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- Hacker News
- Personally I put the Jonnie Walker The Man Who Walked Around The World ad with Robert Carlyle as the greatest one take shot.by pugworthy
- Wow that was very well done!by skrebbel
- I wonder if this show is the ”Connections” in “Technology Connections” [1]. I can’t find a reference on it but I wouldn’t be surprised.by jurf
- I think at some point Alec did mention that was what he was going for. IIRC it was a mastodon or bluesky post.
- If you look at the start of that episode, there is another crazy thing in there, a device which allows you to "see" the bits on a credit card track.
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...
by camkego - I 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 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?
by DavidWoof - I absolutely adore both Burke and the Connections series, and without a doubt this is a lovely shot, but I feel the same: I don't get the hype. It's been memefied to death for no real reason. There's no incredible feat involved. It wasn't a tightrope walk without a net live on air. You can bet they had stand-in footage done before that they could have made a montage of in case Burke stumbled a line.by shmeeed
- If it gets someone to watch the show for the first time then that's a win in my book. I think every young student should be exposed to Connections at various stages of their education.by hyperific
- > 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".
by Joeboy - I’d also mention the ascent of the Apollo 17 LM. The camera could be commanded to move up to follow the ascent, but the command had to be given ahead of time, from the MOCR, to coincide with the launch, which was commanded from the LM. The audio from the LM was delayed, as was the video from the camera, and the command would take about a second to reach the camera on the moon.by rbanffy
- Direct link to the youtube video, without this garbage ad-ridden website:by vova_hn2
- >this garbage ad-ridden website
And that's not Youtube?
by Finnucane - This comment reminded me I have an ad blocker. I reloaded the page without it, and instantly remembered why.by gjfr
- I watched this show religiously as a kid (by then in reruns in the early 90s), along with Star Trek: TNG, Jeopardy, and playing Civilization for PC. The most formative years of my life were spent absorbing as much science, technology, and history as my growing brain could muster. I think that's why I'd grown up to be so optimistic about the future.
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.
by chongli - The last line of the video was talking about nuking others...by wagwang
- It 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://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/doddimnledmldclhlbf...
by s20n - A question about aspect ratio on youtube, Does it care? or can you put whatever aspect ratio you want, I guess my complaint is that I don't see nearly enough (none) square video on the site.by somat
- This will fix it: https://www.stretch.site
And here's the clip with aspect ratio corrected: https://www.stretch.site/?videoUrl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube...
by DonaldFisk - spite driven development is the unsung hero of so many great tools
- The 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.
by devindotcom - Thanks for the link.
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...
by m463 - I was so lucky to be able to grow up watching quality shows like this. Thank you PBS (and BBC).by _JamesA_
- There is also a fourth season from 2023. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30222317
Also note that there is a book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Connections/James-Bur...
https://archive.org/details/connections0000burk/page/n7/mode...
by esafak - 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...
by jdub - I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.
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.
by mandevil - This is my pet peeve.
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)
by hjkl0 - I think the level of irritation is proportional to knowledge of the technical art of cinema, since what makes a good "shot" is often a discussion of minutiae. There are innumerable examples of better shots in television, particularly in the "second golden age" begun with series like "The Sopranos" and climaxing in television like "Better Call Saul" or "Chernobyl"[1]
[1] Which would certainly have some scenes competing for actual best shot. Calling it TV feels a bit misleading.
by lopsotronic - What if we instead look at the last clip as “the one shot”
Personally I don’t think that takes anything away
by joshspankit - I'm not seeing it. Starting at "if you mix those gasses..." to after "...you get that." seems to be a single shot.
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
by OhMeadhbh - If you want a single, unedited shot, Neil’s ladder descent would be a candidate. If you didn’t think Stanley actually did it.by jleyank