Spit out all hungry and born anew

[austin_dern]

[ Sorry to be so late; I was at the Cinematic Titanic performance, more about which anon. If this movie taught us anything, there are severe defects in our educational system. ]

Our tickets were bought by my brother's workplace and I'm not sure how he ended up with them, but they were seats with some definite advantages for hockey: almost directly behind one goal, but high enough that the risk of a stray piece of equipment hitting us was really nil. You'd need not only the hockey puck to go wild but also to be relayed by a small, solid-fueled rocket to get up to us, somewhere around 25 storeys up. So we had a long escalator ride up to our level. A quick glance at the map confirmed that we were not quite 180 degrees around the arena from our seat, and under my guidance we promptly set off in the wrong direction so we did have to walk more than 180 degrees to get there. Still, we got seated with just a couple of minutes to spare, long enough that we didn't feel rushed and short enough to not get bored watching the countdown.

I hadn't been to professional hockey before, nor Devils hockey (yeah, I know they've got a lot better, but man were they bad when they were bad), so I was watching for little things that might surprise me. For example there was the start-of-game countdown, which you don't get in baseball games. As it got to zero the scoreboard showed a little video of the New Jersey Devil, or at least a guy dressed as Pitch from classic Mystery Science Theater 3000 experiment Santa Claus smiling and nodding and waving his trident around to set lightning off in the scoreboard and the video side panels. The video side panels were also used to show close-ups of Devils player faces, giving the impression that giant hockey players were peeping through the Venetian blinds.

The game didn't start just at the official Start-Of-Game time, which shows the dangers of running this sort of countdown to events that are just going to happen when they happen and there's no rushing them. Maybe they were waiting for the TV people to get back from commercial. But it got started soon enough, and in a nicely zippy fashion, and I realized that hockey suffers on television much the same way baseball does; the television screen just doesn't let you see the whole ``strategic unit'' of stuff that's happening at once, and you can't get the full sense of the game when it's chopped into master shots and close-ups instead.

About five minutes in, my eye was roving about exploring the corners of the center, and something big and flashing happened just in front of us. Based on the cheers, the flashing lights, and the triple foghorn, the Devils scored and they were waiting for a pilot boat to see them into harbor. And, sure, I technically missed it, but there had already been roughly eighty shots on goal already; I'd be better prepared for the next one.

Trivia: In April 1809 the New York State legislature appropriated $1,000 to surveying an Erie Canal. This was soon reduced to $600. Source: Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, Peter L Bernstein.

Currently Reading: The Death Of A President: November 1963, William Manchester.

Comments

[orv.livejournal.com]

But it got started soon enough, and in a nicely zippy fashion, and I realized that hockey suffers on television much the same way baseball does; the television screen just doesn't let you see the whole ``strategic unit'' of stuff that's happening at once, and you can't get the full sense of the game when it's chopped into master shots and close-ups instead.

I definitely feel that way about televised baseball. It only seems to have gotten worse as they've added more cameras. Now it's just closeup after closeup. I almost feel like I'm better off listening on the radio, where at least the announcer might tell me what the outfield is doing.

I went to my first hockey game a couple months ago, as it happens. (How MTU let me graduate without going to one, I have no idea; I must have slipped through.) It was a lot of fun and I'd do it again, even though our local team seems to be pretty awful.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It seriously leaves me wondering if people who like sports have any say in how sports are directed on TV. Maybe some of it's just the mental equivalent of lock-in effect --- you can see how the basic camera angles and rhythms for baseball or hockey or such were about all you could hope to do when it was 1946 and the only network was DuMont and the TV set was hoping to be five inches of blurry black-and-white with 140 effective lines of scan. I wonder what a group of talented directors and editors would make if they didn't have preconceived notions of where the cameras should point and what should be picked. Why not, like, a camera behind third base showing the pitch, hit, and first baseman in the same shot? Just for a start?

I got through RPI --- and two years living behind the field house --- without going to a hockey game. Actually, I think the only time I set foot in the field house was for graduation and for housing selection.

[orv.livejournal.com]

I think the camera positions are effectively locked in based on where the camera platforms are installed when the stadium is built, so I suppose there's a disincentive towards trying anything too creative. Getting it wrong would be expensive.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, the big camera mounts are designed in, and probably designed to just about what the legacy design dictated. But you could do a fair experiment even with hand-held cameras from anywhere you wanted to buy a couple of seats --- they put up with that sort of thing for court-side cameras at basketball, after all --- and convert good ons to permanent mounting positions.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

It can be learned and changed; non-US telecasts of Soccer games, for example, are much nicer than the US telecasts.. but the US broadcast media are starting to catch up and learn from their foreign cohorts.

Also possible for certain shot selection may be the TV network's contractual obligation to show in-stadium advertising clearly.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I did find the football coverage in Singapore better than the equivalent in the United States. I don't have any basis for comparing cricket coverage, though. The ESPN Cricket channel was its own little and very expensive tier.

But it is creepy having the cameras catch the adverts which were painted on the ground at a skewed angle so that from certain Official Camera Locations they appear un-distorted on the screen. This makes them look far more distorted than they would if they were just painted on the ground and left in perspective. And it was even worse on a flat-faced picture-tube screen.