LAWRENCE, Kansas – I’ve needed a couple of weeks to recover from the unfortunate event known as Live 8. It seems every media outlet has weighed in, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share my own thoughts.

First of all, it was painfully obvious that MTV and VH1′s July 9th re-broadcasts of two consecutive, commercial-free five-hour blocks of Live 8 performances (one block on VH1 followed by another on MTV) were responses to the overwhelming number of scathing reviews of their previous week’s telecast of the concerts on July 2, 2005. It was not out of generosity to their audience, as they would have liked people to believe. They made some big time errors that they couldn’t rectify until a week later.

Indeed, the idea to run a simulcast on the two Viacom properties was a huge mistake and a complete waste. Realistically, how many people have MTV but not VH1? It was overkill. As if that wasn’t enough, the two networks successfully took an event that had nothing to do with them and presented it as if it were their idea, shielding the real purposes of the concert – to raise awareness of extreme poverty in Africa and the following week’s G8 summit as well as to bring together some of the best and most popular acts on stages around the world.

Unfortunately for people watching with the expectation of seeing any of those acts, MTV had plans of its own. Viewers were thrown a plethora of horribly planned commercial breaks and a miniscule amount of live performances, as they were happening, and of course very few complete sets – or songs, for that matter. At the time, the only fully-televised sets from London were those being played at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, where The Championships, Wimbledon were concluding that weekend. Viewers had no such luck with the Hyde Park concert.

It gets worse. MTV and VH1′s plans to rerun ten hours of concert highlights only revealed the poor directing and camerawork for the shows, not that there was much doubt after they were originally aired. Inexplicably, the Paris concert had a different frame rate than all other venues, causing the footage to look more like film and making it the smoothest looking of the different sites. London, which had the best musical lineup, was by far the worst directed venue. With dissolves few and far between, the cuts rarely matched up to any part of the music. To add fuel to that fire, the handheld cameras were treacherous, inundating the audience with erratic pans and zooms that were enough to induce vertigo, even when U2 wasn’t performing. Whoever said that shoddy camerawork is the correct way to shoot music should be fired. Stop trying to be so MTV, and just cover the concert. It’s not that difficult.

Philadelphia was better, sort of. MTV based its coverage at the sole U.S. concert, whose performances by Dave Matthews Band, Destiny’s Child and Will Smith couldn’t compare to U2, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Madonna and others in London. Being the network’s hub, an MTV crew covered the Philadelphia concert, which often made it look better than other locations, with one notable exception: the 2-minute-and-20-second Steadicam shot during Dave Matthews Band’sperformance of “American Baby”. WHAT WAS THAT?! That’s longer than most commercial breaks.

In fact, it’s possible that the extended shot may have simply been the director putting the show on autopilot during one of MTV’s inopportune cut-ins or commercials. Regardless of the circumstances, however, a director should continue doing his or her job even when there’s no live television audience. Just ask the production crews for the NCAA Tournament. They don’t take coffee breaks when they lose their audience to another game’s upset finish; they keep covering their game. If something notable happens, they can’t be asleep at the switch. The same goes for the crew in Philadelphia.

After enduring Live 8 twice, I just hope that the concert will actually make a dent with the situation in Africa. I don’t think I could handle watching another one.

Filed under: Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial, Television