It also is used in the UK on turf courses...of course, it helps immensely to have a paved road to do it.

Wow, never seen that before. Although i don't think it was as bad as that scene in Luck the other night when Gary Stevens was on the lead at the 1/4 pole and all the other jocks were pulling back there horses so much they were blowing the turn. Quite funny!

You had to select that f*c*ing race as your example. I vividly remember having Dar re me and another horse/all/Gloria de Campeo and another horse in a pick 3. Then I went back and scratched off 4 or 5 from the all trying to be cheap. The pick 3 came back 103k:mad::mad: But, yea, nice camera angle.

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

New Republic's David Thomson: "Should Horses Be Sacrificed for Art?"
 

Strong piece that sneers at the animal-rightists..

David Thomson on Films: Should Horses Be Sacrificed For Art?

And I am sorry for the horses, and for every other animal regularly dispatched for our lifestyle and well-being, whether they like it or not. But that soft-heartedness wants to stop so much—fox-hunting, bullfighting, boxing, football, smoking, and roast lamb. Those things are all dangerous and suspect and exploitative—just like life, where such things as institutional fraud, international famine and slaughter, and ordinary human error run free.

I still think they could continue without any racing footage.They would just have to delete the four losers.

Too bad the computer rendering and CGI that is so present in movies like Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, all the recent science fiction titles, is not quite up to being able to accurately render a horse race from scratch.

One could conceivably pan the empty track and superimpose the virtual horses (with real jockey closeups and placement in shots) and make it look good. I don't think they are quite there yet with living things. Inanimate objects of all sorts can be done and look as real as anything else.

In a couple of years, this issue could be moot - there would be no potential for injury and nothing for the "animal rights" people to complain about, and yet we could depict horse racing from any angle, in any scenario onscreen.

Bravo Ray Paulick :tro:

Great story. The whole situation is a real shame! I've watched every episode and although I thought the first few episodes were a little dry, I think the show was really starting to gain momentum. But, in the end I think it really came down to ratings. If I wasn't a race fan, I'm not sure I would have watched it.

I really enjoyed Naomi going for a "ride" in the Hollywood parking lot.

I wish this show could somehow get a mulligan. They wasted so much time on some pointless storylines and lame characters. This is hbo-did we really have to wait an entire season to see a sex scene and someone getting killed?

I think what we saw in the last two episodes is what I expected to see throughout. In the end, it was too little too late.

Enjoyed tonights episode ... but two totally unrealistic racing scenes.

In Mon Gateau's win ... every other horse in the race was being stiffed in the stretch.

In the Western Derby ... Gary Stevens saved ground on both turns.

Like I was saying....

Wasn't crazy about the scene theft from Indecent Proposal. That movie is 20 years old already!

Luck
 

They definitely saved the best for last. The racing scenes and accompanying music were definitely well done in that final episode. I am hoping that we have not seen the last of some of these characters and story lines.


Ocala Mike

:tro:

I just wish when they had the close-up of Hoffman that they would start the music and then move the camera towards him and go inside his head to reveal an armless hamster on a wheel. Then the camera zooms towards the hamster and goes inside his head and you see a snake in a bulldozer making holes.

OMG that's sooooo weird. I have that very same thought at 5:33 am almost every day. :zz:

Don't be such a smartie pants. It's known that you write letters for other people's jobs first thing in the morning. Don't belittle creative people.

If you look closely you can see Bob Baffert in yesterdays episode