99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

CBS Letterman In London

http://vimeo.com/29331311

Posted by Glenn Lazzaro for his series “Adventures in Television.”

1995, National Video Center, NYC.

David Letterman was going to London for a week and Linda Danner, then head of the CBS Late Night Promo Department, wanted to do a big spot announcing the stunt.

The problem: there was no London footage. The show would be live, so there would be no footage until the first show aired. We came up with an idea to shoot some maps and iconic London landmarks to intercut with existing footage from New York. We were hoping to create a kind of 1940s movie sequence, where a plane is superimposed over a moving map to indicate the hero’s journey to a far-off land. Of course, once we started putting it together it evolved into something very different.  It was 1995, not 1940, and we loved manipulating footage to create wacky, abstract imagery.

Linda and CBS producer Jane Fogtman started scouring tourist shops for New York City and London iconic miniatures: the Statue of Liberty, a NYC taxicab, a double-decker Bus, the Empire State Building, etc. Finding the props today would be easy, but this was pre-Internet so it took a while.

Art director Kevin Largent would then repaint them with Letterman and CBS logos.

He also built some beautiful miniatures of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Ed Sullivan Theater with a lighted sign. We especially loved the lighted sign. We were crazy for it. We kept turning it on and off until we finally burned it out.

We set up a tabletop shoot at National Video Center with the help of my live-action producer, Susie Shuttleworth. She hired DP Steve Kasmirsky to shoot 16mm film. I shot a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex, creating single-frame animations and flash-frames, for what we called in those days “poor man’s production value.”

After the shoot, we transferred the film to tape and the footage Steve Kasmirsky shot looked really pretty. Too pretty. Too pretty for the aggressive mix track that Bob “Boom Boom” Chapman had done. We thought the messy, grainy, flashy Bolex footage meshed better with the spot Linda wrote. So we distorted the “pretty” footage beyond recognition to match the Bolex footage. (Sorry, Steve.)

Bonus: Later that summer, we shot a spot for the “Late Show”based on the Tim Bodet-voiced Motel 6 spots. The much-loved Ed Sullivan Theater with the lighted sign made a cameo appearance in two shots.

http://vimeo.com/29484957

OLN Freedom

Posted by Glenn Lazzaro for his series “Adventures in Television.”

2000, Hood River Valley, Oregon.

When we arrived in the Hood River Valley in November to shoot an image spot for OLN (now Versus), we had a great DP (Trish Govoni), a great crew, a 35 mm camera package, a bag of props, and a great song idea we hoped to license.

We also had a miniscule shooting budget and almost no cast. In order to save money, we decided to source local cast members as we went.

Wendy McCoy, then VP/marketing for OLN, had asked us to develop ideas for an image campaign for OLN’s 2001 season. With Rob Battles, then creative director at Crossroads Television, I came up with a campaign celebrating the first moment a child realizes his sled or bike can transport them to new, exciting places. We planned to shoot Snowboarding, Skiing, Mountain Biking, Wakeboarding, Skateboarding, Hiking and Kayaking–all cut to Jimi Hendrix’s “Freedom.” We’d have to find all these athletes on location.

We got lucky at Mt. Hood glacier: the local Burton Snowboarding team was practicing there along with the U.S. ski team and the Junior Olympics ski team. They all graciously volunteered to be in the spot. The two boys playing in the snow at the start of the spot are kids whose moms worked in the lodge cafeteria.

When we got to the town of Hood River, it was a different story.

Since we had no budget for casting, my producer Carla Tate and our AD Ann Taylor scoured neighborhood parks looking for volunteers.

Word spread quickly around town that some “strange people” were bothering children in the town. Police showed up to arrest Carla. After we explained what we were doing and showed them our film permits, one of the cops volunteered a neighbor’s kid for the spot. (She’s the little girl hanging out the car window at :16.) We also used crew members whenever we could. Our assistant camera operator can be seen running into the water at :20.

I wanted to use Jimi Hendrix’s “Freedom” for the soundtrack from the very beginning, but when we tried to license the track the record company wanted $80,000. We only had $3,000 in our budget for music. I had met Jimi Hendrix’s father at a Woodstock reunion concert a few years before and he seemed to be a really nice guy, so I suggested that we contact him directly.

We called Jimi’s dad, James Hendrix, explaining that we wanted to use the song but couldn’t afford the high price the record company quoted. We asked if he’d consider allowing us to use it for less. Much less. He was open to the idea, but he asked to see a cut before making a decision. We sent him the cut and waited. When he called us back and said we could have the rights to the song for our paltry $3,000, we were ecstatic. He also said, “I think Jimi would have liked your commercial.”

I could not have been prouder.

Mt Hood Glacier:

Time Warner Global Image Spot

http://vimeo.com/28405221

Posted by Glenn Lazzaro for his series “Adventures in Television.”

1990, National Video Center, NYC.  Posted by Glenn Lazzaro

Before 1990, a lot of the things we did in the edit suite (animating art under the title camera, warping images, revealing the process, etc.) were primarily for promos and music videos. The commercial advertising world had yet to embrace the “MTV editorial style.” Agencies would borrow ideas occasionally, but they’d never really done a full-blown spot using “edit suite” techniques. This spot changed all that.

I’d worked with director Jon Kane from Optic Nerve on a number of projects prior to this. He always loved to take chances and subvert what was considered the norm.

Together with Steve Stein, Jon had built a stream-of-consciousness audio track combining spoken word, foreign language, and sound effects with music. This gave us the freedom to do anything we wanted.

Since this was a national spot with a big budget, Jon booked 3 open-ended nights so we could take our time and experiment. He also insisted that we have access to any and all equipment at National Video. The spot was going to be built from hundreds of still images from Time Magazine that we would manipulate under the title camera. (There are only 10 seconds of live-action footage in the 60-second spot.) When Jon said he wanted access to everything, he also meant the kitchen. We shot a series of Time Magazine covers through a fruit bowl under the title camera (you can see the actual bowl 13 seconds into the spot). We also ran the audio track through an ancient oscilloscope we borrowed from the video shop, to create the squiggly sound waves throughout the spot.

Placing the art under the title camera, we recorded 3 frames at a time and created animations that we then processed with digital effects and switcher “wipes” to create the spot. Trez Thomas, VP Brand strategy at Bravo, who was freelancing with Optic Nerve at the time, remembers “long nights and the fact that the Quincy Jones edit for ‘Listen Up’ got moved to LA, so all the suites could be used to edit this one piece.”

After all the layering and digital manipulation of the stills, Jon wanted to introduce a “human” element into the finale of the spot. We enlisted whoever was around at 3 AM to hold their hands under the camera as we animated more stills. That included, Jon, Trez, myself, and some of the girls who were stuck in scheduling that night because of us. This was the second time my hands appeared on TV. (See my “It Takes Two” blog post for the first)

The spot aired nationally, and was written about in the business section of the New York Times (see below). It wasn’t long before the advertising world started doing similar style spots to sell their products.


 

Bravo “Top Chef All-Stars” Food Fight

August 18. 2010, NYC Posted by Glenn Lazzaro

For the past few years, I’ve directed most of the launch promos for Bravo’s “Top Chef.” Whenever we’d discuss creative for a new season, someone invariably suggested a food fight. We’d all get excited, but ultimately we never did one. It would be too time-consuming. Too messy. Too hard to coordinate.

Then last summer I got a call from Bravo. Amy Troiano, VP of On Air Promotion, Trez Thomas VP Brand Strategy, and Creative Director Justin Reichman said we were finally doing a food fight, for an upcoming season of “Top Chef All-Stars.”

I got really, really excited. For inspiration, I watched the famous food fight scene in “Animal House.” But I learned virtually nothing. The actual food fight in the film is only 3 seconds long, and none of the cast takes part. It seemed easy compared to our plan. In one day, we had to shoot enough footage for Bravo to use over a whole season: interviews, B-roll, web components, mobile content, and tease spots for 18 chefs, Padma Lakshmi, and Tom Colicchio. All this before the food fight even started Suddenly, we all remembered why we never attempted a food fight before!

We built a stylized kitchen set at SilverCup Studios in Long Island City, and started planning the battle royal. We paired up the 18 “chef-testants” and devised one-on-one fight scenarios. (My favorite would be when Tre and Jennifer threw 30 gallons of spaghetti sauce at each other.) The chefs would do battle, then head for the shower and wait for their next scene. The art department would clean the set and we’d do it again.

18 chef-testants and numerous wardrobe changes later, we prepped for the big battle.

The art department loaded the set with weapons: eggs, flour, spaghetti, seltzer, whipped cream, shish kabobs, tomatoes, carrots, ketchup and endless other messy stuff. The cast readied their weapons of choice and we rolled the camera. We had one chance to get the shot. There would be no “second take.”

We devised a shooting method we called “Fight Freeze” to ensure we got enough coverage. We rolled the camera at 60 frames a second and the chefs would wage war. After a while I would scream “Freeze,” and they would stop mid-fight, holding their poses. We’d quickly move the camera, re-frame, and I’d scream “Action!” to unfreeze the battle. We did this for about 10 minutes. In the footage, you can see the chefs are really having fun. They brought a lot to the fight. Using pots as helmets and pot covers as shields was their idea. At times when I called “Cut” they still wouldn’t stop, swept away by the messy momentum. I think they were waiting for this moment their whole careers.

Writer/Producer/Editor Jeff Edelstein and Han Yi, Senior Graphics Designer, did the finishing for Bravo in-house. Using opera music for the track gives the spots a sweeping, ominous feel I love.

ESPN “Winter X Games”

1996. National Video Center. NYC.

By 1996, I was transitioning from editor to director  with the help of executive producer Susie Shuttleworth. Together we started a production company in partnership with National Video called Division 6.

I’d been working with Patrick McDonough at PMCD Design since the late ’80s as an editor; he was one of the first people to hire Susie and me to produce and direct his live-action projects. Patrick had designed ESPN2’s on-air look, so when they launched the first Winter X Games they chose PMCD to design the show packaging. Patrick wanted live action to be the core of the design. Since I was an avid snowboarder, Patrick hired Division 6 to produce the shoot with me directing the live-action footage. We couldn’t shoot imagery for each event, so we decided to just shoot ice climbing, snowboarding, downhill snow biking, and shovel racing—a modified version of a sport invented by ski resort workers who used shovels as sleds.

We decided to shoot the footage at night to make it more dramatic. We also wanted to use heavily gelled “Lightning Strikes” lights to add color to the “lightning” flashes.

We shot at Big Bear Resort in California at 10,000 feet in 20-degree temperatures. Hauling lights, cameras, crew, scaffolding, an 8-foot turntable, and a 300-pound ice statue to the top of the mountain was a challenge in daylight. but at night it was downright dangerous. The resort wouldn’t let us use the chairlifts at night, so we used snowmobiles to get everything up the mountain. A helicopter would have been helpful, but we couldn’t afford it. (We did get one accidentally. One of our crew members had a severe asthma attack due to the altitude and had to be airlifted out.)

When our lights failed due to freezing temperatures, it looked like we’d miss some of our needed footage. But our cinematographer came to the rescue: we grabbed our last shots by using the headlights from two snowmobiles.

Back in NYC, Patrick and his team went to work using the footage to create the X Games packaging. I was assigned to edit the tease spot. I did what would be considered a traditional cut, using aggressive modern music that had become the signature of action sports, since “MTV Sports” pioneered its use. That’s what aired on ESPN.

But I did a different cut for my reel, with music that would be less expected. I also looking for something graphic to toss in the mix. My assistant had referred to the helmets the athletes wore as “brain buckets,” and we started comparing the airborne athletes to astronauts. I searched bookstores (remember them?) and found an illustrated children’s book on space exploration. We photographed the illustrations under the title camera and animated them in 3-frame increments. Adding digital decay gave them a dreamy, surreal quality. They worked as great transitions between the helmeted athletes and the helmeted astronauts. With the connection between the brain and the danger the astronauts and athletes shared, “If I Only Had A Brain” from “The Wizard of Oz” became the perfect track for the cut. It was truly a no-brainer.

Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.

Bonus: Some of our old logos at Division 6