Has anyone else noticed the diabolical editing of the present day narrational inserts in these programmes? Last week we seemed to be travelling in a 10ft high 1920's Vauxhall when a modern car passed by the filmed car whilst it was travelling on the filming trailer and this week the car suddenly changed from being RHD to LHD and driving on the right (again with modern traffic passing by, also driving along the wrong side of the road), when the editor decided that the shot direction had to be left to right and reversed a right to left shot!
Has this series been put together by first term media students or just the inept?....
Didn't notice that but I did notice a Friese-Greene shot (shown twice) of him driving on the right-hand side of the road towards the camera. And that wasn't a reversed shot: the driver was on the right, next to the hedge. I suppose in those days the chance of meeting someone else was fairly slim.
":::Jerry::::" wrote in news:444e98bb$0$74023$892e7fe2 @authen.yellow.readfreenews.net:
And there was me thinking it was being shot from the roof of the car. ie man with tripod standing on roof. they did that sort of thing back then. Then again it may have been shot from the passenger seat of a new soft roader ;-)
There was modern shot that felt just like a reversed shot (travelling from L to R) .... the speaker turned to camera - to me that meant that the camera was in the seat normally occupied by the driver ... hence the reversal, also at least one car went behind the speaker travelling in the opposite direction.
Stuart Gray wrote in Xns97B14372114stuartggraydslpipexc@216.196.109.145:
I read in the Radio Times that they originally planned for all the modern driving shots to be for real, but the car proved to be so unreliable and Dan Cruikshank had such difficulty driving it with its poor brakes that they decided to film most of the close-up "driving" shots while it was being towed on a low-loader.
Strange that this commonly-used technique doesn't attract the same comments about 10-foot high cars when it's used in other programmes.
On 'The Bill' we usually tow the car using an A frame. Low loaders tend to rattle too apart from the height problem. Only time they come into their own is for motorway stuff as IIRC the police won't allow the use of an A frame for filming on them.
But it might be difficult to attach an A frame to a car of that age.
Is an A frame something that's actually attached to the chassis / towing points of the car, so as to allow it to run on its own wheels? I can see the advantage of doing this from the height point of view; I hadn't thought about the rattling problem of a low-loader.
Once when I was in London I saw a car being towed by a camera car along the Aldwych - given that it was at night, the lights were very bright and I'd have thought might have dazzled other cars behind the one being filmed. What was noteworthy was that it was being towed with its front wheels a few inches off the ground, maybe to give it extra manoevrability, but this must have made realistic steering actions very difficult for the actor to fake.
I seem to remember driving shots for a sitcom featuring a famous stand-up comedian of the 1980s had to be filmed this way after the comedian lost his driving licence. I was surprised that he was allowed even to steer a towed car without a licence. Maybe they had to use a low-loader in this case to get round the legal restriction.
I must admit I've never noticed the bad perspective of low-loader shots, unlike Freda. What really did grate was the very obvious back-projection shots in a recent Miss Marple episode: I presume that they were added as a misguided homage to the technique which would have been current at the time when the story was set, but it looked extremely naff in a 2005 production: things have moved on since then.
I always like looking out for faked driving shots where the actor is constantly making see-sawing movements of the steering wheel which, if done for real, would have the car fish-tailing along the road and his passengers reaching for the sick bags.
Following on from what Dave Plowman has already said, what was glaring in the shots of Dan Cruikshank 'driving' the 1920's Vauxhall was the extremely bad acting...
I take it that you have never driven a vehicle equipped with a worn, badly adjusted steering box, on many such vehicles one can move the steering wheel as you describe without the movement being transferred to the wheel hubs!...
Actually no: at the first sign of slackness I've had my car into the garage for replacement or tightening up of the steering system. But you have a valid point that I'd forgotten about. However it doesn't explain the majority of see-saw steering cases that you see on film. I think it's more a case of "the more I move the steering wheel, the more convincing my driving will look"!
Yes - it's rigidly attached to the suspension usually. And you don't need a driver in the towed vehicle - the steering will turn on a corner by itself.
That's really a poor show. With modern electronic cameras small battery fluorescent or LED lamps inside the car should be fine, and virtually unnoticeable from outside.
As I said on an A frame the steering wheel will turn on its own. Many actors say this is more off putting than actually driving the car while acting - as used to happen, before H&S became the ruling factor.
Didn't see that episode. Was it set in a location where it wasn't possible to use the real thing due to modern bits giving the game away? It's most unusual to use BP or more likely Chromakey on a drama of that type.
Yup. It's far more satisfactory to have them drive for real. You have your own vehicles front and rear of the action car to give some protection to others - just in case.
Dave Plowman (News) wrote in snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk:
This was a bank of what looked like HMI lights (they were a lot more blue than tungsten lights) on a gantry at the back of the camera car. I dread to think what the effect would have looked like on camera: if they'd exposed for the amount of light falling on the front of the car, the background would have been pitch black. It was also very noticeable so people were turning round and staring, which the director probably didn;t want!
It was scenes of one of the key characters riding a motorbike along country lanes. You got the dead giveaway of a camera that appeared to be rigidly attached to the bike while the background moved as the bike went along and as the bike tilted, whereas a bit of movement of the bike relative to the camera would have looked far more convincing. From discussions on the episode's forum on IMDB, it looked as it if was done very deliberately to give a 1950s "feel" to the episode, rather than as a poor-man's equivalent of a real driving shot:
Talking of filming cars, anyone else sit through that Top 20 TV cars thing the other night? It may have been a repeat. Anyway, when they were filming one particular silver car from some series I forget, I'm damned sure they removed the windscreen for the shots of the presenter and owner sitting inside the car. Which seems like a lot of work for rather a pointless angle.
There was a cracking bit of alternating night/day in Randall & Hopkirk last night, but then that was shot a few years back so perhaps they're excused. I'm sure they've used that Princess Limo in several different episodes too. Come to think of it, there's a tasty maroon Bentley S1 (or 2?) Continental that appears fairly regularly too.
I didn't spot these, I was reeling from the atrocious audio quality of the narration. Can anyone explain this? Do the BBC not have minimum standards for broadcast audio? I was watching via Sky, mind, and didn't check to see if it was the same on analogue.
Indeed, some of the cheaper 1950s cars had worm-and-nut or recirculating ball steering boxes, which even when new had a lot of slack in them. Add to that an idler arm and link rod, anything up to 8 ball joints in the steering linkage and perhaps some king pin slack as well, and you ended up with a car that definitely needed the steering wheel wagged from side to side just to keep the car in a straight line as you drove over imperfections in the road surface. Learning how to do this without over-correcting was quite an art.
I couldn't believe how positive rack and pinion steering felt, the first time I drove a car fitted with it.
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.