99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

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.

Rush Job: Rush & Mr. Mister

1987. National Video Center. NYC.

Usually when I got a rush job to edit an ’80s music video, Rush was not involved. This was not one of those times.

Producer Stuart Samuels called sales exec Steve Ostrow to book me for 7 days straight. I’d have to be available 24 hours a day. Zbigniew Rybcznski, one of the hottest directors at the time, wanted the freedom of working around-the-clock on two music videos: one for Rush and one for Mr. Mister. He wanted to, as he put it, “Edit live.”

Rybcznski was know for his Oscar-winning short “Tango” and his supremely cool music video “Close To The Edit” by The Art of Noise.

His early work had been shot and edited on film, but lately he’d become enamored with video effects, shooting his last few projects on videotape.  I personally thought he seemed more concerned with technology than aesthetics.

The Floating-Aimee-Mann Rush Video

http://vimeo.com/27579494

An edit suite was set up in the control room of National Video’s largest stage, where I would live for the next seven days. You can see the edit suite at 2:17 in the Rush video. Zbig moved his wife and kids into one of the green rooms. Rush and Aimee Mann moved into adjoining rooms. I got a room in a Holiday Inn across the street from National that I never saw.

Zibig had shot footage of country landscapes for Rush. The idea was to shoot short pieces of Rush performing the song against green screen, then composite them together. When we started working, Zbig decided he loved the stage and wanted to composite Rush over that instead. I suggested that we shoot them live in the stage, but Zbig wanted everyone to “float” around it. He also insisted that everything had to happen “live.” Each new layer would be placed on top of the preceding layer without making protection copies or “laying off” a copy, as we used to say. The green screen footage was shot with the same giant studio camera Aimee Mann is using in the video. Zbig would give some vague direction to Rush; I would set up the effects, play the audio track and press record, causing multiple one-inch tape machines to roll up on the third floor. For 3 days in a row. It didn’t matter what time it was. If Zbig got an idea at 3 in the morning, he’d wake everyone up (I was sleeping in the control room) and we would all go to work. We started the Rush video on Saturday morning and finished Tuesday night. Wednesday morning Mr. Mister moved in.

The Disembodied-Heads Mr. Mister Video

http://vimeo.com/27486441

This one was a bit more focused. Zbig wanted it to feel “surreal,” like a Dali or Magritte painting with many, many layers. (Complete with umbrellas.)

Zbig had already shot cityscapes; we started by looping sections of this footage to the beat. Next we shot each layer live and composited them live. I can’t even count how many layers there are in this video. The band was never on the stage together. Each member was shot separately and layered on top of each previous layer. It could not have been done without the Abekas A62, which I talk about in another post (“It Takes Two”). Three days and nights later, we finished and everyone moved out. I personally hated this video, but National Video Center decided to frame a giant print of the disembodied heads and hang it in the lobby, to my embarrassment. When it was nominated for an MTV Music Video Award for “Best Special Effects,” I went into hiding.

Here’s a brilliant spoof someone did of the Rush video. It really skewers the editor. Me.

http://vimeo.com/27775512/settings

 

 

NBC “We Didn’t Start The Fire”

1989. National Video Center. NYC.

I’d been working with NBC’s Tim Miller and his top producer, Don Duncan, for a few years. Don was super-talented and always oversaw the best projects. He also loved taking chances in the edit room. Like the time he used “Helter Skelter” by the Beatles for a series of promos for Tom Brokaw…without permission. When they told me we were going to do a music video for NBC News based on Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” I knew it would be fun.

Don intended do a “word by word” interpretation of the lyrics. His assistant producer Jennifer Johnson had sourced massive amounts of archival footage for almost all the historic references.

Billy Joel had famously said he never wanted to do a literal interpretation of the song, because it would be too obvious for a pop video. Therefore, he would have to approve our finished video in order for NBC to obtain the rights.

We had footage for most of the lyrics, but had no clips for the song’s long instrumental sections. We had to figure out what to cover those with. We tried editing the track to shorten the instrumental sections, but that didn’t worked well. We decided to just start cutting the lyric sections and save the instrumental sections for later.

When I started cutting, I discovered a sales tape NBC News had made in the 1950s to advertise their studios for outside TV production. It was chock-full of great sound bites and imagery extolling the miracles of videotape. The opening line for the sales tape was “Did someone mention television tape?” It was perfect for what we were doing. We started putting these sound bites in the instrumental sections and flash cutting slates, leaders and TV imagery into the piece. It gave us a framework to put anything we wanted in those sections. It also allowed me to throw type in to underscore what we were seeing or going to see. I had transferred different types of film grain, countdowns, and film leaders to one-inch tape, so that reel stayed on a tape machine during the entire week-long edit session.

When the NBC News execs saw the piece, they loved it but they wanted all their reporters included in it. Don hated the idea but we were forced to do it anyway. We had no beauty footage of the reporters so the back end of the video is a festival of “Lip Flap.” I hated that part. I still do. Bob Chapman did his usual amazing mix and the tape was sent to Billy Joel. He loved it and gave NBC News permission to air it. For the next couple of years, local NBC affiliates re-edited it and added their local reporters, usually airing it on New Year’s Eve.