An Olympian shoot for Coke

The word overwhelming leaps to mind when cogitating on tv coverage of the Olympic Games. The pre-Games hype builds to a near-deafening decibel level as the opening ceremonies approach. The number of hours of coverage – Canada’s CTV Television Network alone promises 150 over the Feb. 12-27 Games in Lillehammer, Norway – as well as the number of events on offer and the dizzying array of faces, voices, nations and sundry stories carried on the tube, make the whole thing, well, overwhelming.

As it did for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, ctv is trying to build an occasional quiet and insightful moment into its coverage with the inclusion of a series of beautifully produced snapshots of athletes competing in the games. Entitled Coca-Cola Olympic Portraits, these three- to five-minute segments should offer a welcome reprieve from the blow-by-blow analysis of live competition which tends to dominate Olympics programming.

Abbott Productions of Toronto has devoted much of its time in the past 13-14 months to researching, shooting and editing the 45 portraits, 30 focusing on Canadian athletes and 15 on rising or established stars from other nations. But many of the portraits featuring non-Canadians have a Canadian spin. One of these is about a pair of brothers playing for the Slovak hockey team, Peter and Anton Stastny, who just happen to have both played (as did their older brother Marian) for the Quebec Nordiques in the National Hockey League.

Wayne Abbott, a principal in Abbott Productions as well as being a producer and director on this project, describes the job as challenging, engrossing and fun, but also problematic. The difficulty, he says, comes in trying ‘to guess which are favored athletes, medal contenders or finalists, and which have the best stories.’ ctv naturally had a lot of say in which athletes would figure in the portraits.

Since the production team – particularly Abbott, coproducer/writer Dave Toms and principal cameraman Willie Lypko (Abbott also did some shooting) – tried to spend two or three days with each portrait subject, it was important to choose carefully to avoid wasted time, effort and sponsor Coca-Cola’s production budget. With more than 100 shooting days logged by the middle of this month and more to be done just prior to the Games, Abbott is not exaggerating when he describes the project as ‘a huge, huge undertaking.’

The portraits aim to capture big pictures, he says, to embody a ‘big concept’ and yet remain visually straightforward. Shot on Betacam and on an ElmoCam thumb camera, they make extensive use of in-camera special effects, but include little digital sleight of hand. The idea is to let the viewer feel better acquainted with the athletes. ‘We hope that the athlete will make an emotional investment in us (the production team),’ says Abbott, ‘and that the viewer will make an emotional investment in the athlete. And when they watch (the athletes compete), they’ll care how they do.’

Says Toms: ‘It’s a pretty intense experience when we work with the athlete. We can’t do a whole life story,’ in a short item, he adds, so there’s no point talking about their medals and performances; better to find out ‘where their souls are.’

The soul of Canadian downhill skier Kerrin Lee Gartner is consumed by the thrill of competition, so much so that in her portrait, she tells a story of a dream she had, long before the Winter Games in Albertville, France, in which she heard a voice say ‘medaille d’or’ and someone gave her the gold. At the time, she says, she didn’t know enough French to be aware of the phrase for ‘gold medal.’ The dream came true, of course, and the whole thing is shot most poetically.

Leading with a long sequence, which features an out-of-focus starting gate and slow-falling snow gradually being brought into focus, the Gartner portrait is engrossing in look and content. The out-of-focus starting gate/ snow visuals are also used as a moving backdrop for other segments of the video, including interview clips which had originally been shot in front of a piece of linoleum painted Ultimatte blue. (They had to design their own background because they couldn’t find a portable Ultimatte blue background. This one is durable and has a smooth side.) In editing, Toms says, ‘we create our own wallpaper;’ that is, drop in a different background, such as the starting gate-snow falling, in order to put the athlete in his or her working environment.

For touches such as these, Abbott says, the production team leaned heavily on principal editor Georgio Saturnino who has largely preserved the ‘cinema verite’ look the producers tried to achieve. The pieces tend to unfold in a filmic, documentary style and have the effect of drawing viewers in rather than startling them with quick cuts and brash effects.

The music deserves special note. Most portraits are graced with original tracks by Peter Mundinger. A tour de force is an operatic rearrangement of Ave Maria, which seems to leap and swirl and lilt along with phenom figure skater Oksana Baiul of the Ukraine. It’s an ideal accompaniment to Baiul’s on-camera innocence and on-ice poetry in motion. Mundinger even provided his own interpretation of the Slovak national anthem in the portrait about the hockey-playing Stastnys.

The one notable exception to original music is the inclusion of a Celine Dion tune in the piece on Canadian women’s figure skating champ Josee Chouinard. It turns out Chouinard and Dion grew up a few blocks apart in Laval, Que., had admired one another but never met. They chanced to meet the day Abbott was shooting some skating scenes with Chouinard on the ice at Toronto’s Harbourfront. They heard Dion was close by, promoting her new album, and Toms, who knows Dion, arranged for the two women to meet. Abbott and company shot the impromptu meeting, included it in the portrait, and later got permission from Dion’s label to include a Dion track as the musical bed.

Through 12 or 13 countries and visits with 45 athletes, the sometimes labyrinthian itinerary was choreographed by associate producer/production manager Jocelyne Abbott. Additional camera duties were handled by Clive Scarff, Dennis Southgate and Ted Cannem while Ken Moe and Dave Nesbitt assisted Saturnino with editing. Abbott selected Creative Post as his post-production house, and leaned heavily on Deschamps Recording Studios as the post sound facility, with Mark Baldi as sound mix engineer.

The rich, well-inflected voice of Don Franks kicks in voice-over and narration. Animated title sequences, eight to 10 seconds in length, open the portraits and were put together by Nina Beveridge of ctv’s Olympic Unit. The portraits, which begin much as a music video does with a super of the Coke logo opposite the athlete’s name and a title (i