Creating video montages takes an incredibly varied skillset. CBC’s musical director Tim Thompson does a fantastic job first of all because he’s such a great editor. “His ability to pair the perfect piece of music to set the mood of a game or series is unmatched,” writes Shold Media Group’s Taylod Shold, who wrote a feature on Thompson. “He can turn a mid-season Sabres-Leafs game into something much more by creating a mini-music video with a mass array of great shots coloured beautifully and timed to perfection.” But that’s only half the battle. Thompson recognizes that a great montage, like any other piece of media, requires a story. There has to be a message. “You need a storyline, a theme, and good ebbs and flows to capture your audience all in under 2 minutes of less,” Shold adds.
During the second round of the NHL playoffs last year, Washington Capitals star Alex Ovechkin was having one of the most frustrating spells of his NHL career. Coach Dale Hunter, who had taken over halfway through the season, was preaching discipline and structured defense, something “Ovi” wasn’t used to seeing. As a result, despite being easily the most talented player on the roster, his ice time was being cut down, and surprisingly, it was helping a normally underachieving playoff squad win. This was the backdrop for Thompson’s intro prior to Game 3 of the series. In the previous game, as can be seen in the video, Ovechkin had been glued to the bench for much of the game, before eventually breaking out and scoring the game-winner. Rather than begin the telecast with an average series of highlights mixed with music, Thompson decided something more creative was in order.
So he turned Ovechkin into “the lonely desperado,” and centered an entire montage around his story as a misunderstood, frustrated individual, going up against the stubborn Dale Hunter. The video begins with clips of Ovechkin that depict him as that desperado. There is the goatee and mustache he wears, the snarl on his lips, the slow camera shot of him looking up, the cheesy western movie-style lighting. All of this contributes to that metaphor. Near the end of this sequence, we hear the noise of a roaring crowd mixed with that of a hissing snake. Ovechkin is the cowboy of the Verizon Center.
At 0:16, he looks around with suspicious eyes, picking out any possible enemies, and at 0:30, he sits on top of the boards, ready to draw pistols with anybody, ready for some action. But none comes his way. Everything is black and white, or at least everything involving him. The rest of the world goes by in color, but he is not a part of it. He is stapled to the bench.
The music is also reminiscent of a western classic, but only the part of the film in which very little is happening. You can almost see the dust and tumbleweeds sweeping across the plains. As every highlight of the game is shown in color, we flash back to the looks of both the protagonist (Ovechkin) and antagonist (Hunter). There is a gloomy feel.
But that all quickly changes. At 1:02, we hear a commentator state, “He has to relax and let things happen,” followed by “Ovi sucks” chants in the background. Ovechkin seems to take a deep breath, and as he does his color returns, and with his hand he motions for the crowd to bring it on. He has heeded the advice, and he is ready to go.
By 1:05, he is back in color, and suddenly the music is more upbeat. Ovechkin scores the winning goal, and as he does the music kicks into an even higher gear, mirroring his excitement.
In a May, 2012 interview with the Montreal Gazette, Thompson spoke about these sorts of thematic choices.
“There’s a lot of really bad sports television – and television in general – out there,” Thompson says. “We treat each opening like a piece of art and try to get away from sports TV stereotypes, like the voice-over telling you war is coming. We like the music and the images to tell the story, push the boundaries and give it some artistic integrity… I find some of the best ones have the least amount of hockey action footage in them. You can dive into humanity and find metaphors that way.”
The montage ends with lightning striking the United States Capital building, just as it might a cactus in the wandering desert. The lightning is an allusion to the west, but also an allusion to Ovechkin himself. His shot is like a lightning bolt, and he has won.
“There’s so much richness in the sport, especially during the playoffs,” Thompson says. “The beauty and the pain and the glory and the suffering kind of culminates this time of year. These openings try to capture that, tug at the heartstrings and hit (viewers) kind of deep on a human level.”
Every Saturday night, Hockey Night in Canada does a feature following the late game on certain players or team personnel, based on the situation. It involves interviews with the individuals, and usually a video introducing them and how they got here. This particular video was the introduction to a segment on Montreal Canadiens defenseman Josh Gorges.
The video begins with a shot of a prairie — what could well be Gorges’ childhood home — a peaceful rural place, a symbol of the rural country aspect of his identity. This, however, is layered with the audio from a hockey game — a crowd yelling, very much not a peaceful scene — which is used to represent the now city-living hockey player Josh Gorges, who has left much of his childhood life behind, and has added a new layer to his identity.
We then hear Gorges’ mother speaking, painting a picture of “during the playoffs, when the game starts, and the [camera is] up overhead, and you’re looking down at 21,000 people, and they’re all waiving their towels.” Fittingly, the B-roll that we see is of precisely that: his family watching a playoff game and seeing just that camera-work. She proceeds to talk about seeing her son on the ice, and the visuals accompany the story that she is telling.
The music kicks in at 0:28, and it really feels like after-school special music, something likely composed in the ’80s or ’90s, around when Gorges was growing up. We see images of him as a child, and then the music fades out as he begins to speak in an interview in the present.
At 2:05, as he finishes a comment with the words “my whole life,” the audio of crowds cheering begins as if to transport us inside his mind, and then the video shows that we are to be taken back to the moment he won the Memorial Cup in juniors, as the captain of his hometown Kelowna Rockets. As the clip fades out, and we return to the present-day interview. The director could have opted for a harsh audio cut or a simple audio-fade, but instead keeps the commentary going on briefly in the background, as a barely audible afterthought. It is an interesting effect that makes us feel as though these clips are still going through Gorges’ mind as we watch them and listen to him talk.
Finally, the original music returns, and the video concludes in a cheesy but effective fashion, as we see clips of his family celebrating the end of a successful playoff game by Gorges, and his father close to tears.
Hockey Night in Canada, in a lockout shortened 2012-2013 season, celebrated its 60th anniversary, which is no small feat in the world of broadcast media. As a program that has gained acclaim for its video montages in the last two decades, it was a given that musical director Tim Thompson, with the help of musician/writer Dave Bidini, would put together a short video truly emblematic of the Hockey Night brand, and what it has meant to Canadians over the past six decades.
When the NHL lockout ended early on the morning of January 8, the CBC told Thompson they needed such a video, and that they needed it by the start of games, which would be five days later. Luckily, as Thompson told Sports Illustrated’s Stu Hackel, he had numerous interviews he had done previously with famous Canadian musicians, actors, and athletes, archived, and he was able to pull together those, mixed with clips and commentary, and create something truly special.
The video begins with a view of the great snowy outdoors of Canada, and the ambient sound of wind sweeping across the plains. What is clever about this use of sound, however, is that it seems like it’s diegetic sound. What your mind thinks you’re seeing is video of a snowy path with the accompanying wind, but what you’re actually seeing is a picture of that path, slowly zooming in, with non-diegetic wind sound taken from elsewhere. It’s an effect more than anything to draw you in and pique your interest, and it does a good job of that.
The early music, which kicks in following this sequence, is an instrumental mix of horns and strings, made to sound like the sort of classic sound one might hear while sitting around a fire in a living room in decades past, which is fitting because the topic of conversation between the interviewees is precisely that: reminiscing about watching Hockey Night in Canada in just such a setting in their youths.
At 0:49, deeper baseline tones can be heard, as the narrator utters the words “the cheering from cities and arenas you’d heard of but never visited.” This deeper music makes the viewer feel somewhat small in a large country, and more instruments are added, which catalyzes this effect.
At 1:55, the narrator says, “one thing you did not forget was the taste and feeling and sound of those Saturday nights.” At this point, Thompson incorporates crowd noise with arena visuals, although once again — this is a commonly used technique in these videos — the sound is in fact non-diegetic.
At 2:18, Alan Doyle speaks of renowned play-by-play man Bob Cole, now in the twilight of his career, and states that “if I don’t hear anybody else doing the play-by-play, Bob Cole is in my head.” At that moment, Thompson transitions to Cole calling an all-time famous goal from a past broadcast — Mario Lemieux scoring in his return to the game from retirement — but the transition itself is impressive. The audio for the call kicks in with Doyle still on screen, to promote the idea that this call is going on in the musician’s head, as he had implied. Delaying visual transition behind audio transition is a technique commonly used by video editors, but it is especially effective here because of the context.
Near the end of the video, at 4:40, the music ends as we approach the climax. The narrator discusses the nation as a whole, and then Thompson transitions into more crowd noise and a very fitting final song.
“Footsteps” by Canadian Indy band Petty Victories isn’t a well-known song in Canada, but it is fitting. The lyrics, “These are my footsteps” fit well with the theme of the video — the legacy of Hockey Night being passed on from generation to generation — and the tune itself is reminiscent of various other niche Canadian bands, which feature a female vocalist, numerous backing instruments, and constant use of percussion.
One such band, Metric, saw its song “Gimme Sympathy” used for a Winter Classic intro montage a few years ago, and Thompson enjoys finding lesser-known bands to share with the Canadian population. There is no better stage to promote your music, accompanying the emotion and magic of hockey.
It is a staple from cradle to grave of Canadians. On Saturday nights, you sit down in front of the television and watch the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC)’s presentation of Hockey Night in Canada. And it truly is a presentation. The entire production is targeted not at a select, knowledgable hockey-breathing fan-base, but at the entire population of Canada. As a result, the focus is on making the game exciting at all costs. During the game, fan noise is pumped up to unheard-of levels, the commentary is simplified and familiar, and there is an emphasis placed on the backstories of certain players, so that the audience can identify with them. This trend is continued post-game with segments like “Inside Hockey”, which every week focusses on different players to present their stories and paths to the NHL (more on this in a future post).
Throughout much of this presentation, music is used to make a connection to the story in ways that one would find commonly in conventional television shows and movies. One might think of hockey as a sport that befits the tunes of System of a Down, or even the Angels of Death Metal. But in reality, when one goes beyond the heavy hitting and other violence, hockey is a game of emotions. These emotions, as I will show, are triggered when a player makes a return from cancer; when a player finally wins the big one after two decades of losing; when a country divided is brought together by sport.
As the introduction to every broadcast — each generally starts at 7 p.m. Eastern Time — Hockey Night in Canada puts together a video montage to whet the appetite of viewers for the coming matchups that night. As technology has expanded, so has the complexity of the use of still images, video, commentary, music, and special effects. This blog will not exclusively discuss these montages, but they will be the focus. They are unlike anything that any other sports television station/broadcast has done on a consistent basis in North America, and they are incredibly effective.
Mike Boone of the Montreal Gazette wrote an article entitled “The Power of Music Montages” in May of 2012, in which he interviewed the now 44-year-old executive producer of Hockey Night, Trevor Pilling, who started as a camera operator back in 1986. Boone asked him about these montages.
“The teases and the openings are the perfect places for us to blend music, sound, story, image, look – all those things come together in a tidy package that sets the tone for the evening.”
Pilling understands the impact these types of media can have on viewers.
“There’s so much media these days, if you’re able to create something people will remember, even for a day … that’s one of my goals: to be part of creating something that people will feel and that they’ll remember.”
Whenever somebody mentions Hockey Night in Canada, the video montages are always one of the first topics of discussion. They are what makes 7 p.m. on Saturday nights (or every night in the playoffs) truly special. They make the matchups to follow seem more of a Canadian staple than at any other point. They make them something more than a game.
We live in a time of 24/7 visual and auditory stimulation, coming at us in media that vary from 80-inch HD flat panels to iPhone screens. It isn’t easy to create something that can emerge from all that buzz to transcend irrelevance on the way to becoming iconic.
Hockey Night Analysis 