Quote:
Originally Posted by Calzone Lord
I've never understood why they need to make their own racing scences.
Can't you just get a cheaper racetrack to let you film a few actual races and use them?
The racing scences are always terrible in every horse racing production. They're better in Luck than in any horse racing movie...and they're still pretty bad.
Why not just find a racetrack that will let you film races on the track. Put those cameras on the jockeys helmets and take as many flashy camera angles as you can for each race.
Hell, even film the trial races at EVD that so many soon to be first-time-starters in the state of LA compete in. If you pay the connections a few hundred bucks to wear saddle towels and silks I'm sure they'd be happy to.
After you have 100 races or so in the bank...pick the cuts from the most useful ones.
If you want to add anything to an actual racing scene ... go make the silks, go buy a similar looking horse, and add on to it.
Making an entire horse race from scratch is nuts and the end-result is always laughable.
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Really good question. What you're referring to is stock footage which you see in a lot of films, to better and lesser degrees of success. It's challenging for horse racing sequences:
The race sequences in a movie are staged to advance the dramatic action of the plot, and that is shaped via the number and type of shots. There's no way to determine that before a movie is storyboarded, and by that point you might as well just shoot the race as the director/art director/cinematographer envision the sequence, rather than hope that stock footage will give you what you need. Not to mention the time and cost of an editor going through thousands of hours of stock footage.
A camera in a car driving alongside actual racing horses, which you need for decent mid- and close-up shots would likely affect the outcome of a race, which would be unfair to the bettors.
Stock footage may not match the look of the film or video being used in a project, and the abrupt switch in video speed, or film type, is very jarring to a viewer and will take them right out of the story. It's very obvious in "Secretariat"- watch the film and you'll see the look of the video and film change a lot throughout the film, and not just in the racing scenes. It's really disconcerting. And even in that rather poorly made film, they felt they had to put the real footage of Secretariat's Preakness on a television, so the movie audience wouldn't notice how different the video quality was.
Trying to make continuity work from several actual races would be impossible. One of the things that I found hilarious about
Jockeys was how often they cut several different races into one "race" and how obvious it was. The horse going into the winner's circle had a different saddle cloth from what was supposed to be the same one in the race, etc. I'm sure they did that to improve the look of the races- cutting together the best angles, etc., but it made for some huge continuity errors.
That said, I kind of love stock footage, because it can be hilarious. One of my favorite scenes from
The A-Team (the original series) was when Murdoch landed an airplane by crashing it into an airport. The footage was obviously from
Airplane. 1970's and 1980's TV shows pulled stock footage from movies all the time.