99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

1990 NBC Promo Break

http://vimeo.com/35702481

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

Several of the spots in this promo break came from the edit rooms at National Video Center. NBC producers Tim Miller and Don Duncan usually had one or two rooms going at any given time in those days. I worked on the “Real Life with Jane Pauley” promo in this break. As a bonus, I also got my first chance to shoot film.

Tim and Don had hired a documentary film crew to shoot “real-life scenes” of America for Pauley’s show open. For the promo, they wanted to intercut the open with an interview with Jane Pauley. The crew shot in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York along the Amtrak train line. (The railroad tracks became part of the title sequence.) As we cut the show open, Don felt there weren’t enough “Middle America” scenes, since most of the footage looked urban.

I was heading to the Catskills for a vacation, so I volunteered to shoot some footage with a 1956 16mm Bolex camera I’d just bought at a garage sale. The cinematographer told me which film stock to buy and which filters would match his footage. I kept the camera with me at all times, shooting wherever I happened to be with my kids: farms, baseball games, front porches, a dude ranch. I didn’t really know how to shoot; it was the first time I’d used the camera. Luckily our film style was cinema verite, so my grainy footage fit right in. I shot a lot of footage of my kids, but for some reason they never made the cut.

BONUS! My son found a spot with him as a 4 year old prominently in the beginning. And yes, the opening chords are from Rod Stewart’s Maggie May.

http://vimeo.com/45262340

 

INXS – Beautiful Girl

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

http://vimeo.com/33724660

1992. National Video Center. NYC.

One day Mark Pellington called and said he wanted to come over and play 2 songs for me that he would be directing Music Videos for. I could choose which one I wanted to edit. I had been working with Mark for a number of years while he was a writer/producer/director at MTV and he had made the transition to full time director by this time. The songs were “Beautiful Girl” by INXS and “Jeremy” by a new band called “Pearl Jam.”

After listening to both songs I decided on “Beautiful Girl.” INXS was huge at the time and I had not heard of Pearl Jam nor did I think they were going to be very popular. (When I was a kid I also though that “The Dave Clark 5” were going to be bigger than “The Beatles”)

The song was written by INXS composer Andrew Farriss about how wonderful having a newborn daughter was. It was basically a love song to parenthood.

Mark was always challenging preconceived notions in popular culture and this Video was not going to be an exception. He intended the music video for “Beautiful Girls” to call attention to the increasing cases of anorexia in young girls. Mark remembers, “Michael Hutchence and his girlfriend at the time, supermodel Helena Christenson, were supportive. (it was) ironic because the video bashed models and the entire culture of dismorphia, female body image etc.”

The footage of the band was shot in London by Nick Evans shooting multiple exposures in camera. The 7 layers were created by back-winding the camera on one roll of film. Mark shot the girls or as he said: “real girls- not models” with Christophe Lanzenberg in NYC.

The edit was very straight-forward. Mark had great footage so very little editorial trickery was needed. Straight-cuts and juxtaposing his iconic footage alongside text got the message across very effectively. We did some layering of footage and also used the Abekas A62 to loop sequences. We also shot some magazine tear sheets under the title camera. The opening 40 seconds of the song has no lyrics and no drums so I used the single-note piano line to create a rhythm. It looks a little out of sync here because I got the video from YouTube but I assure you it was not.

The Video was nominated for a Grammy award.

Mark’s “Jeremy” Music Video won four MTV Video Music Awards in 1993, including Best Video of the Year, Best Group Video, Best Metal/Hard Rock Video and Best Direction. And “The Beatles” are still bigger than “The Dave Clark Five.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MTV-Mysterious Man/Randee Gets A Job

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

http://vimeo.com/32156004

National Video. 1989

In 1989 most MTV producers were trying to out-cut each other using blinding-fast edits. There was one exception. John Payson. John had come to MTV from the Harvard Lampoon so the majority of his work was comedy based. He was less concerned about “being cool” and concentrated more on linear storytelling. (but with a decidedly MTV feel) Between 1987 and 1990 John was responsible for helping make “Randee Of The Redwoods” the face of MTV.

Mysterious Man

When John shot the “Mysterious Man” promo he intended it to be one long 60-second shot. Sadly when we got into the edit we had to put a few cuts in just to bring it in on time. We created the soundtrack in the edit stealing bits of music from classical CDs that John brought in. (in those days no one was worried about licensing music)

He shot the “Mysterious Man” in color but wanted it to have a “noir” feel. We turned it black & white but John felt it needed something else- some strange “Randee” kind of thing. We put some color back into his hair because, as John said, “Not even Film Noir could contain Randee.”

Randee Gets a Job

While working at a gas station Randee has a run-in with a “yuppie.” The most hated stereotype of the 80s and his obvious archenemy. The edit is pretty straightforward with the exception of Randee sucking the car into the gas nozzle. Doing it today it would be simple. Just shoot the car separately against a green screen. But MTV shoot budgets in those days wouldn’t allow that so John shot the car in the gas station. In order to separate the car from the background we cut mattes by feeding the shot into a TV monitor under the title camera. We then traced its outline off the face of the monitor onto a piece of paper with a sharpie. We cut the shape out and put it under the title camera and used it as a matte to separate the car from the background. Using an ADO I shrunk and distorted the car frame-by-frame to get it into the nozzle

Note: The explosion at the end was borrowed from a UK show called “The Secret Life Of Television” that I had lying around the edit suite. In the show they dynamited a stack of televisions just to see what would happen. The explosion found its way into many, many MTV promos over the years.

Bonus. As part of a marketing stunt, Randee became the dark horse candidate for President and John had Artist Peter Max do the campaign poster. I got a signed poster for working on the project. Sadly mine is gone but it looked just like this one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.


 

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