Music Video – Page 2

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

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.