i do not watch much TV, but every time i do, i am irritated at the way the programs i watch are compiled.
i usually watch TV when i can not sleep and can not be bothered to get back up to do other things.
last night, i watched an episode of "top gear", and it was obvious that all the circumstances that befell them were scripted. there was disaster after disaster (a caravan catching fire, and another one being blown over), and the "witty" responses of the cast pertinent to those incidents were obviously pre- written. i wonder how many people think that "top gear" is a genuinely truthful show.
the thing that annoys me most about "top gear" is that they very often test cars performances around the track in very wet conditions. sometimes i am very interested to see how certain cars perform (like the australian monaro's etc), and when it comes time to test the car around the track with the "stig", it is very often in wet and miserable road conditions.
also, they test cars in snow and other conditions which can not possibly convey the car's true performance. whatever.
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also last night, i watched an episode of "the detonators" which is about the demolition of large structures using timed explosives. the show was about 3 structures that were going to be demolished, and instead of showing the process behind, and the actual course of the demolition of each structure sequentially, the editors jumped like frogs from lily pad to lily pad, and they showed the preparation behind the demolition process of all three structures in a patchwork of intermingled segments. it was enraging to the point that it was not conducive to sleep. my annoyance energized me to the point where i became wide awake with disgruntlement.
the most annoying thing about the episode was that when they finally showed the actual demolition of the structures (after pressing the red button before a "punctuating" ad break), they did not show the entire process from any fixed angle, and it made my dizzy to try and keep up with what structure i was watching fall down.
they had about 7 fixed cameras surrounding each building, and the footage from each camera was sliced and woven together so that i was shown in a staccato fashion of various vantage points during the collapse of the structure.
i wanted to see the entire process of demolition from each singular camera angle (all the way until the dust clears), but instead, i got a tapestry of 2 second long views from each camera, and it was almost epilepsy inducing (i do not have epilepsy).
to further inflate my dissatisfaction, they rewound each of the clips before they were complete so the building looked like it was being reassembled before it had finished falling, and i became almost enraged.
it is sad that documentary editors must edit their documentaries to appeal to the widest audience, and the widest audience obviously has a "thrill a second" type of mind which has a limited attention span. there was no scene in the documentary which showed accurately the entire process of the felling of the building because it took more than 4 seconds! 4 seconds is the limit for those type of "adrenaline" shows. it is also sad that other peoples adrenaline intrudes into the editorial compilation of the otherwise peaceful and protracted discourse of shows that i could be interested in.
one camera shooting one scene (the worst scene) zoomed in and out with a frequency of 2 hertz while recording the falling of a building.
"thrillaminute" is what the world is interested in.
what sort of world am i living in?
19 Dec 2012, 6:35 pm
