Golf is young and old, vertical and horizontal, cruel and kind
and intensely spiritual." You can forgive Andy Clayman for
waxing poetic. He hasn't been sleeping much. Multimedia director
Clayman, 46, just put the final touches on a video wall he'll
unveil next month when the World Golf Hall of Fame opens in St.
Augustine, Fla. Titled The Passion to Play, it's a nine-minute
electronic mosaic, the first thing visitors will see when they
enter the Hall.
The wall—the Show, its creators call it—is a vast bank of
40-inch TV monitors: 240 square feet of screens containing 11.2
million pixels, each receiving a constant stream of marching
orders from Clayman and his colleagues at Mediaworks, a New York
City firm that has also designed displays for IBM and the
Whitney Museum. Using hundreds of photos and film clips plus
music and computer-driven effects, the Mediaworkers have built
what they call their best work. That's tall talk for a crew
whose exhibit at the Whitney caused traffic jams. They got their
Show on the road last year when Clayman, his partner Burt
Minkoff, editor Paul Allman and writer Nathaniel Kahn visited
the PGA Tour's TV and film archive, which holds film dating to
the early 1900s as well as footage of every tournament ever
televised. "You can ask for a shot of Tiger Woods hitting a
five-iron, and they say, 'What time of day?'" marvels Clayman.
One day the video team was shooting a certain pro (no names,
please) from a crane above a putting green. A simple aerial shot
of a 40-foot putt? Not when the pro kept missing while a Florida
thunderstorm rumbled in. The filmmakers finally got the shot
they needed, clambered to safety and watched lightning strike a
stand of nearby trees.
They survived to make a show that features princely Bobby Jones;
Ben Hogan's icy eyes; Sam Snead's rubbery perfection; the
unexpected beauty of water soaring from a dozen sprinklers; a
smile from Nancy Lopez; a wave goodbye from Arnie; a
split-screen look at Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus holing iron
shots side by side at the same cyber-instant. Yet there's
foolery, too, behind the music and grand moments. Remember that
40-foot putt? Never happened; it's a computer-altered four-footer.
"Hey, we were getting scared up there on our crane, and the guy
was never going to make that long putt," says Clayman.
Issue date: April 27, 1998
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