99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Winwood “Higher Love”

http://vimeo.com/27818768

1986. National Video Center. NYC.

By 1986, I’d worked with co-directors Peter Kagan & Paula Greif on a few music videos, including Dream Academy’s “This World” and “Love Parade.” These grainy, dreamy, impressionistic videos were changing the MTV landscape. Most music videos at that time were bright, Pop-style linear storytelling. Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” was going to be different.

Peter and Paula did most of their off-line edits with an editor named Laura Israel. Laura would cut on 3/4-inch videotape with window time-code. No list. I would lay down her cut on one-inch tape, read the numbers off the screen and match the cut. Peter and Paula would generously leave what they called “Glenn sections” in their videos. These were sections that had been unresolved or that they didn’t like, which I would finish.

All the black & white footage and some of the color was shot on Super 8 or on a wind-up 16mm Bolex camera. We called it “Paula Cam”—Paula being pushed around in a shopping cart with her Super 8 camera. None of the Super 8 or Bolex footage would hold sync during the vocals. We spent many, many hours speeding up and slowing down the tape machines to match lip-sync. It’s simple to do now, but at that time it was a pretty primitive process, and it took lots of “previews” to get it right. After we all agreed that the preview was right, we recorded it only to find out it was different, due to the tape machines’  sloppy mechanics.

No sweat. We did it all the time. We’ll do it again. The difference this time was that Warner Brothers Records was insisting that we provide two “first-generation masters” for delivery. They did not want a “dub.” If the video had fewer speed changes, we could have finished the first master and reassembled a second master from the edit list. We tried a little test and of course it didn’t work.

There was no such thing as a clone in those days, so that meant that we had to run two master record decks at the same time. Not fun or easy in those days.

Every time we made one of the 170 or so edits in the piece, we had to check each master and make sure they were identical. Same field edit, same speed change, no color shifts, no servo errors and on and on. My poor assistant stood in front of the two monitors for 13 hours straight.

In 1987, “Higher Ground” was nominated for an MTV Music Video Award. So of course, I had a big party that night waiting for the results, only to lose out to Peter Gabriel’s “Sledge Hammer.” Another glimpse of the changing music video landscape in the mid-1980s.

 

“State Of Grace” Title Sequence

1989. National Video Center. NYC.

Phil Joanou set up a meeting to discuss the opening title sequence for his upcoming film “State Of Grace,” starring Sean Penn, Gary Oldham and Ed Harris. He’d been working with a film design firm, and was dissatisfied with the work they were doing. He’d started working on videotape while editing U2’s “Rattle & Hum,” and he’d heard through the grapevine that I was doing unconventional things in my edit suite. Phil had shot footage of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade; he wanted to deconstruct it and make it really moody to match the track Ennio Morricone had composed for the open. I showed him some things I’d  been doing for music videos, like placing a color monitor under my color title camera. After feeding footage into the monitor, I could then re-photograph it and alter it radically by zooming, shaking the monitor to the beat, defocusing it, shooting through water in a casserole pan, or bending the video with a magnet. I’d learned the magnet trick when I saw a Nam Jun Paik exhibition as a high school student.

The technique gives the footage a dreamy, abstract quality. Phil loved the idea and chose the font he wanted to use. He wanted small type. I wanted big type. I always loved big type. Still do. He won. We set to work.

When we were finished we gave the open to Claire Simpson, the film’s senior editor, to make a matching optical print of what we had done. That’s when the problems started.

The majority of the things I’d been doing began and ended in the edit room, so I was very lazy when it came to keeping notes. The technicians at the optical house had no clue how to translate what I had done to film. All I could do was provide an edit list that only showed the edit points. Not the blow-ups, repositioning or defocusing.

So along with Claire’s assistant, I went back into the edit room and redid everything, eye-matching what I’d done before. This time we took notes off the camera zoom lens, noted the durations of dissolves, and I gave them coordinates from the ADO, the digital effects device we also used to reposition things. Somehow, after many trips to the optical house and millions of phone calls with Claire, we managed to replicate what we had done.

Phil was so pleased, he let me edit the 7-minute gun battle that ends “State of Grace.” I’d learned a lot about how to prep for opticals, so everything went well.

I didn’t get an editor credit in the film because I was not a union editor, but I did get a credit as “Titles Consultant” and Phil and I worked together for many years after.