Dancing With the Stars

I’ve got a major bitch about  Dancing With the Stars
It could be with the excessive repetition or the unbelieveable number of commercials. But since I TiVO the show, that’s not a problem. My problem is with the director, someone named Alex Rudzinski. In the olden days, my children, before MTV, TV directors just showed you what was going on. The contemporary director feels it necessary to dominate the proceedings by changing cameras and angles every second. It's like some kind of Tourette’s Syndrome. There’s plenty of movement already with dance. We don’t need the director to create it artificially by switching cameras all the time. For example, during the quick step dance of former boy band star Drew Lachey and his partner, Director Rudzinski gave us 28 different camera shots. (Yes, I played it back and counted them). It was like watching a slide show. He was changing camera angles so often, zooming and dissolving, that once Drew and his partner Cheryl Burke were able to dance right out of the frame. On another change he missed Drew’s only mistake. On this week’s show the men did a quick step while the ladies did a rhumba. Rhumba is a slow dance. Too slow for Rudzinski, apparently.
On the winning dancer’s performance (that would be the amazingly long-legged Stacy Keibler who works in the pro wrestling business) we had 26 camera changes. It is very annoying to have someone constantly changing your point of view and I look forward to the day that technology will allow me to direct my own show picking the cameras I want to use. By the way the changes I mentioned don’t count panning, circling the camera around the dancers, or booming it up and down again. These MTV directors have even moved into sports and can ruin a football game with their frequent cuts to fan reactions, sideline shots and closeups of the linemen. Back to Dancing With the Stars, if we could get rid of Rudzinski or calm him down with appropriate pharmaceuticals Dancing With the Stars would be even more fun to watch. Maybe we can get Stacy to wrastle those cameras away from him.

Comments

[Jane S]

Hey Randy,
Right on. It drives me nuts too.
You should send the show an email, referring them to the edicts of Fred Astaire, who got final say on how his dance scenes in movies would be photographed. His demand, always met, was that the camera would never leave him for an instant, would include ALL of him, and the shooting would be continuous.

It has taken them a while to get that right with figure skating competitions and tennis matches too, till someone finally set them straight.
Jane