The greatest shot in television: James Burke had one chance to nail this scene (2024)
openculture.com
openculture.com
So knowing, the engines starts 3 seconds before liftoff, he was able to time the speech.
I saw this clip dozen of times, and only after keeping attention I realized this.
So with the cut technique, it seems like seamless feature, and that's the magic of the TV. Nevertheless amazing delivery.
The IIIE did indeed have a Centaur stage with a "thermos" full of liquid hydrogen and another with liquid oxygen, but that's not what we see in this clip -- the pillars of fire and smoke come from a pair of solid-fuel boosters that burn for about two minutes, followed by about six more minutes of flight powered by two more stages burning non-cryogenic liquid propellants (hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide) before the Centaur was ignited.
About 15 years earlier, I had done some work at the VAB and walked around the Saturn IV that was laying on its side there, just as James Burke had a few years earlier. It wasn't there when I worked the above referenced mission. I'm not sure when they moved it, or where it ended up (but it's not in the "rocket garden" at the Visitor Center).
If you mean just the Saturn IV (no B), that was the second stage of some early Saturn rocket. I don't know much about those or if one was ever on display.
Centaur has balloon tanks which is just very thin metal. It can't even stand on its own without pressure. But no thermos.
That said, on the Titan IIIE at launch, there was an second outer surface around the Centaur -- the payload fairing -- which was discarded only after atmospheric pressure was low enough that it was no longer needed to protect the payload and the Centaur upper stage. (It wasn't a true thermos as the space in between wasn't sealed and was at ambient pressure at launch).
See the cutaway views on pages 16 and 17 (pdf pages 19-20) of https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/TC-6-Voyager-Fl...
You're correct about payload fairing. Also, Space Shuttle External Tank was spray foamed, causing the Columbia disaster when a piece of foam from the tank with hit the wing leading edge. I was googling for what the final verdict was but couldn't easily find an answer. Nice summary in [1]. Cryogenics are complicated.
1:https://idlewords.com/2003/08/things_i_have_learned_about_fo...
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.
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 is being diluted with the advent of generated content.
Maybe we are in a valley of the uncanny valley and the ai tools will become so good that they can successfully translate someone’s passionate vision faithfully, then it could be another renaissance.
Two that my 5-year-old loves are OddAnimalSpecimens who could easily have been on BBC children's programming in the 1980s, and Terragreen who would have been his ITV counterpart :-)
Probably the most entertaining child-friendly programme you can watch right now is whatever Jake Carlini is doing. Some wee guy in a house in Austin, Texas is coming up with better stories, better production values, and better life values than any of the "proper" children's TV productions, except maybe Sesame Street.
If you like big 4x4s (and who doesn't?) then Matt's Off Road Recovery is pretty good. Utah looks lovely, and of course they're culturally fairly free of rude words so that's pretty okay for children.
Quiet Nerd is another of my son's favourites, he builds little electric-powered campers and drives them out into the woods near where he lives.
The issue is somewhat that this stuff needs to be pushed more into peoples feeds and not pregnant spiderman videos.
At least where I live, basically everything that's on discovery, national geographic and the history channel now is just "experts" talking (reading a script) about "hitler's secret sex life" or some such thing, interspersed with a re-enactment shot or one of the "experts" walking around a slightly relevant building.
Lack of depth? Wrong. Just go beyond the usual pop-sci stuff on YT.
You can go as deep as you want. Surely it won't be "as fun" or "tiktok sized" but if you want depth it's there
There is also full MIT/Harvard courses on Youtube.
So yes it is all about what one looks up.
My friend, if you enjoy long format, deep diving documentaries written, produced and narrated without AI about Space, Physics, Human evolution or planet Earths history, then I insist you head over to the History of the Universe YouTube channel and start watching!
This specific video is probably my favorite (I'm a sucker for contemplating "time"and what it actually is) and was the one that got me hooked on their channel. They go way deeper into the details without becoming a formal lecture and it's genuinely captivating. https://youtu.be/ZSmNii0uOmw?si=3Jaty3XcMGlryhh2
https://youtube.com/@historyoftheuniverse https://youtube.com/@historyofhumankind https://youtube.com/@historyoftheearth
AlphaPhoenix - https://www.youtube.com/@AlphaPhoenixChannel - Probably needs no introduction to HN, but some great educational physics videos.
Huygens Optics - https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics - Retired optics guy, lots of interesting stuff on making lenses and other optics phenomena and physics.
Dr. Jorge S. Diaz - https://www.youtube.com/@jkzero - Really good videos on the early history of quantum mechanics and related physics around that time.
Idealized Science Institute - https://www.youtube.com/@idealizedscience -Educational non-profit aimed at helping teachers and students, mostly physics. Typically featuring great physical demonstrations.
Tasting History - https://www.youtube.com/@TastingHistory - Recreates historical dishes, as well as serving interesting history about or surrounding the dishes.
Brian Lohnes - https://www.youtube.com/@brianlohnes3079 - Weird and fascinating history tidbits from mostly motorsports like drag racing.
Marshall Bruner - https://www.youtube.com/@MarshallBrunerRF - Accessible videos explaining radar and RF concepts.
ProjectsInFlight - https://www.youtube.com/@projectsinflight - Has a few amazing videos explaining how semiconductors work, also how to make them at home.
Modern History TV - https://www.youtube.com/@ModernKnight - Lots of interesting videos about the middle ages in Europe, how people lived their lives as peasants or knights etc.
Extractions&Ire - https://www.youtube.com/@ExtractionsAndIre - Fun guy from down under making compounds for his main channel Explosions&Fire in his shed.
https://youtube.com/@historyoftheuniverse https://youtube.com/@historyofhumankind https://youtube.com/@historyoftheearth
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 what you just saw and heard.
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 exchange has changed and the consequences of that - so called tiktok attention deficit folks means perhaps no one watches this content but I think that too is a generalization and great content is watched probably by a greater proportion of smart curious people today than back in the 80s on your phone nonetheless- we have a pocket tv with an almost unlimited amount of content
Im an information junkie and just today I spent 3 hours watching a documentary series on the incan civilization follower by a Stanford video on LLMs and then watching Blaise Arcas’s interesting ideas on computational life and intelligence
You are bristling with something like anger but it has nothing to do with what I wrote.
I'm off to go hiking. There are thousands of stars out there.
A pet peeve of mine is the sound effects added to nature documentaries. I had to explain, once, that the ants do not actually sound like robots no matter how far you zoom in, despite the whirring of servos that the editors decided to add in.
It's as jarring as Star Trek's habit of "30 seconds of technobabble followed by a metaphor involving a balloon" trope they keep hammering.
Movies used to be watched in a place for that purpose. Now its the toilet. Now the phone itself is ringing. A message comes in. Time to upgrade. Ding! All while some key scene in the movie is taking place.
I used to be associated with content groups at a former company and in the almost 15 years I was there we saw clear trends in type of content and length of content viewers consumed.
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.
Since GP mentioned TV, I suspect the ones he's complaining about are the ones I complained about: one-hour TV documentary-style shows like BBC Horizon or PBS Nova.
The ones I've seen from recent years contain interesting stuff, but the presentation is too rapid, to flashy, too repetitive yet not enough time to let things settle.
Feature length documentaries are better I agree.
Yep, these must be them, but our Swedish state TV buys them and somewhat rebrands them, but the BBC logo is usually there at the end.
Yes they are much more flashy and "americanized" compared to 10-15 years ago. Sadly. I still appreciate them.
I hear this often and believed it myself for a while, but I cannot find much evidence for it. It's just the presentation style that people are nostalgic for.
These old documentaries are quite dumbed down as well (and sometimes wrong!). If you were to just read the literal text you'd think it was an excerpt from a children's book. The next time you come across an old video you feel this way about turn on the captions, mute the audio, and block out the rest of the screen except that tiny rectangle at the bottom.
I agree there was pride in the work that shines through, but don't be fooled into thinking it's any "better".
I don’t know how someone could call The Act of Killing or Five Broken Cameras “dumbed down.” Or 20 Days in Mauripol just a few years ago
Unlike with a lot of award shows, one can actually do pretty well watching all the Oscar nominees for documentary any given year. Guaranteed at least half are good or great.
Connections was so influential that my university (Purdue) introduced a 3 semester series of courses on the history of technology.
However the related The Day the Universe Changed, which took a slightly different conceit (the episodes aren't necessarily linear in time) and focus (science and philosophy rather than technology), is excellent, and I'd put it right next to the original Connections series.
(There is, it turns out, a fourth season of Connections, "Connections 4", released in 2023 on Curiosity Stream according to Wikipedia. I've net seen any of it. It consists of only 6 episodes. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...>.
Civilization and The Ascent of Man were both commissioned by Attenborough - he had a major impact on the broadcast landscape well beyond natural history.
(I've been wasting neurons on this for fifty years...)
I don't know the show, but when I first watched this clip (under the title of "greatest shot on television") I totally bought in to the hype and thought it really was amazing. You start out just walking alongside him, and only slowly realize where you are and what is about to happen, and everything is perfectly timed and composed: he ends his walk, reaches the conclusion of his explanation, and you realize what is going on, all at the exact time the launch begins. Brilliant!
Except that this is not "a shot" at all. I just hadn't noticed on my first watch that there's a very obvious cut just at the end of the "walk". It's a different angle from a different location at a different time of day, and he just has one sentence to say before he looks back at the blast off.
It would be no different from any news reporter on location at the time, reading a prepared message ahead of the launch, timed to end before the launch itself with no need for extensive rehearsals, the launch timing is widely broadcast, you time yourself accordingly with your talking speed, by adding pauses, etc. And on top of everything they probably had to do it live too.
I have no issue with James Burke or his show. And this scene is really beautifully done. But it's not the greatest shot in television. It's not even one shot!
(edited: typos)
I honestly can't say for sure whether that was intentional or an actual typo. Good job.
Not a lot of people know that after his famous lines as he descended the ladder, Armstrong quietly muttered "and good luck Mr. Lansky". The few people who have heard the audio asked him about over the years, and he was never willing to explain ... until one day. "Well, you see" said Armstrong at a NASA publicity event, "when I was a kid growing up one of my neighbors were Mr & Mrs Lansky. I was playing on the street one day, maybe 8 or 9 years old, it was a hot summer's day and everyone had their windows open. Mr & Mrs Lansky were having some sort of argument inside their house - I couldn't hear much of what they were saying. But then Mrs Lansky must have moved closer to the window, because I heard her very clearly say "Oral sex? You'll get oral sex from me the day that kid next door walks on the moon!"".
They say it's a great shot because Burke hits his mark at the beginning of the shot, then he progresses through the shot, hits his final mark and points within half a second of ignition. All while delivering dialog. (Props to the camera operator who tracked Burke and pulled focus at the appropriate time.)
And then I think there's the thematic element of the subject matter. What you don't get by watching the final shot in that episode was the emotional impact of the Voyager launches. The space program was, at the time, continuing on from the high of the moon landings. The Pioneer probes had returned black and white images from Jupiter and Saturn but the Voyagers were going to return more colour images. They were a RETURN to space, demonstrating that the pioneer mission wasn't a fluke and that, as a people, we were capable of doing great things.
And now, as a people, we bitch in online forums about voice-overs.
One does not, as you suggest, need to deduct any points for editing the sound of an impressive bit of writing, timing, presenting and camera work.
The Conversation's treatment (there are many others): "The animal sounds in most nature documentaries are made by humans – here’s how they do it and why it matters" (2024) <https://theconversation.com/the-animal-sounds-in-most-nature...>.
Burke's time-shifting is a relatively minor sin, though I'd have appreciated if they'd allowed the original sonic lag to be experienced.
The sounds in combat footage of WW2 are all dubbed in, as the cameras did not record sound.
If you dig around, you can find more examples, but I think you're right in that the vast majority of films take liberties with physics in the service of visual storytelling.
However, I don't think people were praising this shot for it's audio editing. I wouldn't be surprised if Burke re-recorded it and they dubbed it over the video. I think they're saying this is an amazing shot because the timing seems to be pretty good... He points at the rocket and about a quarter or half of a second later it ignites. This comes at the end of a 10-ish second sequence. Pretty good timing. Unlike other shots in popular media up to this time it would have been difficult to try to do a second time (though I guess they could have tried again at the Voyager 1 launch a couple weeks later.)
https://youtu.be/qybUFnY7Y8w?si=DBSqRMciDY41QPzD
I thought they really did it all in one cut but there are at least two. Still a great music video and song.
* in a zero-G plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWGJA9i18Co
* one-take (?) on electric unicycles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1ZB_rGFyeU
* 4.2s real-time scene with the footage slowed down to 4 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvW61K2s0tA
* Chevrolet-sponsored video where they use a moving car as an instrument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c
> Watch it enough times yourself, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by having Burke walk from a non-time-sensitive shot into another with the already-framed rocket ready for liftoff. But that hardly lessens the feeling of achievement when the launch comes off.
Personally, I saw it exactly that way when I first saw it - the cut is super obvious because the background is totally different after. If the commentary before had been with the same background then it could well have had the illusion of being continuous.
Regardless: Like the article author, I still think it's great television.
Personally I don’t think that takes anything away
The main thing is that he has say basically one sentence right in a single take, but he is a seasoned television announcer, so that in itself is not too surprising.
The much longer segment, including walking with a moving camera at exactly the right timing, would have been much harder to get in a single take. (Not to mention that that Saturn V lying on its side is probably not even in the same location.)
But I think it's about 120 degrees to the left from where they shot the shot of Burke walking. They absolutely had to set up a different shot to get Burke and the Titan III in the same shot.
As an aside... That Saturn V is no longer at that location. Several years ago they moved it a mile to the north and built a building around it to create the Apollo / Saturn V center. Or at least I think it's the same artefact.
Just a reminder, we didn't have AI editing tools at the time. Traditional editing tools of the time would probably be obvious. Maybe you're responding to the focus change where the camera operator adjusts the focal plane from Burke to the rocket in the distance.
That focus change makes me certain the shot wasn't reverse projection as the screen would have to be exceedingly large (too large to keep sufficiently flat.)
I remember seeing film (yes, film!) on the news of the Voyager 2 launch and I remember seeing this episode of Connexions on PBS shortly after.
I'm honestly flummoxed you think there's a cut in the final shot of that sequence. I just don't see it. Maybe it's a generational thing
I think that's why you aren't seeing what people are talking about then. It's being pitched as "one long shot", folks are seeing the cut at :44 and saying "no it isn't!"
It's also not as hard as it might seem because they could track the countdown and cue him at the appropriate time.
[1] Which would certainly have some scenes competing for actual best shot. Calling it TV feels a bit misleading.
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 also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.
Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.
Better still, like a well-written essay, there is closure to the series. All the ends left about in the preceding episodes are drawn together neatly in the final one.
That said, his commentary about telecommuting is spot-on. At 39:49 of https://archive.org/details/the-day-the-universe-changed-s01... .
"The point about all this technological pizazz isn't the gee-whiz high-tech stuff. It's the secondary effects of using it. Take say what this chip could do to change the pattern of work. With this you could have telecommuting, that's where you work at home from a screen and you never go into the office.
Great! No more rush hour. But what does that do to the public transportation system and the taxes it uses. Or to the car manufacturers and their workers' jobs, and the rest of the economy that depends on their output?
Or to the concept of the city itself, with its support systems and businesses. Or to the downtown properties where maybe your pension fund's invested.
Not to speak of working at home day in and day out and what that might do to a marriage. And what do you get out of work when it's only you? What would be the effect of isolating and fragmenting the community like that?
From just one application of this microchip."
You were talking about Connections. I watched The Day The Universe Changed.
Just realized my mistake now, and watched Connections episode 1.
Yeah, totally about technology traps.
Many of these older docu’s wanted you to stop and think.
And for Philomena Cunk's various projects…
Also note that there is a book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Connections/James-Bur...
https://archive.org/details/connections0000burk/page/n7/mode...
This clip is Season 1 Episode 8 "Eat Drink and Be Merry" and the shot starts at 48:17:
https://archive.org/download/bbc-connections-1978/Connection...
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...
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://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/doddimnledmldclhlbf...
Quick googling suggested that square video under 3 minutes will be automatically classed as "shorts", which much of HN hates and may never have seen.
Wes Anderson's "The Grand Budapest Hotel" has every section of the movie shot in the time appropriate aspect ratio.
If you buy the Blu-ray it's presented in 16:9 and 1920x1080 throughout, it's just masked to suit.
They won't ever squash or stretch video though, so this means the original uploader stretched the 4:3 content to 16:9 at some point before upload
As an uploader you should never add black bars (if they are in the source, crop them out before uploading) and of course never distort the video. This ensures the best playback experience for all devices.
In an ideal world yes. In practice, the YouTube layout looks weird on aspect ratios that aren't 4:3 or 16:9. If you upload any vertical video it gets categorized as a short, so that's out of the window - and even for things like 21:9 you get a teeny tiny player on desktop since it just fits the width.
It cares about overall pixel size, and for example standard 720x576 standard def 4:3 video will be brutally compressed compared to the exact same video upscaled using any non-AI upscaler (even nearest-neighbour) to 1440x1080.
I dug into this a bit a while ago, and could probably post my finding here if anyone was interested.
And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...
I think there's still a lot of room for optimism, despite all of the pessimism in the media, and I'm not even talking about AI. There are a ton of other things which have benefitted enormously from ubiquitous, efficient, and powerful computing that hardly get talked about anymore, we've come to take it all for granted.
He didn’t shy away from talking about technology for good or ill, for the ways it liberates us but can also trap us, for the ways it makes new sources of energy possible, and new weapons.
And that's not Youtube?
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 thousands of times a day around the world on far less preparation than Burke had here.
The fact that this article calls a simple cut a "sleight of hand" just terrifies me. 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".
Apparently something called "magnetic viewing film" can allow you to see the bits on the magnetic stripes of credit cards.
I had never heard about this before.
Link to video time: https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections...
https://www.space.com/connections-with-james-burke-docuserie...
It begins at South Tower of the World Trade Center, and as Burke enters an express elevator (Car 6 or 7 if you must know) he says in effect, "Do I worry about ascending to the top in a steel box? Of course I don't! We take going up in the world like that for granted." When an elevator later goes dark he says. "We expect this to happen sometimes so what do we do? We strike a light and look around in the dark for an emergency button to push and if we find one, we press it." In this discussion of single takes, note what the temperature of the butane lighter must have been by the time he finishes his speech. Ouch!
Also interesting to note in the realm of happenstance: the airliner portrayed in trouble over darkened New York was flight 911.
That is an awesome set of coincidences.
... or perhaps the series influenced OBL ...
Growing up in Argentina, back in the day these were all dubbed. The version I watched on tv had a voice and personality of its own - Latin American "neutral" Spanish - and for the life of me I could never find that same version, only the Spain-dubbed one.
The episode was funny (although cringey too) for the things that happened in it.
But what was quite clever I thought was that the episode was itself done (at least seemingly) in one-shot.
It’s to heighten the sense of anxiety and tension for the viewer in order to amplify the comedy.
Great show!
"Never have so many people understood so little about so much."
Even more true today.
Do yourself a favor, and search for the episodes.
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?