99 Tigers

A Creative Agency

1990 NBC Promo Break

http://vimeo.com/35702481

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.

http://vimeo.com/45262340

 

ESPN “Winter X Games”

1996. National Video Center. NYC.

By 1996, I was transitioning from editor to director  with the help of executive producer Susie Shuttleworth. Together we started a production company in partnership with National Video called Division 6.

I’d been working with Patrick McDonough at PMCD Design since the late ’80s as an editor; he was one of the first people to hire Susie and me to produce and direct his live-action projects. Patrick had designed ESPN2’s on-air look, so when they launched the first Winter X Games they chose PMCD to design the show packaging. Patrick wanted live action to be the core of the design. Since I was an avid snowboarder, Patrick hired Division 6 to produce the shoot with me directing the live-action footage. We couldn’t shoot imagery for each event, so we decided to just shoot ice climbing, snowboarding, downhill snow biking, and shovel racing—a modified version of a sport invented by ski resort workers who used shovels as sleds.

We decided to shoot the footage at night to make it more dramatic. We also wanted to use heavily gelled “Lightning Strikes” lights to add color to the “lightning” flashes.

We shot at Big Bear Resort in California at 10,000 feet in 20-degree temperatures. Hauling lights, cameras, crew, scaffolding, an 8-foot turntable, and a 300-pound ice statue to the top of the mountain was a challenge in daylight. but at night it was downright dangerous. The resort wouldn’t let us use the chairlifts at night, so we used snowmobiles to get everything up the mountain. A helicopter would have been helpful, but we couldn’t afford it. (We did get one accidentally. One of our crew members had a severe asthma attack due to the altitude and had to be airlifted out.)

When our lights failed due to freezing temperatures, it looked like we’d miss some of our needed footage. But our cinematographer came to the rescue: we grabbed our last shots by using the headlights from two snowmobiles.

Back in NYC, Patrick and his team went to work using the footage to create the X Games packaging. I was assigned to edit the tease spot. I did what would be considered a traditional cut, using aggressive modern music that had become the signature of action sports, since “MTV Sports” pioneered its use. That’s what aired on ESPN.

But I did a different cut for my reel, with music that would be less expected. I also looking for something graphic to toss in the mix. My assistant had referred to the helmets the athletes wore as “brain buckets,” and we started comparing the airborne athletes to astronauts. I searched bookstores (remember them?) and found an illustrated children’s book on space exploration. We photographed the illustrations under the title camera and animated them in 3-frame increments. Adding digital decay gave them a dreamy, surreal quality. They worked as great transitions between the helmeted athletes and the helmeted astronauts. With the connection between the brain and the danger the astronauts and athletes shared, “If I Only Had A Brain” from “The Wizard of Oz” became the perfect track for the cut. It was truly a no-brainer.

Sorry. I couldn’t help myself.

Bonus: Some of our old logos at Division 6

 

 

 

 

 

 

“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.