing compare to other sources. Maybe the same technique can be used on Connections
I recently looked at an old technical encyclopedia at my grand mother's place. I paged through that 30 years ago when I was a little kid ... and was a bit surprised to see that a lot of it is still relevant today.
Not on BBC's iPlayer, despite it being a BBC production. There's so much good old stuff that the BBC can't be bothered to put up on iPlayer - they'd rather fawn over royalty or pretend to be impartial by giving equal time to experts and the sanity-challenged.
BBC iPlayer access is different in UK than elsewhere, right?
I suspect for much of the older stuff it's licensing issues making it not worth the time to verify, in their view. Just because it's BBC production doesn't mean there isn't 3rd party stuff that has to be checked.
That and content, they probably don't want to air everything they did in the 60s/70s for example, for fear of being buried in complaints...
The older programmes were typically exclusively BBC produced content - I can't think of any part of Connections that would be problematic for them. Surely with a new series of Connections having been made, they should have a look at making it available. It was a similar thing with their Oppenheimer series - fully available on YouTube and not on iPlayer.
According to IMDB [1] 'Connections' was produced 'in association with' Time Life Films so probably some sort of clearance would be required from them ?
FWIW Time Life were involved in a number of distribution arrangements with the BBC, there's some details here [2].
As I understand it though, the typical way this would happen is through a new and/or separate licensing agreement (in this case for PBS, and for a different region, etc.)
More stupid is that it may or may not be on their (joint with ITV) paid 'BritBox' service. I'd probably have signed up in an instant (despite the stupid name) if it had the whole archive. (But it doesn't, so (a) it's possible it doesn't have Connections; (b) I haven't signed up and don't know if it does or not.)
I mean the whole BBC (nevermind ITV) archive, not Connections specifically which I've never heard of before now.
If they just put up everything they already made they could charge more than Netflix IMO. Instead, god knows why, it's a limited selection that too from which some missing episodes due to the usual 'woke' rewriting of history & present (racist or whatever-ist people exist right, so what's the problem with a show having such a character? Doesn't mean it's right, nor that the show itself is that-ist).
> not Connections specifically which I've never heard of before now
You're in for a treat, especially if you can enjoy the 70s stylings of James Burke. I particularly enjoy his dry wit which would probably be toned down quite a bit for modern serious productions.
> the usual 'woke' rewriting of history & present
It's not so much rewriting (unless you're a publisher looking for free publicity), but attempting to not broadcast very offensive material that was considered normal back in the day (much as slavery used to be considered normal). Personally, I was quite a fan of "Till Death Us Do Part" featuring Alf Garnett as a racist bigot, but then I can appreciate irony and that the programmes were making the point that he was a character to be lampooned and pitied. However, there's too many people that would accept it at face value and use it to justify their vile racism, so I can understand that it's not suitable for modern consumption.
It's a nice shot, but it's a basic skill to read your (prewritten) copy to a specific deadline. The last shot was 20 seconds, he had plenty of time to practice and speed/slow down as the clock went on. Sure it would be stressful, but had it failed then the program would still have gone out, just with a voice over and a different angle.
The credit goes to the production team (including Burke, but presumably also his producer and camera) for thinking up the shot in the first place. For delivery, there are far more stressful and impressive live timings done every day around the world
In radio, talking over the start of a song and ending right when the lyrics kick in is called "hitting the post" and sometimes it's done without prewritten copy, just winging it.
It's just a skill you can practice and some people get quite good at it.
One difference with this is if you miss the lyrics, you can just try again next time. There's a new song every few minutes.
At my college radio station, every applicable record had intro time cues written on a label on the record jacket. You would know that there was, say, seven seconds you could talk over before the song began in earnest.
"Hitting the post" (not familiar with the term) was not really a problem for the deejays.
p.s. - I loved being able to inject our call letters into the gap on 'Riders On the Storm', timed to the top or bottom of the hour.
I get that it probably wasn't in the production schedule, but strictly speaking they could have come back a couple weeks later and done the shot with the voyager 1 launch.
I always think it's pretty impressive when there is a military fighter jet flyover at e.g. a sport event and they hit the timing within a few seconds to coincide with the last few bars of the national anthem. I don't know if they plan the exact flyover time in advance or if they are just circling a few miles away and coordinating by radio with someone in the venue.
Honestly these old shows had such a low budget I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was just Burke and the cameraman there. And in a way the stakes were low: if there was no executive producer shouting “GET THAT SHOT” at them they might have just been thinking “why not give it a try, if it doesn’t work out, oh well, we’ll just do a voiceover”.
Another "perfectly timed" TV moment with Rockets, unvoluntary this time, would be Ariane 5's first launch. The commentator literally says "all propulsion parameters at their normal value" (in French) as the thing is blowing up. (1:25 in the video)
That's a fantastic shot, to be sure. But for my money, Tiger Woods at the 2005 Masters did the most theatrical thing on live TV ever, and the cameraman couldn't possibly have captured the movie-climax moment better if it'd been filmed on a set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJEysanOT7w
You obviously never played the game. The shot mentioned was pretty much impossible, yet Tiger pulled it off. Dead lay chip with perfect backspin to stop the ball and allow gravity to pull it down the slope into the hole. Not only was the placement precision, the backspin precision, but the fact that there was just enough momentum to get the ball to drop into the cup.
Science is cool, rockets too, but the finesse of this shot hasn’t been seen since.
I think they were talking about the camera work and editing more than the shot itself. It's a fantastic piece of work if you look at it closely. Starting with a close up shot of the ball, slowly zooming out to show you the predicament while seamlessly transitioning to a pan of an anxious Tiger surveying the ground. Cut to sweeping shots of the beautiful scenery around and timing the pan perfectly to stop at Tiger as he readies to play the shot while bringing the flag post in view at the other end preparing the viewer to bring their full attention to the shot.
There's a lot more that goes into that piece end to end. The more you watch it, the more you tend to appreciate and marvel at the fact that it was all done live. It was probably just another round of play and day in the office for the production team, but when you shoot sports at the highest level, you better be prepared when you get that once in a career shot.
they probably only realized they were in their career shot when the ball started rolling down the slope towards the hole. You can kind of tell because the camera operator zooms in but is a little shaky until the ball slowly almosts rests before dropping in the cup. Producer A immediately cuts to Tiger yelling cheers of joy and several more cuts showing reactions and congratulations. I bet they were all just sitting there like "What just happened?".
Yeah, having a set timeline like the article’s shot where you have to kinda deliver 10 seconds in 10 seconds so that it ends with the rocket ignition was a clever use of timing that hasn’t been used since in that magnitude. I guess the OP was referring to “The best shot in TV history” rather than timed shot.
For timing, The article’s example is pinnacle. For just best shot, Tiger Wood’s 2005 shot. Best photograph shot: Earthrise from Apollo 8.
The 16th hole traditionally uses that pin position on Sunday to intentionally create such drama. The golf shot was not near impossible at all. It was the occasion that made the shot seem magical.
Even beginners can pull off these kind of shots, and that's what makes people fall in love with playing the game.
It's a great shot for sure but there an element of luck and the fact that one of the best golf players in the world can pull it off, on occasion, isn't in the slightest bit surprising.
I remember seeing this live while visiting my grandma, she happened to have this on her 8” CRT. She missed it until I got her attention: “GRANDMA! What!?”
I mean there are so many epic sports moments. Thinking about football (you may know it as soccer) and not just goals Gerard's goal vs Germany, Maradona's hand of god, or Zidane's headshot versus Materazzi.
So you'd have to be an expert on all of these epic moments, being able to draw them in proportion, and then have the expert pick the best. With panels, seasons of different topics, and a grand finale it would make a great TV show. You could sell the format, and become a millionaire..
..or accept the author's humility (with word 'probably'), assume the author is no expert on the field (neither am I regarding football), and go on with your life.
He's not arguing that Tiger's chip was the greatest moment in sports (although it is certainly up there), he is arguing that it's the best "television shot", superior to the one discussed in TFA.
And it's a strong argument. The BBC rocket shot was about timing, and it was pretty damn good, but everything was 100% scripted and precisely timed, and could have been practiced and rehearsed dozens of times. The Tiger Woods shot was live, obviously, and relies on a confluence of good fortune -- of 360 degrees, the cameraman was exactly behind the ball, he did a masterful job of following its movement while continuously tightening up the shot (an ultra-close-up of the ball is uncommon), the producer sticking with that shot an extra two seconds rather than switching to a reaction, the ball displaying the Nike logo, and finally, the extraordinary physics of the the ball stopping before finally dropping into the cup. And of course the person, place and time -- 16th hole on Sunday at the most famous golf course at the most famous tournament by the most famous golfer to take the lead and ultimately win the Masters. And finally, Verne Lundquist making one of the greatest and most memorable calls of all time, just naturally off the cuff, amazing. In your life!
> And finally, Verne Lundquist making one of the greatest and most memorable calls of all time, just naturally off the cuff, amazing.
I had to go back and watch it again (not memorable enough to me after just the length of time to read your reply, apparently!) - are you talking about 'Oh my goodness. Oh wow! In your life did you seen [sic] anything like that?!'? I don't follow golf, or know the name (Lundquist I mean, obviously Woods) but what's.. what am I missing, why's that 'amazing' 'just naturally off the cuff'?
"in your LIFE have you seen anything like that?" is highly unusual in the order of phrasing, the emphasis on LIFE, and the timing, stepping and extension of the first three words (all single syllables), that he only had one chance to compose and then speak, in about 10 seconds. Additionally, by asking a question, he engages the collective audience which raises the sense of amazement even further than if he had stated introspectively "in my life I've never seen that".
At 3:20:50 of [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PreYFbNZpVU) is another all-time legendary shot at the Masters. But the announcers say nothing for nearly a full minute and finally concede "words do not do justice to the greatness of that shot." By contrast, Verne found the perfect words instantaneously and delivered them masterfully (no pun intended).
Subjective I suppose, just doesn't seem like anything to me. He's excited sure, but just reacting like any excited sports fan, he doesn't say something amazing 'off the cuff' or any extraordinary quick wit or something like that, he just reacts, and fumbles it in his excitement at that. (It wasn't 'have you seen' as you quoted, but 'did you seen [sic]' as I did - a blend of the former & 'did you ever see' I suppose.)
You are entitled to your opinion, but there's a reason Verne Lundquist is an iconic hall-of-fame broadcaster assigned to the biggest events, and you're not. In the moment, he could have stuck to describing the athletics "a perfectly-executed chip shot" or the situation "Tiger Woods takes the lead" but he immediately recognized this shot was truly once in a lifetime, highly-emotional, bigger than any individual event, and spoke to that instead.
As far as the words he improvised, I would challenge you to find examples of other sentences in news or literature or culture that start with the exact phrase "In your life" (followed by "have you seen", not "did", your prior comment is incorrect). The guy basically created a new sentence structure in the language right on the spot, on the biggest stage.
> he is arguing that it's the best "television shot", superior to the one discussed in TFA.
TFA doesn’t say “best television shot” though, it says “best timed television shot”.
> The BBC rocket shot was about timing, and it was pretty damn good, but everything was 100% scripted and precisely timed
Well, yes. That’s why everybody is talking about it as the best timed television shot and why people are puzzled at this golf shot being brought up where timing is not particularly relevant.
It was late at night and I was about to go to sleep. I saw this article with a very cool video. That made me think, hey, maybe people who are into neat videos will also like this other one I know about, and because I’m sleepy, that ball hanging on the edge of the cup is kind of perfect timing, too.
That’s all. I was sleepy and wanted to share another cool video.
I've referred to that clip in past conversations about future moon missions revisiting relics like the Apollo 11's flag and the first footprints.
People tend to forget every manned moon landing site is also a launch site. Sure, there's no atmosphere to disturb the dust since we left, but the liftoff exhaust didn't care much about that.
A launch that knocked over the flag over eight meters away[1] almost certainly also left a smoothly blown-out depression where most of the first footprints were, no matter how inert the site has been since then.
And beside that, between the two of them there was enough traffic in and out of the module that the first footprints were probably stepped on over and over again.
The LEM separates at launch from the moon. The descent module remains behind. When the ascent engine fires, it blows the gas on top of the descent module below it. The descent module, having a mostly flat top, would direct gas sideways, blowing away the tall flag, but not the footprints.
That’s actually an interesting thought… on earth, such a redirection of the exhaust gas wouldn’t mean much, since the resulting turbulence would cause the surrounding air to get caught up in the wake of the exhaust anyway (making everything around it disturbed), but with no atmosphere? The result would look a lot different. I still think the footprints would be affected because the exhaust deflection is not perfect or complete, but it’s interesting to think about the idea of exhaust traveling thousands of miles per hour just a few feet above the lunar surface while the surface itself remains undisturbed.
It's also a rocket launch, which is commonly accompanied by a countdown.
It was also pretty common to have that countdown broadcast over the radio, as many people would show up just to watch the rocket launch. Even without a radio broadcast, it'd be as simple as a walkie talkie inside the control room and another with the filming team.
This shows up on the internet every few months, and I'm still astounded by how much attention it gets. It is not nearly as remarkable as portrayed.
Learning it wasn't composited surprised me. I always assumed it was green-screened (or blue-screened or whatever they used for chroma-keying back then) - that's because until ignition, the camera focus makes it seem like he's standing in front of a sheet with a painting on it, and overall, it feels as a very well-made composite.
I'm guessing they set the camera very far back, which will appear to compress depth. Otherwise, since he must be standing so far from the rocket, the rocket would be too small to see.
(It's not the lens - That's a pet peeve of mine, it's not the lens. The z-divide in any graphics simulation is what appears to compress or expand depth. The lens merely makes a shorter or farther camera distance practical. The lens themselves don't distort anything until you're talking about fisheye effects.)
> (It's not the lens - That's a pet peeve of mine, it's not the lens. The z-divide in any graphics simulation is what appears to compress or expand depth. The lens merely makes a shorter or farther camera distance practical. The lens themselves don't distort anything until you're talking about fisheye effects.)
Yes, thank you. It's quite unbelievable how many people get this wrong, even on specialized photography forums and the like.
I used to love watching James Burke's Connections on tv as a kid.
So much so that when years later I saw his book, Connections in a second hand bookshop I bought it and it sits in arm's length from where I am sitting now, unread. Just checked now and it's copyrighted 1978, this edition published 1979.
The show was brutally honest, not just about the history, but also the present. It's fitting for it to recognize that the difference between a space rocket and ICBM is the payload - something people don't understand even today, and then get surprised about ITAR or why space programs and governments getting nervous go hand-in-hand.
Reading the article I wanted to understand why it is possibly the best timed shot in TV history but it didn’t seem to provide the answer? What am I missing? Can somebody explain?
For the shot to work he had to point towards the rocket exactly as it ignited, meaning he had to deliver the whole line at just the right pacing to punctuate it with the rocket igniting. Today he'd just be standing on a green screen and they would add the rocket in post, but this is "doin' it live"
All launches are timed, even the shortest notification window is 24 hours for a launch, I could go make this same exact video every week at Cape Canaveral.
That brings back some very fond memories. Connections was a seminal TV show that was interesting, funny, and intelligent. As a newly minted electrical engineer, I loved learning the obscure history of things I used daily. Until Carl Sagan created Cosmos, there had been nothing like it nor has anything been like it since.
I remember years ago reading about the operating system and language used for voyagers 1 and 2, and how they've last so long because of them. Really interesting read, really wish I'd bookmarked it because I can't find it anymore.
I don't get why exactly this is so impressive. If the exact time of launch is known, isn't it trivial to begin a short, well-rehearsed speech at a specified time so that the delivery syncs with the launch?
It's impressive because it worked. Nobody would know if it hadn't because the shot wouldn't have been used then. Yeah, that makes it kind a trivial but it's still a good shot because it worked.
What makes this one the "best" is that this shot needed to be done right or it couldn't have been done again for years to come (at least if the launch itself was meant to be somewhat meaningful). A myriad of things could have gone wrong but didn't. Of course it's also easy to see they had some tolerances to work with (turning away from the camera to say "that" while standing motionless to make sped up or dropped frames less obvious if they had been necessary).
It's a lot like videos of trick (ball) shots: if you saw them together with all the ones that didn't work, the ones that did wouldn't really stand out much. But when the stars align and everything just "flows" like it should, that gives many people a fuzzy feeling and that's what this TV shot does. It's like a choreographed dance routine.
Do you have a better (or equivalent) example of an independent film crew and talking head hitting the nail on a visually impressive third party event outside their control?
(Without post production fix up magic, of course)
This is an impressive example of exactly that .. but is it the most impressive example, indeed.
Note that the article does not say that it was hard, just that it was perfectly timed. The fact that the time of the launch is known to the second is exactly why they were able to pull this off, but they still had to have the idea, and execute it right.
Plus, realize that we looked at it with the headline "most amazingly timed shot in TV history", which made us look for something extraordinary. It must have been a totally different experience to see this on TV at the time, half asleep learning about rocket fuel, and all of a sudden the guy points in the direction of the launchpad and a rocket lifts off.
I tried saying those words in a fixed time (12 seconds) while looking at a clock now, it still does not seem hard. Appears to be easier once you attach parts of the phrase to time offsets, and probably easier yet with a teleprompter.
You MUST do a post with the WORST timed shot: i.e. on 9/11/2001 the BBC announcing the fall of the WTC Building 7 while it was still standing on her live background
I was thinking about the shot by the crew doing Firefighters documentary. That shot of the first plane crashing is to me the best timed TV shot, even though it's for the wrong reasons.
This is one of the things I really notice in movies. Whenever something explodes in a fight sequence (eg Marvel movies[1]) the sound matches the explosion exactly. I find it annoying although I suspect the average movie-goer would be put off if the sound was realistically delayed.
[1] https://youtu.be/4vHxHgYaOes?si=BnzjncUQLHz_6DZy&t=58