99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kurtis Blow “America”

http://vimeo.com/30957074/settings

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

National Video Center, New York City, 1985.

In the early ’80s when hip hop & rap were first noticed by the mainstream, most of the music videos were dance tracks and for the most part, devoid of political messages. Then Kurtis Blow released the single “America” and all that changed. It was a political rant about everything that was happening during the Reaganomics-Cold War-Anti-Russian era in America. Claude Borenzweig, then working at Polygram Records, was editing & directing internal projects when he got the chance to direct the “America” music video. Claude came up with the idea of a classroom filled with kids where Kurtis would teach them the “real” history of America. David Brownstein and Len Epand produced the shoot for Claude on the main stage at National Video. They shot on videotape using the giant, old-school studio cameras that were usually used to shoot “Sexually Speaking with Doctor Ruth.”

Claude did a rough cut using the classroom footage he directed, and a second cut using stock footage that we would combine in the edit. As usual, we went into the edit room over the weekend so we’d have all the time and equipment we needed. We needed time because we had no edit list, no After Effects, no digital storage, no tracking marks. Just an old Ampex ADO and lots of “crossed fingers” that we’d match the motion between the camera moves and the composited footage. Sometimes it matched. Most times it didn’t.

Needless to say, the special effects seem crude compared to what is possible today. But at the time they were considered state-of-art. We also used the then very popular technique of running the footage thru a black & white monitor to distort it.

Claude hadn’t shot any footage for the Pledge Of Allegiance section of the song, so I was enlisted to lie under the title camera and lip-sync the part. Yes, that’s my ’80s mustache you see inserted into the blackboard starting at 18 seconds in.

Shortly after we finished the video, I worked with Frank Zappa on a week’s worth of programming called “Porn Wars” for the music show “Night Flight.” Zappa would appear at the PMRC Senate hearings in Washington during the day, then come to National Video in New York to tape his segments for “Night Flight.” One night I showed him “America.” He was really excited that the rap world was finally getting political and asked for a VHS copy. I was very proud.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bonus: Article about Claude and the shoot in Optic Music Magazine

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.

 

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.