99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

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

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

It Takes Two

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.

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.