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The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
61–70 of 209 posts
Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down? It's not just you. Most modern TV documentaries, especially series, are dumbed down and sped up. Fast cuts, lots of woo, not too much to challenge your brain, don't want it to get strained. Gone are the days where someone conveyed the information calmly while not driving a car somewhere irrelevant. No more lingering shots allowing you to process…
Thats because we have a trove of in depth specialist and deep youtube content including all those old documentaries to mine through these days Youtube and the internet is a goldmine and way bigger than old 80s/90s content, im over 50 and remember the 80s well enough.. a few great well produced documentaries are not a comparable to gigabytes or petabytes of videos and podcasts we have today The cultural format of exch…
You watched all that content. Did you take action on it? What did you make or do as a result?
Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#63I loved Connections so much as a kid, but I'm so tired of this clip. There's so many better clips from this show. So he nailed a 13 second countdown. Who cares? Newscasters do this at every commercial break. Sports announcers do this without a script and they still nail the cut to commercial almost every time. Yes, there's a talent to timing your speech to a countdown in your ear, but it's a talent that people do tho…
> Does the public really not know what editing is?
I think most viewers would be unaware of the cut unless it was pointed out. Hence this sequence being called a "shot".
Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#64I love this style of documentary, I feel like we had it even when I was a kid in the 90s - 00s and as an adult in the 10s, but now is totally a dead style.
Sadly, it is not produced anymore. The producers chase a style and person that no longer exist, so they get their panties in a twist and make TikTok style and "true crime" style interviews is all I see from newer documentaries sadly. Women love "true crime" so 50% of new docus are just true crime drama slop.
I used to watch all or most of our state TV ones but they are no longer as good (They do some of their own buy buy in most from BBC, Showtime and PBS.)
I have been watching World at War and The World at War and such. Should watch Civilization and How should we then live?
Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#65I love this back when we where not afraid to exhault our own virtues.
Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#66It really grinds my gears that the uploader had to ruin the "Greatest Shot in Television" by stretching the 4:3 video to 16:9. I know I sound like a pedant but so many of these old TV recordings are uploaded this way on youtube. I was so annoyed by this infact that a few years ago I made a dumb extension that squeezes the video element back to 4:3 [1]. I'm not sure if this still works though. [1] https://chromewebsto…
spite driven development is the unsung hero of so many great tools
Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#67The late 1970's were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth. Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down? As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.
Yes, but the YouTube ed channels are such a treasure in and of itself. We had the “tech” to produce content like this for almost a century, but it took the Internet and democratization of content creation to come up with gems like smarter every day, veritasium, extra history, etc My fear is that this is also being reshaped with ai, mostly for good now but I feel like the personal touch and passion of these creators i…
The youtube channels are nowhere near the style and depth of documentaries like the ones above...
Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#68The late 1970's were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth. Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down? As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.
NOT just you.
I feel it has gotten worse the past 10 years.
I feel it myself, I am dumbed down too. Having trouble even formulating this as I never type formally anymore.
Our state TV SVT buys in documentaries from BBC, Showtime, PBS and some of their own production. Some of their own are still good. The BBC ones are absolute garbage dumbed down now.
The world the aristocrats warned about in the 60s and 70s are here now.
Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#69The late 1970's were the golden age of documentaries: Connections, Cosmos, Civilization, The Ascent of Man and Attenborough's Life on Earth. Perhaps it's just me, but modern documentaries are rather dumbed down? As a side note: Quite ironic that he ends up pointing to a rocket propelled mostly by solid fuels.
Even Golden Age TV documentaries can seem dumbed down compared to actual books. Even at the time, in the 1960s and 1970s, thinkers expressed concern that the medium of television was inherently likely to delight audiences with spectacle more than truly educate them.
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Re: The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
#70The full series is on Archive: https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections... It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.
I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.
A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:
"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."
I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...