99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

Kurtis Blow “America”

http://vimeo.com/30957074/settings

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

National Video Center, New York City, 1985.

In the early ’80s when hip hop & rap were first noticed by the mainstream, most of the music videos were dance tracks and for the most part, devoid of political messages. Then Kurtis Blow released the single “America” and all that changed. It was a political rant about everything that was happening during the Reaganomics-Cold War-Anti-Russian era in America. Claude Borenzweig, then working at Polygram Records, was editing & directing internal projects when he got the chance to direct the “America” music video. Claude came up with the idea of a classroom filled with kids where Kurtis would teach them the “real” history of America. David Brownstein and Len Epand produced the shoot for Claude on the main stage at National Video. They shot on videotape using the giant, old-school studio cameras that were usually used to shoot “Sexually Speaking with Doctor Ruth.”

Claude did a rough cut using the classroom footage he directed, and a second cut using stock footage that we would combine in the edit. As usual, we went into the edit room over the weekend so we’d have all the time and equipment we needed. We needed time because we had no edit list, no After Effects, no digital storage, no tracking marks. Just an old Ampex ADO and lots of “crossed fingers” that we’d match the motion between the camera moves and the composited footage. Sometimes it matched. Most times it didn’t.

Needless to say, the special effects seem crude compared to what is possible today. But at the time they were considered state-of-art. We also used the then very popular technique of running the footage thru a black & white monitor to distort it.

Claude hadn’t shot any footage for the Pledge Of Allegiance section of the song, so I was enlisted to lie under the title camera and lip-sync the part. Yes, that’s my ’80s mustache you see inserted into the blackboard starting at 18 seconds in.

Shortly after we finished the video, I worked with Frank Zappa on a week’s worth of programming called “Porn Wars” for the music show “Night Flight.” Zappa would appear at the PMRC Senate hearings in Washington during the day, then come to National Video in New York to tape his segments for “Night Flight.” One night I showed him “America.” He was really excited that the rap world was finally getting political and asked for a VHS copy. I was very proud.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bonus: Article about Claude and the shoot in Optic Music Magazine

TeenNick Halo Awards

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

2010. Los Angeles.

When Steph Sebag, owner & creative director at BPG, called and asked if I wanted to direct a spot he wrote for the 2010 TeenNick “Halo Awards,” I  jumped at the chance. The spot, cut to Beyonce’s “Halo,” would showcase all the great things teens around the globe were doing to “change their world.” Steph’s idea was to create different tableaus using a series of movable sets that changed from one into another in one continuous “flow,” without using any cuts. The sets would be like giant “transformers” with movable walls and floors on rollers and tracks. Teen cast-members acting as stagehands would physically move the sets on cue and thereby change the world of someone in need.

The “flow” went like this: An outdoor city street would transform into a mailroom; we would travel through a door and find ourselves at a devastated house in Haiti; the destroyed house would morph into a brand new home; the house would rotate to reveal a market in Mumbai; the market would split open to reveal a classroom; the camera would pan across the classroom and enter a bedroom; the bedroom walls would split to reveal a basketball court; the camera would follow a basketball up to the sky and then down to a beach.

For safety’s sake, art director Andrew Trosman had to build sets strong enough to support up to 12 people at a time. This made them very, very heavy. So heavy in fact that on our shoot day, our teen cast-members couldn’t move them on their own. In the spot it looks like the teens are moving these huge sets by themselves, but in reality lots of people off camera were helping: the grips, the electrics, Steph, and me. Even David Chustz, then VP of Brand Communication for TeenNick, and his producer Matthew Perreault spent most of their day hidden, helping the teens move the sets.

In the end, we got the whole thing shot in one long, long day and the spot won a Promax Silver Award.

Bonus: An early crude storyboard I did.

 

 

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