Not that I should be surprised, but trying to watch it today and it’s just talk talk talk talk. Commercials. More talk. Overhead shots of the stadium. People walking around in the rain. Talking head. Cut away to footage of Carl Lewis bitching about something. Instant replay of something they already showed. People hugging. Stadium shot. Human interest story. Commercial. Shot of Eiffel Tower. Promo for actual sports being shown on Peacock. Etc etc.
Meanwhile you can see there’s sporting events going on because they are showing them on the Jumbotron in the stadium shots. Really no excuse for this since most of this coverage is pre-recorded anyway.
The archery footage blows. Face, target. Face, target. You can’t get a good feel for how far away the target is, nor the size of it. It’s much more impressive when you can get a view of the whole thing from an over the shoulder perspective.
Got to say I disagree on this. I think the focusing on the face/ bow and the target is actually the best way to show it. Over the shoulder shots are just hard to see anything. If you want an example of this go look at the footage from the trap shooting event, they tried doing it back over the shoulder and you literally couldn’t see anything. I could never tell what they were shooting, where they were shooting, if they hit anything, etc…
No the problem with the archery coverage was there was barely any. You were able to watch dedicated streams on peacock, but if you had no access to that you just couldn’t see the archery they don’t mention it during their main broadcasts. That’s the main problem with NBC’s broadcasts. It’s the Prime Time stuff where they’re supposed to show you what happened during the day. We’re talking about a place that’s half a day ahead of most of us time wise. A lot of the events took place at 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. And the rest took place them very middle of the day. So prime time is how most people are going to see the Olympics. Yet The Prime Time barely shows actual Sports.
I’m not suggesting every shot be over the shoulder, but some variety of shots to emphasize the distance and size of the target would add some much needed perspective. The way it’s currently shot it feels like they’re 20’ away and shooting at large targets. It takes away from the impressive ability those archers have, IMO. You’d think they would have some dope tracking / zoom shots or something, it’s quite monotonous as it is now.
Well they did do shots where they showed the whole thing. They had a lot of sweeping shots that showed the size of the stadium and the length of the… i don’t know what they call it, gallery? So I don’t think it was ever a mystery. And they did constantly talk about that lining up two 747s wingtip to wingtip thing a lot. I think the vast majority of people watching archery, again because you have to go find it so it’s not for the Casual viewer, are pretty familiar with the distances. They also did have a pretty cool thing where they had a computer graphic trace the route of the arrow.
Highly highly disagree that it was monotonous though. There’s a lot of tension and anticipation to archery in the way they shot it and I think it comes off very well. I mean I was standing up and pacing half the time I watched it. There’s a lot of drama in archery.
Show, don’t tell. It’s a visual medium.
I’m referring to the camera work, not the competition.
I believe it actually showed a graphic of that plane thing. And like I said they show the entire course many times.
Well, I disagree. Face, target. Face, target. Face, target. Check the link. That’s not dramatic IMO. Maybe it was just their YouTube videos but it left me wanting. Curling is 100x more dramatic than how they cut the archery footage together.
https://youtu.be/6IsKUb5E030
Oh well shit no wonder you think it’s boring. That wasn’t the broadcast. That’s like a recap highlight reel thing. That’s choppy as hell. Yeah if that’s what they actually showed I’d agree with you. When you watch the actual event the whole thing it’s a lot better. That’s not what I saw at all. Also the real announcers were way better. They were actually people who knew archery.