99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

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.

U2 “One”

1992. National Video Center. NYC.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes it does exist. Vimeo has removed it at the request of the RIAA- the organization that polices U2’s work.

It seems silly to me. I seem to remember a certain member of U2’s organization telling me, when asked if we had the rights to the broadcast TV footage we using for the ZOOTV concert, “Its ok. we’re stealing from the thieves.”

In the meantime enjoy the spoof of the video below.

“Rattle & Hum” director Phil Joanou called and said he was coming to NYC after being on U2’s “Actung Baby” tour for 2 weeks. He and I had worked together earlier on his film “State Of Grace.” Now he was doing a music video for the U2 song “One.” Two other videos had already been made, but U2’s management wasn’t happy with them. Phil asked if I could start Friday night and work over the weekend to cut the video.

At 6PM Friday, Phil arrived with 10 hours of film he’d shot: 5 hours of Super 8 shot live on tour, 3 hours of performance footage shot on a soundstage, and 2 hours of film he’d just shot of Bono in the Village nightclub Nell’s. I met with Phil, U2’s manager Paul McGuinness, and Ned O’Hanlon from Dreamchaser, U2’s music video company. They said the video had to be finished Sunday afternoon so it could be flown to London for its premiere on “Top Of The Pops” Monday night.

Only the Super 8 footage had been transferred to tape. All the other footage had to be color-corrected and transferred to tape before we could start the edit.

At 6PM Bill Willig, the colorist at National, started transferring the footage. My assistant, Scott Harrison (a fantastic editor today) started shuttling all the color-corrected footage to me in my edit suite as they finished each one-hour tape.

They finished the transfer around 1AM. Phil, Ned and Paul McGuinness gave me some direction and said they would come back in the morning to see how I was doing.

As I started going thru the footage I realized I was never going to make the deadline if I tried to incorporate all the footage and stick to the narrative Phil had envisioned. I decided to ignore the 3 hours of soundstage footage. I also ignored the narrative. I’d decided that non-linear storytelling was the only way I could get the video done on time.

I started cutting around 1:30AM.  I soon realized the Super 8 footage cut really well with the shots of Bono in the nightclub. It was a gold mine of little moments that accentuated the lyrics beautifully. I decided to build the video around Bono’s performance and use the Super 8 to support the lyrics.

Phil called a few times that night and I explained what I was trying to do. He though it sounded like a great idea and gave me the go ahead to continue.

Around 11AM the next morning I had the first minute and a half done. Phil and Ned and came by to see it. They were very surprised but excited.

They were, however, concerned how U2 would react. There had never been a U2 video without the whole band performing together in it.  I’d also used footage of a girl that was not intended for this video. No previous U2 video had a woman interacting with Bono in it.

Phil loved it. He had us make a 3/4 inch copy for him to take to Boston that afternoon to show Bono. He also made an audio-cassette recording of me explaining every edit’s significance and the reasoning behind it. They left and we went back to work.

Saturday evening Phil called to say he was coming back to NYC and that Bono liked the cut. We kept cutting.

Sometime on Saturday I accidentally put in a shot where Bono “dropped” a line during the filming. He stopped singing and looked at the camera as the lyrics continued. After playing it back, Scott & I felt it really worked and helped make the video unique. When Phil arrived that evening and saw it, he though it was a mistake. (You can see it 2:43 into the video.) After some debate he embraced it and sold the idea to Bono. They eventually liked the technique so much that when they shot the video for “Wild Horses,” they did the same thing intentionally.

Phil, Scott and I worked straight through the night a second time. By morning we had an almost complete cut. Phil took it to show Bono, who was in NYC by then, and we kept cutting. When Phil came back with the word that the video was approved, we made a few little tweaks, put a slate on it (I’m listed as “Glenn O’Lazzaro” out of respect for the Emerald Island) and Phil put it on a plane. We’d worked 48 hours non-stop from start to finish.  Later, the video was spoofed perfectly by Ben Stiller on his TV show. He used our video as the foundation, adding elements from the two previous videos. You can see “Lucky Clovers” below.

http://vimeo.com/27403185

 

 

 

 

 

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.