(www.openculture.com)
I don't know the show, but when I first watched this clip (under the title of "greatest shot on television") I totally bought in to the hype and thought it really was amazing. You start out just walking alongside him, and only slowly realize where you are and what is about to happen, and everything is perfectly timed and composed: he ends his walk, reaches the conclusion of his explanation, and you realize what is going on, all at the exact time the launch begins. Brilliant!
Except that this is not "a shot" at all. I just hadn't noticed on my first watch that there's a very obvious cut just at the end of the "walk". It's a different angle from a different location at a different time of day, and he just has one sentence to say before he looks back at the blast off.
It would be no different from any news reporter on location at the time, reading a prepared message ahead of the launch, timed to end before the launch itself with no need for extensive rehearsals, the launch timing is widely broadcast, you time yourself accordingly with your talking speed, by adding pauses, etc. And on top of everything they probably had to do it live too.
I have no issue with James Burke or his show. And this scene is really beautifully done. But it's not the greatest shot in television. It's not even one shot!
(edited: typos)
The IIIE did indeed have a Centaur stage with a "thermos" full of liquid hydrogen and another with liquid oxygen, but that's not what we see in this clip -- the pillars of fire and smoke come from a pair of solid-fuel boosters that burn for about two minutes, followed by about six more minutes of flight powered by two more stages burning non-cryogenic liquid propellants (hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide) before the Centaur was ignited.
About 15 years earlier, I had done some work at the VAB and walked around the Saturn IV that was laying on its side there, just as James Burke had a few years earlier. It wasn't there when I worked the above referenced mission. I'm not sure when they moved it, or where it ended up (but it's not in the "rocket garden" at the Visitor Center).
If you mean just the Saturn IV (no B), that was the second stage of some early Saturn rocket. I don't know much about those or if one was ever on display.
So knowing, the engines starts 3 seconds before liftoff, he was able to time the speech.
I saw this clip dozen of times, and only after keeping attention I realized this.
So with the cut technique, it seems like seamless feature, and that's the magic of the TV. Nevertheless amazing delivery.
Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down?
As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.
My fear is that this is also being reshaped with ai, mostly for good now but I feel like the personal touch and passion of these creators is being diluted with the advent of generated content.
Maybe we are in a valley of the uncanny valley and the ai tools will become so good that they can successfully translate someone’s passionate vision faithfully, then it could be another renaissance.
Two that my 5-year-old loves are OddAnimalSpecimens who could easily have been on BBC children's programming in the 1980s, and Terragreen who would have been his ITV counterpart :-)
Probably the most entertaining child-friendly programme you can watch right now is whatever Jake Carlini is doing. Some wee guy in a house in Austin, Texas is coming up with better stories, better production values, and better life values than any of the "proper" children's TV productions, except maybe Sesame Street.
If you like big 4x4s (and who doesn't?) then Matt's Off Road Recovery is pretty good. Utah looks lovely, and of course they're culturally fairly free of rude words so that's pretty okay for children.
Quiet Nerd is another of my son's favourites, he builds little electric-powered campers and drives them out into the woods near where he lives.
Movies used to be watched in a place for that purpose. Now its the toilet. Now the phone itself is ringing. A message comes in. Time to upgrade. Ding! All while some key scene in the movie is taking place.
It's as jarring as Star Trek's habit of "30 seconds of technobabble followed by a metaphor involving a balloon" trope they keep hammering.
It's not just you. Most modern TV documentaries, especially series, are dumbed down and sped up. Fast cuts, lots of woo, not too much to challenge your brain, don't want it to get strained.
Gone are the days where someone conveyed the information calmly while not driving a car somewhere irrelevant. No more lingering shots allowing you to process what you just saw and heard.
Youtube and the internet is a goldmine and way bigger than old 80s/90s content, im over 50 and remember the 80s well enough.. a few great well produced documentaries are not a comparable to gigabytes or petabytes of videos and podcasts we have today
The cultural format of exchange has changed and the consequences of that - so called tiktok attention deficit folks means perhaps no one watches this content but I think that too is a generalization and great content is watched probably by a greater proportion of smart curious people today than back in the 80s on your phone nonetheless- we have a pocket tv with an almost unlimited amount of content
Im an information junkie and just today I spent 3 hours watching a documentary series on the incan civilization follower by a Stanford video on LLMs and then watching Blaise Arcas’s interesting ideas on computational life and intelligence
I feel it has gotten worse the past 10 years.
I feel it myself, I am dumbed down too. Having trouble even formulating this as I never type formally anymore.
Our state TV SVT buys in documentaries from BBC, Showtime, PBS and some of their own production. Some of their own are still good. The BBC ones are absolute garbage dumbed down now.
The world the aristocrats warned about in the 60s and 70s are here now.
A pet peeve of mine is the sound effects added to nature documentaries. I had to explain, once, that the ants do not actually sound like robots no matter how far you zoom in, despite the whirring of servos that the editors decided to add in.
https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.
I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
Many of these older docu’s wanted you to stop and think.
Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.
Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.
A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:
"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."
I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...
This clip is Season 1 Episode 8 "Eat Drink and Be Merry" and the shot starts at 48:17:
https://archive.org/download/bbc-connections-1978/Connection...
Also note that there is a book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Connections/James-Bur...
https://archive.org/details/connections0000burk/page/n7/mode...
I know I sound like a pedant but so many of these old TV recordings are uploaded this way on youtube. I was so annoyed by this infact that a few years ago I made a dumb extension that squeezes the video element back to 4:3 [1]. I'm not sure if this still works though.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/doddimnledmldclhlbf...
And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...
As an uploader you should never add black bars (if they are in the source, crop them out before uploading) and of course never distort the video. This ensures the best playback experience for all devices.
In an ideal world yes. In practice, the YouTube layout looks weird on aspect ratios that aren't 4:3 or 16:9. If you upload any vertical video it gets categorized as a short, so that's out of the window - and even for things like 21:9 you get a teeny tiny player on desktop since it just fits the width.
Quick googling suggested that square video under 3 minutes will be automatically classed as "shorts", which much of HN hates and may never have seen.
Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" has every section of the movie shot in the time appropriate aspect ratio.
If you buy the Blu-ray it's presented in 16:9 and 1920x1080 throughout, it's just masked to suit.
They won't ever squash or stretch video though, so this means the original uploader stretched the 4:3 content to 16:9 at some point before upload
It cares about overall pixel size, and for example standard 720x576 standard def 4:3 video will be brutally compressed compared to the exact same video upscaled using any non-AI upscaler (even nearest-neighbour) to 1440x1080.
I dug into this a bit a while ago, and could probably post my finding here if anyone was interested.
The episode was funny (although cringey too) for the things that happened in it.
But what was quite clever I thought was that the episode was itself done (at least seemingly) in one-shot.
It’s to heighten the sense of anxiety and tension for the viewer in order to amplify the comedy.
Great show!
I think there's still a lot of room for optimism, despite all of the pessimism in the media, and I'm not even talking about AI. There are a ton of other things which have benefitted enormously from ubiquitous, efficient, and powerful computing that hardly get talked about anymore, we've come to take it all for granted.
Apparently something called "magnetic viewing film" can allow you to see the bits on the magnetic stripes of credit cards.
I had never heard about this before.
Link to video time: https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do thousands of times a day around the world on far less preparation than Burke had here.
The fact that this article calls a simple cut a "sleight of hand" just terrifies me. Does the public really not know what editing is?
I think most viewers would be unaware of the cut unless it was pointed out. Hence this sequence being called a "shot".
https://www.space.com/connections-with-james-burke-docuserie...
Made today it would be a woman or MtF person screeching about it and a disclaimer in the beginning.
Sadly, it is not produced anymore. The producers chase a style and person that no longer exist, so they get their panties in a twist and make TikTok style and "true crime" style interviews is all I see from newer documentaries sadly. Women love "true crime" so 50% of new docus are just true crime drama slop.
I used to watch all or most of our state TV ones but they are no longer as good (They do some of their own buy buy in most from BBC, Showtime and PBS.)
I have been watching World at War and The World at War and such. Should watch Civilization and How should we then live?