:: Earl Green - Freelance Television Writer / Producer ::

Like last August’s “Fighting For His Life,” this was a promo whose source material was so touching that it would have required serious effort to misfire. The entire spot was done in an Avid-created soft focus look, a memory-intensive but very nice-looking process I devised by laying an image on top of itself, and defocusing and 50% ghosting the second layer to achieve a bit of a “glow” around the original image’s sharp edges.

Hey, if it works everywhere else I’ve ever worked, why not recycle an old concept again? The tried-and-true Windows lookalike scheme popped up for a return engagement in February sweeps for this unusual promo, which featured no voice-over. Instead, the sound of my (somewhat fast) typing set the rhythm for an entire 30-second promo whose script appeared on a computer monitor one letter at a time. This was a bear to edit, even on the Avid. It took almost three nights to complete. For an encore, I produced an accompanying graphic segment for the story itself, in which anchor Donna Bragg started out full-screen, and then shrank back into the computer monitor, and wiped to graphics. By this point, it was fairly simple - but the news department was really jazzed by it.