|
|
 |
|
|
|
#1
03-19-2012, 03:41 PM
|
||||
|
||||
Quote:
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. 
|
|
#2
03-19-2012, 04:35 PM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Phar Lap scenes were pretty good.
|
|
#3
03-19-2012, 10:36 PM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
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.
__________________
Gentlemen! We're burning daylight! Riders up! -Bill Murray
|
|
#4
03-20-2012, 12:50 AM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
You would get the Jeep camera angle as well as the awesome blimp shot after a race. Only difference is that the vehicle would drive inside of the rail instead of on the track with the horses. I don't remember all the racing scenes in Secretariat...all I remember is that the ones I remember were horrible. I'm not a suing person...but If I was Laffit Pincay Jr. --- I would sue the sh!t out of Disney for the ride he gave on Sham in (I think it was the Preakness) in the movie. You can't make an entire race from scratch without it looking like a complete joke. If you film a hundred races with all the riders wearing a jock cam -- you will get your share of dramatic races. A horse will break slow or flat out get left and still win. You'll get a few great head-to-head stretch duels. You'll get many instances of rough riding, inquirys, and major traffic trouble. No one would have to sit there and watch all of the racing footage...just simply read the result chart...and in 20 seconds you'll know if anything dramatic occured that you'd want to work with in your racing scene. Give me just 8 jockey cameras, NBC camera angles, a pan shot, and cutaways of a crowd and I'm sure I could put together way better racing scenes than anyone trying to stage a horse race from scratch.
|
|
#5
03-20-2012, 12:59 AM
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
#6
03-20-2012, 01:07 AM
|
||||
|
||||
|
This is Laffit Pincay Jr. -- one of the strongest stretch riders in racing history -- pulling Sham up for the entire final furlong of the Ky Derby. Fast forward to 4 minutes and 25 seconds in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhHfn...eature=related
|
|
#7
03-20-2012, 08:56 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
|
|
#8
03-20-2012, 09:17 AM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
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
__________________
Gentlemen! We're burning daylight! Riders up! -Bill Murray
|
|
#10
03-20-2012, 07:50 AM
|
|||
|
|||
|
Quote:
|
|
#11
03-20-2012, 08:57 AM
|
||||
|
||||
|
Quote:
 But, yea, nice camera angle.
__________________
"Let the whiners and lazy cry about how impossible "they've" made it to win at this game." - Steve Byk
|
Hybrid Mode
