I happened to see a segment of a show on the Planet Green channel about the Shell Eco-Marathon, an student competition to achieve maximum MPG. The winning entry from Evansville Mater Dei High School achieved a calculated 2,843.4 mile per gallon.
However, I have to rant about what appears to be a minor production detail: often, when defending champion Cal-Poly's vehicle appears in footage, the video editor apparently thought the sound of a V-8 stock car cruising at 170mph sounded better than a 50cc single-cylinder engine turning at 600rpm, and dubbed in that sound.
What the hell? If you're doing fiction, we call this "artistic license," like space ships making sound in space. For a damned television channel called "Planet Green," it's doing our culture a disservice to misrepresent reality. The amount of sound energy emitted by a single V-8 powered stock car is probably exceeds the amount of power generated by the moped engines in the Eco-marathon - and it's important, because the whole point of the Eco-marathon, and the whole point of the story about the Eco-marathon, and the whole point of the dumbass channel is supposedly how to achieve 2,800 miles per gallon and why we care. If a vehicle has to be made of aluminum tubing, shrink-wrap plastic and duct tape, and sound like a tiny irrigation pump engine to get that result, then that's what you should represent in your footage.
The presenters introducing the show segment first complained that motorsports wasn't ecologically friendly and cited how many miles the competing vehicles covered during the race while getting only 2 miles per gallon - as though them traveling a certain distance was actually a goal. They said this in front of a monitor showing a stock car race, the race track bleachers full of fans. How many more fans drive their personal vehicles to watch people throw, kick, and hit balls around in any given year in the U.S.?
Boneheads.
2 comments:
I haven't seen that show or noticed such obviously fake dubbed audio but I've noticed lots of overwhelming cluelessness on Discover Networks productions--especially on their 2nd-shelf channels. Usually it's that the copy provided for their narrators being flatly contradicted by the image on the screen.
Dunno if you've seen any of Star Racer, a Discovery Canada series searching for a new driver for single-seat racing. There was some fun stuff with a lot of time spent in open-wheelers at the Jim Russell School at Mont Tremblant, and with Derek Daly and Paul Tracy as celebrity driving coaches. But the idiotic voice-overs make it unwatchable at times.
Oh, btw, the record listed on the Eco-Challenge UK site is 11,525 mpg. Yeah, imperial gallons, but nonetheless... I've heard that US teams always use engines that are too big for the job, fittingly I guess.
I *have* watched some of Star Racer, but did get irritated enough to stop following it.
11,525mpg!!! Zow! Yeah, I was kind of surprised that the narrator said that most Eco-Marathon entrants used "stock" 50cc motors. Maybe they just want to focus the student efforts on aero, but if you're going to go for numbers, go for numbers.
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