Quote:
Originally Posted by Calzone Lord
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That's one of the noticeable things in
Luck, also- how many of the horses are being held back. I don't disagree with any of your points about why the races look bad, but I think trying to use stock footage of actual races would not improve the problems.
The Jeep cam is lovely, but it's all a fairly wide shot. To get in closer, you can't just zoom in on the picture, because the focus will be off, or, in the case of video where everything is in focus, you won't have any depth of field and the shot will look very flat. In addition, all of your shots would be limited to wide-range side shots and POV if the track happens to have jockey cams. You can't have any lower straight-on shots because the fence will be in the way.
In the lead-up to the start of the race in the clip from
Secretariat, there are dozens of shots- a close up of hooves in the dirt, a jockey stroking a lock of his mount's mane, two jockeys eyeballing each other. Those are all necessary to build dramatic tension, would never be shot before an actual race (would take too long) and if you shot them separately and then cut them into shots of an actual race, with other horses, etc., even if, by some fortune, all of the horses you'd cast matched the look of all the horses in the actual race, and all the jockeys' silks matched, the video quality would not match and the race would look like what it is- stock footage.
Plus, there's no way to guide the audience's eye with a wide shot. People who know how to watch races can focus on one horse's trip, but a movie-going audience is going to be totally lost as to which horse they are supposed to be watching.
Even the most complete racing result form is not going to list what the angles of the camera were, and that's what an editor needs- to know what the shot looked like, and there's no way to do that other than going through the hours and hours of video and watching it. It's not about what happens in the race; it's about what the shot looked like.
Part of the challenge is that horse races, by the nature of what they are, aren't ideal for the film medium. I sometimes think it would be cool if a fictional piece would film a race in the style of the Robert Downey Jr.
Sherlock Holmes movie- where the camera and effects show you Holmes' thought process, since a lot of the dramatic tension of a race is a person on the back of a running horse making split-second decisions about what to do based on what is happening right then.
And I wish movies would stop with the close-ups on a horse's eye. For the audience to really experience an emotional reaction, you really need both eyes facing forward. It's the reason dogs look so expressive on camera.
Good short explanation of stock footage, along with a great trip down memory lane of examples of it in certain movies and TV shows:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StockFootage