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

A fairly simple package we “borrowed” from a Hearst-Argyle sister station in California, this one seemed like a great opportunity for a “fun” promo. There was also a piece of music in our licensed music library that I’d been looking for a place to use for months because it had a manic “alarm clock buzzer” motif, and so it all just fell together. Maybe it came out a little bit silly, but come on…it’s hard to make it sound like your snooze button could cause the downfall of western civilization as we know it. This promo also comes from a time when I was experimenting with composing a lot of promos in 16:9 letterbox format, something I figured would look a little bit cinematic and would also give me some practice for the future, as upgrading to DTV and HD were all the talk at the time. I got my wrist slapped because it’s not really HD, and if I continued doing promos that way when we did get to HD, it’d just be this tiny letterboxed window of video, smaller than a typical up-converted 4:3 frame would be. I can see where they’re coming from, truthfully. But now guess what we’ve been asked to keep in the back of our heads for future reference now? “How would I do this in widescreen?” Hmmmmm…