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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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.

A Primer on “Tribute Videos”

Lessons from Slide Shows (and I don’t mean PowerPoint)

I started my career creating slide shows. Not slide talks, speaker support, vacation slide presentations, or charts and graphs, but actual shows. Pictures. Script. Soundtrack. All synced together.

It was called sync-to-sound, and it replaced 16mm film as the medium of choice for business to business and business to consumer (point of sale) audio-visual communications.

Slide Shows were born of an economic necessity. Film was becoming increasingly expensive to produce (especially during the economic recession of the 70′s), and clients had no lower cost alternative for audio-visual messaging (there were filmstrips, but they were never a very satisfactory solution. Why is another tale for another time. In fact, go to www.avsquad.com for more background.)

From our standpoint, we couldn’t afford to make films. But we wanted to make "shows". So we tried a new technology at the time, the Kodak Carousel Slide Projector (2 of them actually), a "dissolve unit", which made one projector’s slide appear to fade into the other projector’s slide before advancing the slide tray, a two-track tape recorder and a "pulse unit", which made low 60 MHz tones that were recorded on one track of the tape when we hit the remote, thus recording when we wanted to change the slides.

On the other track of the tape was– the soundtrack.

For all of the rigmarole described above, the heart of the show was actually the soundtrack. While we couldn’t make movies, we could create a soundtrack that made our slide show sound just like a movie.

The soundtrack became the blueprint for the show. There were words, or interviews, or both. There was music– lots of it. Sound effects, to create the illusion of synchronous sound. And all of it mixed into a carefully paced beginning, middle and end.

Once the soundtrack was perfect– and this included anticipating where slide "sequences" would be, leaving music up for 10 or 20 seconds or whatever– we then took our rough slide edit, refined it against the sound track, loaded the trays and did the final "pulsing"– making the images match the music, sounds, words, etc. It was rare that we would go back and change a soundtrack. When the track felt right, we knew the show was right. We’d re-edit the pictures, add pictures, subtract pictures to match the sound.

The reason was the very limitations of the visual medium we employed. And that limitation taught us all a lot.

As audio genius and author Tony Schwartz one said, "You can close your eyes but you can’t close your ears."

We view single streams of visuals, but hear multiple streams of audio. Audio provides the emotion, information, and persuasion. Pictures provide the proof.

Eventually, more visual firepower became available, and companies like us felt we had to keep up with the technology. Heaven forbid a competitor announced they had the new TurboBlaster 2000 before we did.  It was simple marketing. In slides, we added animation stands, multiple banks of computer controlled projectors, even computer graphics. To pay for all that stuff, we were soon doing projects we didn’t like, including speaker support. We had gone a far cry from a camera and a tape deck– to me it seemed the tail was wagging the dog.

So I moved into video with a camera and a simple cuts-only edit system. Once again the soundtrack did its thing. People raved about our work. If we needed graphics, we brought our edits to a "post house" and layered fancy graphics on top. We were cost competitive and told better stories through incredible editing to the soundtrack, thanks to our low-tech slide show training and our journalistic love of storytelling.

But as video gear became more affordable, as presentation gear and software (PowerPoint) became plentiful, and as the Avids began rolling off the assembly line, the  promise of a competitive edge combining non-linear video editing, computer graphics, animation capability, and  audio sweetening beckoned. And many of my brethren were swayed by that siren call. They were competitive for a few months, then discovered the piper must be paid.  Overhead drove them into editing services, computer graphic support, cd-rom and videotape duplication and other kinds of work that had nothing to do with telling stories, and everything to do with  meeting the monthly "nut."

Today, a young person can be in the video business– turnkey capability, mind you– for between $5,000 and $10,000– maybe even less. A good camera and a software-loaded desktop editing system is all you need. The editing program of choice is sold by a consumer computer company (Apple.)  Most kids coming out of colleges or tech schools can make computer graphics that would make the NFL blush. The big production companies with large overhead are gone.

We can afford the toys.

But toys don’t tell stories. And even colleges and tech schools are more concerned these days with glitz and glamour than the hard-core, straight forward work of being intellectually creative. (Colleges have to market, too.)

But to me, communications success remains simple. Assess a problem. Design a solution. Discover a story. Tell the story in a compelling way. Move an audience to act. How much you pay for a real audience response should have nothing to do with toys and everything to do with talent.

See, the technology has NOTHING to do with moving audiences. Ask me what kind of editing system I use and I will look at you cross eyed. Obviously, you don’t have a clue the difference we can make for you, or you wouldn’t ask that question (Sony Vegas and Final Cut Pro, by the way).

My slide-show era business partner, Ric Sorgel, was an extraordinary photographer. We always laughed when we were pitching someone with a sample of our work and the first question they asked was "What kind of camera do you use?"  And yet, that’s the kind of thinking that’s prevalent today.

If I go buy an Avid and I can be like George Lucas. Right?

Our success in this business has never been about any one component or tool; it has been about the design, scripting, pacing, and persuading that today still starts with what you hear.

Toys change. But the story stays the same.

Thanks,

Brien Lee

Life is Dead Again

Almost as a testimonial to the Bob Garfield article cited in the last entry, Time, Inc. announced it will shutter its Life Magazine weekly newspaper insert (see the Milwaukee Business Journal for details.)

Was a weekly 18-24 page Life ever going to work? We have USA Today‘s weekly, the venerable Parade weekly, and of course real magazines (though some seem to be sputtering and shuttering as well.)

The first time it closed, in 1972, Life was a newsweekly that had gone lifestyle to compete with and differentiate itself from the immediacy of television news. It’s second incarnation was in the 1990′s as a monthly glossy. That died in 2000.

You can’t blame them for trying, but the few times I did see the Life newspaper insert, I thought to myself, "This is Life magazine?" I felt sorry– even embarrassed– for the nameplate.

But still images and slideshows work well on the web, and Life has tons of beautiful content in its backlog. Time says the name will remain on the magazine’s website. This is a no-brainer: put as much effort into the website as Slate, Something Awful, or almost any decent industry portal site, and Life might survive the third strike. Find a niche– photography of the highest order– even video that transcends the crap that is on most web sites– and there might be life in the old girl yet.

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