The power of music montages
“The tease works consistently – to the extent that some nights the intro is the best part of the game.”
It ’s the most vivid and colourful aspect of Hockey Night in Canada.
No, we’re not talking about Don Cherry’s wardrobe.
The first thing viewers see when they tune in CBC hockey is a one- to twominute montage combining game and archival footage with music. The pieces segue directly into the classic Hockey Night opener, featuring the swirling bagpipes, the voice of Foster Hewitt (“Hello Canada and hockey fans in the United States and Newfoundland”) and the stylized images of Stanley Cup heroics performed by Wayne Gretzky, Guy Lafleur, Johnny Bower, Mario Lemieux and the ne plus ultra, Bobby Orr.
The segments are designed to whet your appetite for what you’re about to see; and the tease works consistently – to the extent that some nights the intro is the best part of the game. It is certainly the hippest ... if that adjective can be applied to a venerable TV franchise haunted by the black-and-white ghosts of Ward Cornell and Murray Westgate.
Trevor Pilling knows how artful combinations of music and sound can enhance a sports telecast. The 43-yearold executive producer of Hockey Night in Canada got his start in 1986 as a camera operator in Brandon, Man. Peering through a viewfinder left Pilling with an enduring appreciation of television as a visual medium.
“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 said during a phone chat from his office at the CBC building in downtown Toronto.
Having personally edited and packaged opening segments for the network’s telecasts of hockey, CFL football and the Olympic Games, Pilling describes the montages as “some of the network’s signature pieces over the years.”
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.
“For me, the teams that create those teases have a great opportunity,” Pilling says, “in that 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.”
Not every hockey game produces a moment that burns itself into the collective conscience, a Mario Lemieux splitting the defence, a Bobby Orr taking flight. But every game yields interesting images, and combining them with narration and music is an art form that’s been around since Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia documented the 1936 Berlin Summer Games.
With ever more sophisticated technical abilities, a sports event can be turned into a compelling television drama, offering what Pilling calls “that moment people can hold on to and remember.” He traces the evolution of Hockey Night’s openings to the closing montage of the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics.
“Prior to the late 1990s, the visual style was a lot of dissolves, from one slow-motion image to another,” Pilling recalls. “We’ve moved ahead in our minds as to how we put these together.”
The mastermind of Hockey Night in Canada’s video segments is 38-year-old Tim Thompson. With 13 years of video production and five seasons at HNIC under his belt, Thompson is the senior member of a team of five young producers and editors who, Pilling says, “are always thinking, always gathering ideas, always collecting songs and concepts so they have a little bag of tricks.”
Thompson describes himself as “a music fanatic with an interesting background in hockey.” A defenceman, he played major junior in the OHL, college hockey at the University of Guelph and one season with the New Mexico Scorpions in the “late, great Western Professional Hockey League,” which Thompson likens to “Slapshot Meets Spinal Tap.”
“Every day,” Thompson recalls, “was like, wow I didn’t just see that, did I?”
Thompson grew up in a family that “devoured music.” His parents had a large collection of vinyl and CD recordings, the appreciation of which was passed down to Thompson, his brother and sister.
“Music and hockey were such big parts of my life growing up,” Thompson says, “it’s natural and almost inevitable I’m doing what I do now. It’s like where the two roads
“We like the music and the images to tell the story.”
PRODUCER TIM THOMPSON
intersect. I’ve been exploring the connection ever since I got into sports television.”
Thompson’s taste in music varies from Gordon Lightfoot, with whom Thompson did a lovely segment about the great troubadour’s love of the Leafs, to Canadian indie bands such as Cuff the Duke and The Lowest of the Low.
Thompson believes “music is what brings out the soul in an image.” Behind every great Hockey Night opening, he says, is a great song – a passion he shares with Hockey Night studio host and fellow music-lover Ron Maclean, who gives the bands a helpful shout-out.
“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.”
Preceding Game 3 of the Rangers-capitals series, the opening featured Alexander Ovechkin depicted, partially in black-and-white, as what Thompson calls “the lonely desperado.” For Game 4 on Saturday (a 12:30 p.m. start) – the HNIC producer has a treasure trove of material from Wednesday’s tripleovertime classic.
“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.”