William Faulkner wrote: "The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again, since it is life." He concluded, "This is the artist's way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must some day pass."
Not that anyone in a hockey-TV production booth in North America is thinking about William Faulkner this week. The playoffs and the replay season are on us, and the techs are too busy trying not to miss a faceoff. They are especially trying not to do what nearly every broadcaster at the Vancouver Olympic Games did, which was to miss the money shot as Sidney Crosby scored his gold-winning goal in overtime.
Not the medium-wide picture of the lad launching the fatal wobbler from left of the net. Not the hero shot of Mr. Crosby with his hands up and gloves off. Everyone got that. The replay artists, being replay artists, are more interested in how the puck actually made its way past the raptor reflexes of U.S. goaltender Ryan Miller. That footage didn't show up for days. Only NBC had the right camera angle.
One Saturday afternoon, in the dim light of Hockey Night in Canada's replay centre at CBC headquarters in Toronto, the Elvis team is delving into this very mystery. The Elvis team operates EVS (electronic video server) machines - the contraptions that create the 100 or more replays in every National Hockey League game. They get their most serious workout during the playoffs.
Fernando Cabral, the senior production editor, has cued up the golden goal from Hockey Night's vast archive. He runs the footage back and forth at 12 per cent of actual speed, examining it the way Sherlock Holmes inspects footprints.
"The puck goes right underneath Miller's 5-hole," Mr. Cabral is saying, pointing a large finger at the tiny replay screen. "He thought he had enough time to poke-check Crosby. Miller's looking at Crosby, going, 'Okay, Crosby's got his head down, this is my chance here. I can get him with my stick.' Because Miller's got a good reach, right? And then just as he comes forward - you can see his stick comes up, and he has nothing blocking. Nothing blocking! And that's how the puck goes in."
It's one thing to remember the glory shot, Sidney Crosby standing in triumph. It's another, deeper thing to know how he did what he did to deserve it. We pay pro athletes millions to thrill us, but it's slow motion that has revealed their secrets, and made sports an art again. Faulkner would have understood.
Slow mo gives sports celebs their bodies back
Nearly a quarter of every NHL hockey game gets replayed. Slow motion isn't new, but it is pervasive. "Super-slow-mo replays have become such a regular part of the vocabulary of television sports and events," says Sherali Najak, Hockey Night's executiveproducer, "that it's impossible to imagine life without them."
But slow motion is more than just a technique. It's another way to look, to deepen the increasingly artificial reality of professional sport. Pro sports are about money and celebrity, first and foremost. Slow motion is about the physical, and what is and isn't time-worthy; it restores the aesthetic grandeur the money men threw away.
It has practical effects too. Slow motion gives sports physical verisimilitude by bringing the action up close and hypnotically personal. It lets everyone be an expert in what happened, when and why. It has changed the way games are played: Replays are used to settle controversies and even affect coaching tactics.
But the most important thing slow motion has done has been to make sports beautiful to look at and linger over, especially in high definition. In a world in which everything happens fast, slow motion is the communal pause button, the cue to feel.
Hollywood knows this well. Watch the opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan or any number of scenes in Gladiator or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Wanted, with Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy, in which a single bullet bursts a circle of skulls - action braked to bring the weight of what's happening home to a chronically distracted audience.
There are dozens of websites devoted entirely to slow mo: bullets firing, gum bubbles bursting. "Something I've always liked to watch was butter frying," writes one online curator of the time-delayed. "While this video does not give us any insight into the formations of the bubbles, it does give us a good look at them." Two weeks ago, Monica Tap, a talented Toronto artist, opened a show of paintings modelled from stilled frames of video footage.
These days, it seems to be a pause that's refreshing.
Slow mo's progress, from ballistics to bobsleds
True slow-motion photography is known as "over-cranking." Standard film and video cameras record at roughly 24 and 30 frames a second; if you film someone at twice that frame rate and play the footage back at normal speed, the action is depicted in twice the time - slow motion. Various speeds produce different effects: 48 frames a second is "walk-away-from-the-explosion speed." Filming slower makes things faster: A lot of kung-fu movies record at 22 frames, while at 8 we get those instant moves the vampires are capable of in Twilight.
It's an old trick. By the 1930s, Bell and Eastman Kodak had developed a camera that could expose short bursts of 16-mm film at 1,000 frames a second. Akira Kurosawa (drawing on the exaggerated movements of Japanese No drama) pioneered the use of slow-motion photography in feature films in 1954's Seven Samurai, a direct ancestor of The Matrix.
The first sporting event to be filmed in slow motion is thought to have been Max Schmeling's knockout of Adolf Heuser in 71 seconds in 1939. In Vancouver, the Olympic Broadcast Service (OBS) that provides the official TV feed at every Olympic Games, installed more than 50 cameras on the Whistler sliding track alone - hand-held slow-mo cameras at 60 frames a second, stationary and tracking robot cams that sell for $400,000 apiece. A bobsleigh race would be just a smear without them.
"They were originally developed for ballistic testing," explains John Pearce, the OBS manager of specialty engineering. "Unfortunately, due to the lighting conditions we shoot in, the best we can manage is 300 frames a second, or about eight to 10 times slower than normal. But that's good for showing up the muscles and tendons in a skier's arm."
"Super-mo" (a third of regular speed) and "X-mo" (ultra-slow motion) are extra-fond of summer sports, which expose more flesh - the quivering delicacies of the balance beam, water-shedding bodies in the pool, even dressage, for the earthquake in a horse's chest as it lands a jump.
But X-mo footage needs lots of time to be played back, and not all sports have that luxury. Hence the more common, ersatz version of slow motion, the EVS (or Elvis). It looks like a metal Rolodex case, with a dial and a T-bar toggle for controlling the speed of playback. Each Elvis can record footage from two to four cameras at once, non-stop, while letting its operator edit and replay action at anything from full speed to stop-action. (They first showed up at the Atlanta Games in 1996, and came to Canada for that year's Grey Cup in Hamilton.)
The machine performs its magic by "interpolating" extra copies of each frame into the recorded footage. EVS is almost (but not quite) as smooth as true slow mo, but can be turned around in the 15 seconds between whistles in a hockey game, between football turnovers or while a baseball pitcher is chewing his cud.
The Elvis machine can stop time. When it does, we get to ask what might have happened had things gone the other way. Slow motion suspends fate. We like this. It doesn't work on real life.
Slow mo behind the scenes: 'Craiger' cranks his crew
A few Saturdays later, five Elvis operators are crammed into the replay corner of Hockey Night's pristine broadcast truck at Toronto's Air Canada Centre with their boss, isolation director Craig McDonald. The Edmonton Oilers and the Toronto Maple Leafs are taking a final whack at one another.
Craig McDonald is a slight, fast-brained man who looks like Woody Allen and always wears a tie. When action in the booth gets antic, the announcers call him Craiger. He's monitoring quadruple feeds from each of four EVS machines (each named after a colour), plus the input from two $100,000 high-definition recorders from the arena's four fixed-position cameras - one in each net and a super-slow-mo camera over each net, which the referees consult if a goal is contested.
Slow-motion feeds have made hockey a less quixotic experience for fans - games are less subject to whim and miscall. It's harder now to believe your team was cheated: If barroom spats are more civil, we owe slow mo a round.
To Mr. McDonald's right, Cathy Morrison is isolated on two players, Toronto's Phil Kessel and Edmonton's Dustin Penner, and plans to isolate Leaf Tomas Kaberle as well, while she builds outtakes for the sponsored Subway Hockey Night Close-Up moment.
"If Kaberle farts, we're ready," Mr. McDonald says.
Farther right, another Elvis jockey, Mark Frederick, is preparing packs of highlights for halftime and post-game shows. "Kind of like a non-verbalized recap," Mr. McDonald allows. "That kind of thing, five to six years ago, would have taken an afternoon to build. Now Mark does it while he's still giving replays to the show."
Because the techs can do it fast, they do it often - with the result that games of speed and action like hockey, football and basketball, to say nothing of golf or baseball, are now more analytical, more intellectual and even more interesting.
Every time one of the Elvis operators notices something - a wince on a player's face (a possible injury), a nice saucer pass, an uncaught trip - they rewind, examine the clip, mark and log it in a computer. They know more about a game of hockey than even the most serious fan ever can.
Meanwhile, Mr. McDonald is monitoring his own screens, and listening and talking to half a dozen voices on a headset - his producer, his director and the play-by-play team as well as the "dry feed" (the announcers off air, discussing the game, so he can volunteer replays they'll be interested in). He cuts in and out, constantly fondling switches with three fingers of each hand, as if he were playing a tiny piano.
The wince becomes a slow-mo clip and then part of on-air chat. So commentary isn't just one guy noticing stuff; it's the product of an entire team armed with time machines.
Whether pain or pride, slow mo makes it bigger
Whenever anything significant or unusual happens - say, if the Leafs actually score - the collective blood pressure surges. "Silver, purple, red," Mr. McDonald intones, each EVS offering a different angle.
Every goal is replayed from a minimum of three angles. They get the onset of every fight. Every hit, steal, chance, shot, save, triumph and sorrow is preserved.
"I hate slowing down fights," Ms. Morrison says, "and really hate slowing down injuries. Sometimes you'll see somebody's head hit the ice or you'll see their arm breaking. That's hard for me."
The game before last, she backed up what appeared to be a fiery slapshot that hit the post. But at 8-per-cent speed, the footage confirmed her instinct that the puck was tipped off the goalie's glove, and thus a save. To an onlooker, this feels thrilling: Justice restored. For that kind of eye, a top EVS operator can make $800 a day.
It's a hectic job, but not as hectic, Mr. McDonald claims, as golf. "Here, you have 26 cameras pointing at one thing. In golf, you have 20 cameras pointing at different things. You're never going to work harder than you do in golf." Golf even uses X-mo cameras "where you have the blade of the club clipping the ball and the grains of sand and the bits of grass tumbling in the air."
Producers claim it's for analysis, but cameramen know it's all for the art.
"These machines have really released that animal inside people now, because this stuff is so cool," Mr. McDonald adds. "We can do all the replays you want - when there's a penalty, you gotta show somebody holding."
Their real purpose, he adds, is to "make the show look really big." But better than big is to make us feel something. This is the reason he's especially fond of low-angle, ice-level cameras. "It's magic, honest to god, because you see every wobble of the puck."
Do you recall Alexandre Bilodeau's mesmerizing knees at the Olympics, pounding moguls like a stoned steam piston? Cartridges flipping end over endless end out of biathlon rifles, into the snow? The fat skis of skinny ski jumpers wobbling to stillness as they launched off the ramp? Jon Montgomery weaving through Whistler with his jug of ale? All courtesy of slow mo.
When Joannie Rochette won bronze after her mother died, Mr. McDonald recalls, "we had music, we had the feed of her skating. We also had our own cameras at the venue, so we could isolate Joannie Rochette's dad, who had also lost his wife. … That kind of thing, it used to take hours and hours to do. You can do it now in a minute. And everybody's crying. And we're all crying too, right?"
It's pleasant to feel patriotic, proud or inspired when your country or team wins a game. Without slow motion, you wouldn't feel it as strongly.
Suddenly Mr. McDonald looks up at one of his many screens. "Dead guy!" he shouts. Someone's down on the ice. Mr. Frederick backs up to learn what happened.
The second period swirls to an end a minute later. Ms. Morrison isolates the Oilers' Andrew Cogliano and the Leafs' Luca Caputi as they tangle against the glass, names on the backs of their sweaters in full view. She slows the picture down, and down, and down, until finally the frame freezes, and it's time for a fast dinner.
Mr. McDonald is out of his chair, but his eyes are still on the screen. He declares, "Italian sausages for everyone."
Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.