Production values: "When it was good" vs Now

[hallicks]

One of the received gripes about watching WWE today is how the presentation feels simultaneously stale yet too slick. So I thought it might worth making a few comparisons on them, to see what's changed from "when it was good" vs now. I've gone for two Raw main events 19 years apart.

Raw 352: February 21, 2000
28,614 - Georgia Dome, Atlanta, Georgia
Main Event: Big Show, X Pac & Triple H (c) vs Kane, Cactus Jack & The Rock
Camera Angles: 6 (Hard cam, ringside 1, ringside 2, back opposite ramp, ramp, crowd)
Camera cuts: 120
Match Duration: 10m 53s
Avg time per camera cut: 5.44s

Raw 1343: February 18, 2019
4,900 - Cajundome, Lafayette, Louisiana
Main event: Ruby Riott vs Ronda Rousey (c)
Camera angles: 6 (Hard cam, lower hard cam, ringside 1, ringside 2, ringside 3, ramp)
Camera cuts: 150
Match duration: 8m 3s
Avg time per camera cut: 3.22s

Italics indicates camera angle used only once during match

You really notice that extra couple of seconds on the average cut time. I'm not sure it's the fairest of tests, as the 2000 Raw was a mega 6 man with Steph, Tori and Paul Bearer all lurking at ringside and all sorts of stuff going on outside the ring while the two legal guys were in the ring.

Essentially fewer camera angles. in 2000, two ringside cameras and the hard cam, that was 99% of everything. In 2019, I'm fairly sure there were 5 in regular use, and the ramp one may just have been one of the ringside ones. 

One mark down on the 2000 one - Triple H is about to clock Cactus Jack with the fire extinguisher for the finish when the ref was distracted, but the camera cuts to ringside for the duration and there's no reaction at all from the crowd to the foreign object. Then it cuts back to the ring and Triple H covers him for the pin to zero reaction.

Probably a fairer test would be two one-on-one singles matches - I'll do it when I get some more time. 

Other notes: Commentary. I wasn't concentrating on it as I was noting the cuts, but JR just being JR and calling the match, whilst understanding the personalities of the people in the ring and getting the whole thing over is just light years away from the current three person team. JR's telling a story but you don't realise it. Cole, Young and Graves are also telling a story but it's so forced. Also, at the 2000 Raw, it must be a peculiarity of shows in a stadium, even though the crowd was pretty hot for the main event, there's just so much ambient hubbub of people talking, it reminded me of any time after the 2 hour mark at a modern Wrestlemania. 

My overall feeling is, less is more. 

[Michael_3165]

Completely agree. I hate the 'new' era where everything is so polished and shiny. The reason 'RAW' was precisely that was because it was gritty with a 'anything can happen' feel. With everything so stage managed now nothing seems organic and this dents my interest in your average RAW and SD. I think the death of gritty, reality based WWE was around the time they bought in the HD, LED screens. Way too much. That is why NXT works better for me, far less sensory overload. 

[Loki]

Here's my technical gripe - the camera movements.

Look at this video of Rollins whaling on McIntyre on Raw this week:
 

He's laying those shots in nicely.  But check out the cameraman to the left's movement, bobbing up and down with each hit.  The end result of that is this shot:

The chair shots actually look LESS impactful as the movement of the camera WITH the chair lessens the apparent velocity of the impact.  The good work done by Rollins, and the physical toll taken by McIntyre here is totally undermined by the direction.

When fan footage makes your product look better than your own feed, you have underlying directorial issues with your tv show.

 

 

[Mr Butternut Squash]

1 hour ago, Loki said:

Here's my technical gripe - the camera movements.

Look at this video of Rollins whaling on McIntyre on Raw this week:
 

They're so disconnected. It's seems like they're crawling ever deeper into their own arseholes. 

It's the commentary that does it for me though. Long term, I don't think it's ever been as bad. It's fucking abysmal. Micheal Cole, Renee Young and Corey Graves are an atrocious team of announcers. Nobody sounds like they mean anything they fucking say.

That Shield match at Fastlane - where their constant whining utterly killed what should have been Roman's joyous return, to the point I muted it - Cole says something like "They shattered Braun Strowman's elbow in a Dominant, Hellacious, Assault." Now Jim Ross could have made that line by putting some gravitas behind it. Hell, 90s Vince would have puffed out his chest and boomed that out with the pomp that makes wrestling great. This cunt delivers the line no differently to any other line the script tells him to. Which is like an automation reading through a bingo card of WWE jargon. There's nobody capable of putting over the angles or drama or the wrestlers as a big deal anymore. Not to mention the pointless, bored, phoney bickering between Renee and Corey that nukes every story they try to tell.

Remember when Renee was a likeable backstage interviewer and possibly even a human?  

Honestly, the commentary is wack and should be added to all the other reasons why wrestlers aren't as over today as they were When It Was Good.

[hallicks]

Last one, promise. 

Wrestlemania 13, March 23, 1997
18,197 - Allstate Arena, Rosemont, Illinois
Match: Bret Hart vs Stone Cold (submission match)
Camera Angles: 4 (Hard cam, ringside 1, ringside 2, crowd)
Camera cuts: 169
Match Duration: 22m 5s
Avg time per camera cut: 7.84s

Summerslam, August 17, 2014
17,357 - Staples Center, Los Angeles, California
Match: Dean Ambrose vs Seth Rollins (lumberjack match)
Camera angles: 7 (Hard cam, ringside 1, ringside 2, ringside 3, crowd 1, crowd 2, ramp)
Camera cuts: 159
Match duration: 10m 51s
Avg time per camera cut: 4.09s

Italics indicates camera angle used only once during match

I thought this would be a fairer-ish comparison, since both matches go into the crowd for quite a significant amount of time. Again, the number of cuts in the modern era match is dizzying. There's a reason every other form of television doesn't have as many camera cuts as this, and that's because it takes you out of the story. How are you supposed to follow what's going on when you're constantly have to re-orient your perspective? It's bad storytelling because it's so bloody distracting. Dunn could do with a film school refresher or something.

Credit to the guys in the modern match, though. This was post-Shield break up, Authority-era Seth vs Dean wearing a hoodie and vest. It's an 11 minute sprint and it's one of the best lumberjack matches I can remember, mostly because they're used sparingly. Dean was pretty over here, but if I recall, this was in that period where they just beat him like a drum in every match of any significance and then wondered why nobody cared when they finally made him champ. Seth wins after a briefcase shot and interference from Corporate Kane. Urgh.

There's little for me to add about the WM13 match itself, what with it being a classic and all. It's a real absorbing spectacle, apart from the minute or so when they're completely submerged in the crowd and the cameraman is just standing on tiptoes to avoid all the drunk fans yelling and gurning into the lens. But this was when they didn't really have any control over the outside areas, unlike in the 2014 match where they're able to get on to a balcony in the lower tier with just a few pats on the back and an "I LOVE YOU DEAN!" here and there. 

Three man commentary teams at both events. It's just inexplicable why they persist with it, it was awkward as hell in 1997 and that's with Vince, JR and a motivated Lawler. If they can't make it work well, what chance do Cole, JBL and a Lawler who'd been phoning it in for 13 years have? Also JBL. Fucking hell. Talking about Seth, "He's the man that created Dean Ambrose." Even Cole calls him out on it. 

Without wanting to sound like a fogey, (and at the risk of repeating myself a bit), just because you can doesn't mean you should. It's universal. Since films aren't distributed on actual rolls of film anymore, studios aren't bothered about your average flick going 2hrs 10m because there's no added cost when it comes to getting the films out (bar the extra shooting time, but unless you're shooting on film, that's less expensive too). I digress. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom had zero business being over 2 hours long. Likewise albums. Not that anyone listens to albums anymore, but does your album really need to be 55 or 65 minutes long? Yes, it's nice that vinyl isn't restricting your creative output anymore in terms of how much music you can put out, but actually, maybe it was a pretty decent filter that stopped self-indulgence? Maybe some of these lessons will have been learned over again in about 20 or 30 years, but for now, can someone please stop Kevin Dunn changing shot so much!

[Mr Butternut Squash]

When did the wacky camera cuts start? As in the extra excessive ones on the outside.  Did they introduce it with The Shield beat downs?

[hallicks]

That was all that shaky-cam bollocks. Nauseating. I think they cut more since they went HD, something about being paranoid about it being more obviously "fake" if you're able to concentrate on what's happening. 

[Egg Shen]

of all the things i dislike about the WWE now, its the attempts at trying to capture audience reaction shots that annoys me the most. That Undertaker streak reaction kid ruined it for everyone because the WWE try to re-create it every few minutes and the supermarks in the crowd know it so they play for the camera instead of reacting organically, the worst.

[tiger_rick]

3 hours ago, Egg Shen said:

of all the things i dislike about the WWE now, its the attempts at trying to capture audience reaction shots that annoys me the most. That Undertaker streak reaction kid ruined it for everyone because the WWE try to re-create it every few minutes and the supermarks in the crowd know it so they play for the camera instead of reacting organically, the worst.

Nope. Miz kid.

[King Pitcos]

13 hours ago, hallicks said:

That was all that shaky-cam bollocks. Nauseating. I think they cut more since they went HD, something about being paranoid about it being more obviously "fake" if you're able to concentrate on what's happening. 

It’s also because we’re in the movezmovezmovez workrate era. Haven’t they always tended to cut at points of impact, to distract from the fakery? There’s just more movement and impact now than there was 10, 20 or 30 years ago so they do it more often.

[Vamp]

They should just cut to the crowd every time someone hits a move like that odd period when they censored Test's big boot.

[tiger_rick]

I don't like it but honestly, I find it the least of their worries.

I chucked on the first (new) Thunder from 1999 that came up on the Network last night. WCW isn't dead at that point but it's in hospital riddled with cancer and the treatment isn't working. Yet that Thunder has more life to it than any modern Raw. The crowd are hotter, there are more signs, they react to the heels and pop for the faces. Even though the heels are a cheesy DDP and the faces include Shane Douglas.

Although speaking of production, there is a vignette/promo video for Berlyn that has to be seen to be believed. It's easily amongst the worst three things I've seen on a wrestling show. Pretty sure a GCSE student could have drawn something using stop-motion and done a better job.

http://network.wwe.com/video/v2523611683 about 21:15

[BomberPat]

I'm not sure if cutting away on impact is supposed to limit the risk of it looking "fake" in HD, or limit the risk of it looking "violent", and make them less culpable should a kid make headlines for mimicking wrestling moves in the playground and doing someone a mischief. Either way, it's bloody annoying.

The biggest problem to me is that it's all completely lacking any sense of urgency. I watched Wrestlemania IX last night - hardly an example of an all-time great show, littered as it is with non-finishes, ref bumps, and Giant Gonzalez - and, despite being all that, and despite being more than 25 years ago, it feels fresher and more vibrant than anything I've seen from WWE in years.

It has a unique venue that defines the entire visual style of the show. It may be a little hokey to dress everyone up in togas, or to stick the announcers in chaps and cowboy hats every time they run Texas, or dressed as spooky ghosts for Halloween, but it makes each show stand out. Running different buildings, with different sets, different visual styles, meant the shows felt varied, they felt interesting, and it didn't feel like you'd seen it all before. Even with the current standard LED screen set-up, they could use that screen so much more creatively with bespoke graphics and displays for every show. NXT doing single spotlights for title matches makes them feel significant, and make them stand out, in a way that matches on the main roster don't. 

It's just about making things feel different, rather than all looking the same. 

 

Another aspect I think is key, and was probably the turning point for a lot of this stuff - how often do you see wrestlers interact with the camera? It's clearly dictated to them not to do it. If you watch early '90s WWF or WCW, you'll see heel wrestlers pushing the camera out of their face, wrestlers posing toward the camera, talking directly into the lens, addressing the audience. But WWE want to be a "proper" TV show, so they pretend the camera crew don't exist, because you'd never see someone in Breaking Bad acknowledge the existence of a cameraman. Aside from leading to insufferable backstage "why are they even filming this, and why aren't the dastardly heels concerned that their conversation is being filmed?" segments, it makes the actual wrestling part of the show less immersive. 

Someone (I can't remember where I got this from, apologies) criticised Jurassic World's camerawork compared to Jurassic Park's, saying that in Jurassic Park the view of the camera is always at a human's eye level - straining to look up at dinosaurs, seeing them from roughly the perspective you would if you were in the scene. But in Jurassic World, you have cameras that fly around the T-Rex, circling it, shooting it from above, and from what possible "real" perspective is that representing? It goes from an immersive shot where you could easily be a character in the scene itself, to a view more akin to a kid playing with toys - able to see everything, but not themselves a part of the story. 

It's similar in wrestling - when the camera cuts every few seconds, you're not seeing it from any one perspective, so there's no sense of immersion, no sense that you're in an audience watching the show, so you don't feel a part of it in the same way. I think it started when TV became a more significant part of the business model than live events - the focus was no longer on producing a TV show that made you wish you were in that crowd of that wrestling show, the crowd were now secondary to making a TV show about wrestling.

[HarmonicGenerator]

1 hour ago, Vamp said:

They should just cut to the crowd every time someone hits a move like that odd period when they censored Test's big boot.

I’d enjoy the crowd cuts if they went full nostalgia with it and just repeatedly used the three or four crowd shots that Sky One always used to use to censor chairshots and table breaks when they showed SmackDown on a Saturday morning.

[BomberPat]

1 minute ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

I’d enjoy the crowd cuts if they went full nostalgia with it and just repeatedly used the three or four crowd shots that Sky One always used to use to censor chairshots and table breaks when they showed SmackDown on a Saturday morning.

My favourite of these was watching an episode WWF Classics, where an in-ring beatdown from 1991 cut away to an audience reaction from 2000.