99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

It Takes Two

http://vimeo.com/26914175

1988. National Video Center. NYC.

Pam Thomas from MTV called. She and Peter Lauer had been asked to re-edit a music video for Rob Base & DJ E Z Rock that needed help. The footage was sub-standard and there was very little of it. Rather than re-shoot, the record company reached out to them to try and “save it in the edit.” Pam was the perfect person to call. She was/is an amazing creative. Adventurous and decisive.

I had been experimenting with the “Mitsubishi P60U,” a small B&W video printer that graphic artists were using to print out frames for storyboards. I would print out every third frame from one-inch videotape and draw on top of the prints with magic markers. I would then put them under a title camera in my edit suite and animate them. The result was a crude, grainy animation that looked like the same thing I had done in high school art class. The first one I did was a short clip of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. When Pam called she said she wanted to do the same thing for “It Takes Two.”

We started printing out all the frames from the video. I would pause the one-inch tape on a frame. Press the print button. Wait about 60 seconds for it to print. Advance the tape 3 frames. Repeat for 3 or 4 hours until we printed enough frames to inter-cut with the existing video. With magic markers the three of us went to work writing, sketching and scribbling on the prints.

Putting the prints under the title camera, we started animating them. By that time we were lucky enough to have a black box called the “Abekas A62,” the first digital storage system developed for TV stations to do live replays of sporting events. A technician could record up to 60 seconds of video on a disc and instantly play it back without having to rewind a tape. With the prints under the camera, we recorded them with the A62 one click at a time to build the animations. (Those are my hands in the music video holding the prints under the title camera around 2:20 and 3:16 into the song.)

We started cutting the animations into the video and restructuring the existing footage. The song is 4:57 long and we had only 3 minutes of footage, so needless to say we had to re-purpose and repeat a lot of shots. When the video was released the song was already a big hit, so it got a lot of attention. Every other day someone wanted to use the same technique for their music video, promo or commercial. I got really busy, and National Video tried to convince me to start charging my clients for the printer. Of course I did not.

3D BloKart

“3D BloKart”

2011. August 5. NYC.

Do you know what an Anaglyph is? How about “Swapping eyes?” I do. I just spent a week learning about 3D HD. And BloKarting.  Bill Price shot 3D HD footage of BloKarts in the Mojave desert to promote the “2012 BloKart World Championships” in California. I volunteered to edit the 2 and a half minute promotional piece. BloKarting is like sailing except it’s on dry land with wheels. Editing 3D is like regular editing except I had to wear those silly paper glasses over my eyeglasses. Which sometimes made me dizzy. I wanted to do an aggressive, “Big Type” graphic treatment to help tell the story, but it would have had to be 3D to be visible. So I learned how to make Anaglyph: Red/Cyan graphics. Luckily there was tons of info out there on the web, and hundreds of complicated ways of doing it. The hardest part was finding the best/easiest way to do it.

Here is the perfect, most simple method I found in case you want to try.   –Glenn

Connect The Dots


“Connect The Dots”

1986. National Video Center. NYC. Lynda and Ellen Kahn of “Twin Art” asked me to help them put together an animated sequence for the upcoming new show “Pee Wee’s Playhouse.” In the sequence “Connect The Dots,” Pee Wee Herman jumps into his “Magic Screen” and tosses up colored dots that connect and construct a farm tractor for him to play with. Pee Wee had been shot on green screen on 16mm film and transferred to one-inch tape. Twin Art prepared the graphic elements on a Quantel Paintbox, the standard at the time. (Photoshop, After Effects, or anything else for that matter didn’t exist.)

It was my job to combine the green screen footage and all the multi-colored graphic elements in my edit suite.

Hoping to get the 1:20 piece done in 10 hours we decided to book the job starting on Friday night in case we needed more time. That also allowed us have the use of all the Videotape machines and equipment we wanted without anyone knowing. The amount of time we though we needed was a guess because no one had done anything like this before.

In 1986 one-inch videotape was the gold standard for editing. Non-linear editing or digital compositing system had yet to be invented. Although the most widely used editing controller at the time was CMX, we had a system called a “Datatron Vanguard.” (It was nicknamed “Dumbatron by some of the editors.)  It controlled tape machines, production switchers and audio decks thru a series of relays. The relays had a “delay time” of up to 6 frames. Not ideal for doing precise single frame animation editing. Doing multilayered compositing on tape prior to the digital revolution was time consuming and each time you made a copy or added a layer the image degraded severely. One had to be careful of “generational loss.” This piece was going to ultimately take upwards of 100 generations. The piece looks simple by today’s standards (and it is) but at the time it was uncharted territory. We had to find a way to reduce “generational loss.

”Slaving 6 one-inch tape machines together and using two switchers- one in a separate edit room down the hall helped. For each edit I would roll all the tape machines containing pre-built sequences in a long 30 second pre-roll and run to the other room hopefully in time to hit a button on the switcher in there (and account for the 6 frame delay). One frame at a time. Doing thousands of single frame edits we built the piece backwards. We started with the end frames and added layer upon layer hoping that everything would match up at the end. Luckily there were a few full frame edits so we could hide any errors. And the childlike style of the animation also helped.When we finished it was Sunday morning around 11Am. We went straight thru Friday and Saturday night in order to make Monday morning delivery.

I went on to do 2 more “Connect the Dots” sequences with Twin Art. On the next 2 we had gotten a “black box” called the Abekas A62 that changed everything but that’s another story.

Tigers With Benefits

We saw “Friends With Benefits” last weekend. Tigers can relate. Not with having sex with your best friend, necessarily, but with flying back and forth from New York to L.A. again and again and again. We may not always find romance, but our air miles are off the hook.

promax/bda nyc 2011

99 Tigers are scattered—in NYC, Venice, Boston, Dallas, and the In-N-Out Burger on Radford in North Hollywood.

But this week, amazingly, we’re all in NYC. Glenn just wrapped shoots for Bravo’s “Most Eligible: Dallas” and CMT’s “Texas Women” in Texas. David just wrote a rack of “Family Guy” and “Conan” SPGs for TBS. Bill just dropped some “Actuality” bombs on truTV. And Brett just cut a slammin’ Carmelo Anthony tape for MSG.

So now we’re thirsty and hanging at the glamorous Bridges Bar in the New York Hilton lobby.

Yep, that’s us. Waving at you with sparkly drinks and nodding at the booth next to us, near all the other glamorous people wearing achingly chic Promax lanyards.

See you on the Intrepid Tuesday night. This year, no Zeros dive bombing the flight deck—just passing thunderstorms and the intensity of thousands speaking ardently about branding, design, and what’s new with Rep. Anthony Wiener (Dem, NY, retired).