Norman Rockwell, Creative Director

The relationship of the well staged and photographed still image to creative direction in advertising and video / film is no more evident than in this article about Norman Rockwell from Photo District News.

Before he ever committed paint to canvas, he set up intricate photoshoots. These were as professional as any video or film shoot, and included casting, set design, lighting, and the directing of talent and expression.

It raises my estimation of Rockwell, perhaps because it makes clear that he wasn’t working from swipe files, but was in fact creating his own masterful photographic tableau’s. Take a look at the comparison of Rockwell photo to Rockwell painting. Each has their own genius.

He picked the right people. He directed the right expressions. He positioned them in a still life pose that rivaled the best photographers and painters.

Then, on canvas, he filled in the details, adjusted, added, enhanced, reimagined and yes, photo-realistically replicated what he had previously created in black and white.

It was quite a process. Probably not unique. But a definite unraveling of a great artistic process.

We need to imagine our own work in video and print as well as Rockwell did his. Great motion is made up of great moments.

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No Soup for You? Soupy Sales TV Legacy

I was lucky enough to grow up in New Jersey when Soupy Sales, who died yesterday at 83,  was in his heyday. Us high-schoolers rushed home for his antics every day at 4, Saturday as I remember at 6:30 (Saturdays were when the big stars showed up to be pied.)

I loved when he tuned in the radio on the windows sill with the puppet Pookie. It was a pop culture explosion– bits of teen hits of the day, followed by old time radio like The Shadow, The Hindenburg, and audio skits recorded for the radio bit, etc.

The song, “Do the Mouse”  was hilarious, as was the dance, which it was supposed to be– defining “irony” as a form of humor where bad equals good… or something.

When he returned from his suspension (for asking the kiddies to go through their New Year’s Eve hung-over parents clothes for pictures of George Washington) he blasted “Happy Days are Here Again” and showed film of silent movie pie fights, car crashes, etc. for almost five minutes before walking on set.

I did attend his big Soupy Sales Easter show at the Paramount Theater which featured The Hollies, Little Richard (and his guitar player, Jimi Hendrix), and as they say, many others.

Almost every TV show he did– five days a week– was outlined, but not scripted. And for all the hub-bub, he was only on in New York for two years.

But I think his kind of show– outlined, live, adlibbed, supposedly for kiddies, but really for teens who wanted to be treated like adults– was the exit point for the afternoon kiddy show and the entry point for things like SNL and “Fridays”– on the air barely ten years later. Letterman and Conan followed.

Just more proof that creativity is a continuum. Thanks, Soupy.

D-Day for Mercury Marine? Video as Corporate Culture

I was privileged to produce Mercury Marine’s 50th Anniversary video 20 years ago. It was a celebration of an entrepreneur’s vision,  a company’s impact on society, and, in much subtler ways, it’s impact on its surroundings– Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

The local impact– on employment, community growth, local pride, freshwater recreation heritage– was never pointed out directly. It was there in the amazing visual documentation founder Carl Kiekhafer left behind of his surroundings through 16mm film and pictures. Mercury’s founding in Cedarburg. It’s purchase of the Coriam Farm in Fond du Lac to be the home of it’s amazing growth. It’s incredible impact on watersports, including Tommy Bartlett’s Water Show in the Dells. The national dealer celebrations Mercury hosted in Wisconsin.

I write this because today (Sunday, August 23, 2009) Mercury’s union rank and file will vote on whether to accept concessions in order to keep Mercury’s headquarters and plants in Wisconsin.

I don’t have a bone to pick or a dog in the fight. What I do know is this video demonstrates the incredible impact Mercury’s corporate culture has had on Wisconsin. To see it go the way of so many other corporations that have left, merged, been bought, or otherwise disappeared from the scene would be a distraught moment indeed.

We have short memories, and more and more companies seem to want to forget their past. The man who hired me for the Mercury gig, Ed Huck, often said “What’s past is prologue.” But what prologue is there if you ignore your past?

Here in slightly shortened form, is “50 Years of Leadership.”

The Wizard of Waukesha and Do-It-Yourself Genius

Les Paul has died.

Self-proclaimed at an early age as “The Wizard of Waukesha”, he deserved the monicker. Not for his legendary guitar-virtuosity, but for his advances in music technology.

My parents might blame Elvis, or Bill Haley, or Allen Freed for ruining radio with that darn rock-and-roll, but in fact it was mild-mannered, “Via Con Dios” playing and producing Les Paul who gave us the toys and tools to rock and roll.

Would there be “Stairway to Heaven” without the Les Paul guitar? Would there be “Sgt. Pepper” without the multi-track recorder? In fact, I doubt I would have had a career without the multi-track recorder. It’s the first purchase I made after Sorgel-Lee Multimedia sold a project. (I was making mix-tapes before you were born, sonny-Jim. Er, sorry. Got cranky there.)

Anyway, smash a Sears Silvertone tonight in honor of Les Paul. He needed tools, couldn’t find them, so he invented them.

Necessity.

The Death of Local Arts Reporting in Milwaukee?

According to the Milwaukee Business Journal, the people that will take the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s latest buyout offer include broadcast media columnist Tim Cuprisin, theater critic Damien Jaques, books editor Geeta Sharma-Jensen, education reporter Alan Borsuk, pop music writer Dave Tianen, music/dance writer Tom Strini and business columnist Tannette Johnson-Elie.

Most are arts writers. All, including Johnson-Elie, who chronicled new business and minority business stories, and Borsuk, on Milwaukee’s volatile local education scene, can be considered important local-oriented reporters, whose detailed reporting on the arts, media, education, and small business gave an important and influential segment of the paper’s readership something to look forward to.

Jaques is a legendary name in Journalism circles. His father was a journalist, and Damien has been consistently and devotedly reporting on the arts for most of his career. Cuprisin brought new life to the TV-Radio section, following on the heels of early Sentinel efforts by Chris Stoehr and others, and always emphasizing the local ups and downs of Milwaukee’s broadcast media.

Sharma-Jensen, Tianen, Strini,  Borsuk, and Johnson-Elie owned their niches, and one wonders if they will even be replaced, or whether their activities will be merged into a one or two “combo” positions, echoing what happened to architecture reporting after Whitney Gould left.

I’m guessing the Journal-Sentinel will be happy to pay for freelance reviews. But behind-the-scenes analysis? Maybe not so much.

You can’t argue with the economics of the newspaper world. But you can argue with a medium giving up it’s unique selling proposition (USP). Local, local, local is what makes a newspaper or on-line publication different.

When big city papers started trying to be USA TODAY, their soul started to evaporate. You can read about Michael Jackson anywhere. What’s in the offing for the Milwaukee Rep, Symphony, Ballet, and so many more institutions, now that their  important voices are gone?

The Journal-Sentinel has yet to announce replacements.

Just Because You Don’t Get It, Doesn’t Mean You Shouldn’t Get It.

I admit it. Despite being an early adopter of the web (I’ve had the same url’s since the mid-90’s) I misread a couple of things.

I didn’t think information could come in spurts as short as a tweet. I forgot about something called telegrams.

I didn’t think about the web as a social place. Yet I’m as old as Walt Mossberg and used to hang out in the same “forums” on Compuserve and The Source.

And I didn’t see it as the ultimate distribution tool for video…. well, I did, but I didn’t expect it to kill off DVD’s and cd-roms. Now we urge our clients to create video just for the web– video that doesn’t even have to go “viral” to do the job. Just find your niche.

A lot of potential users of video on the web don’t get it, so they don’t use it.  They can’t understand the technology, or can’t envision a world beyond cable TV, DVD, or even giant sales meetings. And a good video might cost the same as a basic website, so they put the horse before the cart. These days, you need both– they are synergistic beyond belief.

So you’ve got to believe in the potential of what you don’t know– even if you can’t see what’s in front of your nose.

You can’t be aware of everything. But you can rely on the expertise and experience of good consultants to help point you in the right direction.

Brien Lee (that’s Brien with an “e”, in case you want to call or write. Really, we can see the future– we think.)

Thoughts on What’s Under New Media’s Hood

I’m about to deliver a presentation in two hours or so. Every Tuesday morning, a group of local business people gather for something called a “BNI” meeting– Business Network International. BNI is a structured networking referral group.

We have about 20 members in our group, which means that each individual gets to make a ten minute “pitch” three times a year on what kinds of referrals would be good for their own business. It’s hyperlocal, which is good in general, but probably not perfect for me since my goods (custom meetings, videos, DVDs, Web Video and Web Sites) tend to be somewhat higher ticket.

We meet at Cafe Verde in Phillipsburg, NJ, which is a very nice place, and also happens to be a client. We started working on a video / web marketing package for them about a month ago. And this is NOT a high ticket relationship, but it is an important one. It is a proof of concept relationship. The web+video marketing combo relies on a lot of things, all of which are defined by the fact that the web is somewhat measurable, search rankings are somewhat controllable, and video is turning out to be a key component to succeeding in defining success in measurement and ranking.

I’ve been through a lot of media in my career: slide-shows, multi-image extravaganzas, filmstrips, industrial theater, video for meetings, multi-screen video, electronic presentations, visual databases, “Instant” a-v’s for meetings with early electronic recordable still cameras, panoramic video through anamorphic shooting and playback, PowerPoint, interactive cd-roms and DVDs, and even custom video-on-demand,  e-learning and content management systems.

Always about a year too early. So we’ve got some arrows in our back, but we broke a lot of ground and can claim we were among the first in many of these areas.

My company has done web sites before– plenty. But my company was bigger back then. It was a different time. The bandwidth wasn’t there for video, there was no such thing as WordPress, FrontPage was the “mature” web development software, and Dreamweaver was on V1.0.

That meant that web sites were expensive, and not very creative. They took a lot of programming, and if you weren’t careful you could lose your shirt. The emphasis was on the back end, and it’s endless pursuit of perfection, and I was a front end kind of guy. Content, Creative, Design… then execute.

It seemed we sold  something, then almost immediately started to program. The programming applications had some flowcharting visualization built in, but all of it was in the hands of one person– approvals were therefore difficult, changes were plenty, and projects seemed endless. It was all in one person;s head.

Doing a DVD was a bit different for me. Being, in fact mostly video, and being a pretty straightforward (IF GRUELING) programming process, we were better able to visualize how the DVD (or cd-rom) would work. We used flowcharts, and those flowcharts were created by our writers, who had to build the sales and persuasion logic that drove the whole process to begin with.

Besides, we had been down this road before, so we knew what to do.

Writer always made us different. That we didn’t realize the important role writers could play in the architecture of the web was understandable. The web was links, clicks, pictures, some copy blocks, or a lot of fill in the blanks surveys or grabbing data from here and showing it there. I know. We even built our own e-commerce system.

Years have passed, the web has matured, there’s tools for everything, and advertising and Google’s role in the web have brought standards and measurements to the field very reminiscent of magazine and newspaper readership studies. There has also emerged a standard language for building websites, and the bandwidth is now such that, thanks to YouTube and other video hosting sites, video is the big gorilla carrying viewership and search optimization on its back.

Welcome home.

The video web combo offers bang for the buck unlike we’ve seen in the past 20 or so years. One way of controlling costs of course is to plan. That we have always done, and it’s not surprising that our tool-set for this is very familiar:

• Strategize
• Outline
• Propose
• Quote
• Wireframe
• Site-map
• Copy Blocks
• Art Direction
• (APPROVAL)
• Refine art & copy
• Create graphics and videos
• Webisize.

Okay, “webisize” gives the work done by the web designers and programmers short shrift.

But what good local sight needs today is efficiency, gravity, personality, and constant change. And all the Flash in the world can’t provide the juice to pump up the search engines.

Content can. Video Can. Change can.

That’s the Video Trojan horse. Used to be, to sell big videos we had to sell big meetings. Now, to sell video, we sell web sites. A well produced video on the web is gold. it is sticky, has personality, gets the communications job dome quickly in site and sound, and can be parceled out at the right place on the site at the right time.

We have a very well developed “wireframing” process for our web sites and interactive projects. But, being around for a while, we didn’t just learned the logic of interactivity yesterday.

Many years ago, we produced some of the first interactive laserdiscs in the world in conjunction with AT&T and Bell Labs. They provided the hardware and the operating system for their hardware, we provided the finished laserdiscs, all carefully branched out interactively, just like one of today’s DVD’s or websites.

Here is the end result:

One of the First Interactive Video Projects, by Brien Lee & Company for AT&T

We didn’t have flowcharting software; heck Microsoft Word didn’t even exist and we were just a year or two beyond typewriters. So, here is what it took to get it there:

Tim Dodge and Brien Lee review their "living" flowchart

A flowchart. made of masking tape and a large empty room.

And it worked.

Proving once again, content is king.

There were something like 150 videos produce for those laserdiscs– all small segments like you might see today on YouTube. It was the beginning of short attention spans.

Without a detailed written guidepost plan, I don ‘t see how we could have done it. We used three different facilities in New York City, two writers, two producers, and dozens of support personnel. That’s what video was like in those days, plus laserdisc production was a very tightly controlled process– high quality, clean rooms, test pressings, on and on.

Once the laserdiscs were done, the AT&T engineers had to program their secret code into their secret computers to make the discs work with their secret playback systems. We didn’t have much contact with them, because they were protecting their proprietary code,  but they had our flowcharts, and they told us that the flowcharts and script segments were detailed enough that they could handle it on their own. Saving, I’m sure, hundreds of hours of miscommunication had we not had all the documentation.

Lesson learned. And not the hard way.

Today, outside of some of the more sophisticated shooting or 3d animations, the whole job could be done by two people and a couple of powerful enough laptops. Naturally, we’d use DVD, or hard disc, or even solid state drive. The intelligence could be programmed into the DVD, or the whole thing could be put on the web with a combination of flash, video, html and perhaps php. And the code is no longer proprietary, or at least a secret. You just have to buy off-the-shelf software.

But you have to be proud of the fact that our people– Linda Duczman, Lora Keller, Tim Dodge– went into the project with a plan we all developed. (And came out of it alive!)

It guaranteed success, and we do like to guarantee success.

Video Viewing for a Happy July 4th (Part 2)

Video Viewing for a Happy July 4th (Part 1)

Ed McMahon Taught Me How to Write

When Ric Sorgel and I started Sorgel-Lee in 1972, we didn’t have to worry about voice-over announcers. Our first few jobs were interview style arts slide shows. Point the microphone, ask questions, get answers, edit it into a documentary continuity.

But in the summer of that year, we were asked by Ric’s friend Mike Kiefer (with some influence from Ric’s Dad) if we’d like to produce a slide show touting their company, Kiefer Corporation. A real corporate project! Kiefer sold commercial kitchen impliments and did custom stainless steel fabrication, and they wanted something to show at a trade show.

The answer was yes, the budget cheap, and I had my first real script to write. No relying on other people’s voices, this had to be written for a narrator. And since the budget was cheap, we couldn’t afford– and for that matter, didn’t know– an announcer.

My job was to write the script and produce the soundtrack to which the slides would be edited. And, I agreed, I would read the narration as well.

From an entrepreneurial standpoint, this was perhaps the critical moment in my development as an audio-visual person. My first script, my first narrative soundtrack, and my first (and I hoped, only) voice-over read. How I handled the assignment would define our house style for years to come.

I was a mimic in those days. I did impressions of Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny, George Burns, Kirk Douglas, Johnny Carson…. wait! Johnny Carson, Johnny Carson… Ed McMahon!  Budweiser. Clydesdales. Tonight Show Commercial Reader. Ed McMahon was the answer.

Short sentences, a good theme line, a low key personable approach. Ed McMahon didn’t write what he read, but he made it sound like it. I worked on the script, maybe 3 or 4 pages,  and I remember the final line– it was a direct rip-off of some Budweiser commercial read by McMahon:

” Kiefer Corporation. All… You’ll ever need.”

No explanatories, like “This is Kiefer Corporation, your leader in kitchenware.” No verbs. No complete sentences— and a dot dot dot to guarantee the pause in the right place. Hell, even I could read that, it was so clean.

Which I did. We lived in a one bedroom apartment which was distinguished by the fact that it had one closet for the entire apartment, in the back corner of what passed for a living room.

In that closet was all our earthly possessions, which, given that this was Wisconsin, included a bunch of winter coats. I set up my tape recorder outside the closet, fished the mike cable under the door, attached the Shure SM57 microphone, started the tape recorder and closed the door. I stood in between the coats to insure no reverb or reflections, and also to help give some bass boost to my voice. And I read. And reread. Until I could hear Ed McMahon.

I never read professionally again, but what I had done that day worked beautifully. It helped me define the words I would write, the music I would use, the style of our shows, and the pace of our shows.

It made us a real company, with a real industrial demo to show. It helped put us on the map.

Thanks, Ed McMahon. Your were all we ever needed.