The amount of negative Cubs stuff out there is getting me down so maybe lets talk some Olympics.
By now you've seen what T.J. Oshie did for the USA in that shootout ending vs. Russia.
In international hockey, the coach has to use 3 different guys to shoot in a shootout.
But if nobody wins by then, he can use whoever he wants.
So T.J. Oshie gets 6 shots and makes 4 of 'em, including the winner.
Goosebump stuff!
What a game, I guess.
It came on before the dogs were awake.
Have you watched any curling?
It's like just the putting scenes from golf in slow mo, and once you start watching you have to wait for a commercial to come out of your hypnotic trance.
Bob Costas' pink eye was revolting.
And I LOVE the Under Armour story.
Super hi-tech speed skating outfits that looked like Spiderman or Captain America but turns out to be more like Turtleman or Captain Snail.
Finally, the Russian goalie, Sergei Bobrovsky.
Man that was brutal watching him flop and squirm around trying to find the puck in the back of the net.
And for some reason it reminded me of this hockey shoot I was on for Wheaties in the '80s.
Because we ended up casting this one guy who was an actual ex-NHL guy, and then we filled out the rest of the cast with guys from some local hockey club in New York.
So they could play, only on a much lower scale.
And there was this one guy who... well, first off I actually found the spot on You Tube (and it's from the time when jingles were the norm so no making fun):
See the guy getting slammed into the glass at about the 8 second mark?
We had to shoot that guy getting hammered into the glass about 20 times from different angles and he got pretty beat up mentally just knowing he was going to get hammered each time the director, Andy Jenkins, said "action!"
But the real reason I was so happy to find the video is - I told this story here a long time ago but didn't have it.
And now you can see...
It was like my 3rd shoot, and Andy was kind enough to let me work the camera on a couple shots just so I could see how difficult it was.
And back then, art direction in film called for graphic stuff like match cuts.
See at the end there with the profile shot of the cereal bowl with the flakes falling down and that matches to the overhead shot of the goal with the guy scoring?
So they built a giant scaffold thing way high above the goal with the camera attached looking straight down, and Andy says why don't I climb up there and look through the lens and do the shot.
It was SO exciting.
I climb up there and we do about 6 takes and I say all cool-like, "Yeah, I think we got it." (there wasn't any video playback back then - you just had to know you got it when you saw it live).
Okay, so now we're editing the commercial with editor Tim McGuire over at Cutter's.
When we look at that scene, Tim says, "Man, something must have been on the lens. Look in the lower left - see that brown thing?"
Sure enough, there's a soft blurry brown thing there that I immediately recognized as my boot.
I was so focused on the action that I totally didn't realize that my boot was hanging down in front of the camera, and back then they didn't really have the technology they do today where you can just get rid of mistakes like that.
"Yeah, what the hell could that be?" I say.
Anyway, I can't remember if I actually came clean and admitted it so don't tell anybody, but there it is right in that shot.
How embarrassing!
Here's a picture of director Andy Jenkins - we did a water polo spot during that same shoot...
