Customer Reviews

Instruments of the Orchestra DVD

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I gave this one star, because Amazon doesn't allow you to award no stars at all -- or negative stars, which this embarrassment deserves. As a former television cameraman and documentary producer, I'd say this is the most horrendously bad amateur production I've ever seen in my long career -- and I've seen a lot of turkeys. The Rollins College music department should be mortally embarrassed to have their name on this junk.

This appears to be a miserably third-rate classroom instructional tape for students who had the flu that day and missed the professor's actual class. It looks like they let the students run the cameras -- worse than a community access cable channel run by neighborhood grandmothers.

It's videotaped in what looks like some ugly high school classroom. It appears to be totally unscripted,ad lib,unrehearsed, and unprepared -- a last-minute hodge-podge throw-together. The fuzzy video quality looks like a bad 8th generation dub. The camera work is so incredibly jerky and clumsy it looks like Aunt Martha's home video of the nephew's third birthday party -- only Aunt Martha's video is better. A significant number of the instruments are hidden behind music stands so you can't really see what they look like (wasn't seeing the instruments the whole point of the production?).

Sometimes people's heads are cut off. Frequently the camera is aimed at other instruments instead of the ones being demonstrated, apparently because the control room crew dozed off (who can blame them?). Often the camera stays on the instructor's face instead of the instrument he's describing (is someone unclear on the concept?). Mercifully they somehow missed getting the cameraman's thumb in the lens.

The conductor walks around miking the instruments with a hand-held microphone like an auctioneer on some shopping channel -- too cheap to even mike the instruments professionally.

These people were too cheap to even design a case for the DVD. It's in a plain generic case.

I thought this was a great program. It has a wonderful group playing some delightful music. It is also very informative. Would definetly buy it again.