99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

1990 NBC Promo Break

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.

 

MTV-Mysterious Man/Randee Gets A Job

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

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Extreme Poetry In The Mountains

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

“I am a blackhole supernova, colliding with a proton, genetically-engineered from a hooker, mutated into a circus clown, riding on a unicycle. What I mean is: my words make me extra powerful.”

Patrick Anderson. Poet.

In 2000 ESPN was bringing the Winter X Games to the east coast for the first time and they were looking for an entirely different way of packaging the show. The games were going to be broadcast on the ABC network for the first time and they wanted to make a big impression. I had been attending “Poetry Slams” at the Bowery Poetry Club for a while and thought that Slam Poets were similar to extreme athletes in many ways. Both groups push the limits of their chosen field, both are misunderstood by the general public and both compete as individuals.

I had been doing quite a bit of work with ESPN at the time so I presented the idea of using poetry as a way to package the show to VP of Event Production, Jamie Reynolds. The concept was to take five young poets from the streets of New York City, and ask them to write poems for the Winter X Games. The poems would celebrate both the games and the people and lifestyle associated with it. I chose Sage Francis, Patrick Anderson, Beau Sia, Laurel Barclay and Amanda Nazario- all nationally recognized Slam Poets to write poems specific to the games.

We set off to film on location at Mt. Snow Ski resort in Vermont. We were hoping to shoot on top of the ski mountain with vistas of the valley as a backdrop. Of course when we arrived in January a huge cold front swept thru the area dropping temperatures to 10 below zero with wind chills on the mountain-top at 30 below zero. Mt. Snow closed the mountain the day we arrived. We though we would have to reschedule the shoot but my Cinematographer Trish Govoni was undaunted. We scouted the area and found great snowy landscapes that could only exist in Vermont. We made an old barn with hubcaps nailed to it our home base. We also used the forest behind the motel to shoot. (On that location we were able to use hair dryers to warm up the Poets between takes)

Everyone in the action-sports world at the time was “cut crazy.” I was also “cut crazy” but felt as a Director I needed to do something different with the Poets. I really wanted showcase their intense performances. We shot the poems in their entirety without worrying about how long they would be. We did very little coverage because I did not want the poems to be “edited” after the fact. (We did have to do some cuts because the poets were freezing and had trouble doing the long poems without making some mistakes) Somehow we got it done and no one froze to death.

ESPN had expected the poems to be inter-cut with action sports so when I showed them the pieces they were entirely surprised. To their credit they realized that they had a great opportunity to do what they had wanted to do all along. That is: to do something unexpected. The poems formed the framework for the 4 days of live programming and ran unedited just as I hoped.

On February 6th, the X-games began with a haiku by Patrick Anderson.

There is a snowman

his eyes are two perfect x’s

the snowman is me

BONUS: A cut featuring all the Poets reading their haikus.

Inside Pee-Wee’s Playhouse

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

I am very proud to have been included in a new book  entitled “Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon” By Caseen Gains. Its a great read about the making of the original CBS television show and filled with great-behind-the-scenes stories and photographs.

Believe it or not, this “Connect-the-Dots” segment I edited for the show was  considered “state-of-the art” in 1986.

If you are interested in reading the book you can get it here:  http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Pee-wees-Playhouse-Unauthorized-Unpredictable/dp/1550229982/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1321373227&sr=1-1

 

 

 

Time Warner Global Image Spot

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.