Images From Ground Zero
A sweeps piece from November 2001, “Images From Ground Zero” promised to show us heart-wrenching home video from that gaping hole in lower Manhattan that we’d just spent two months getting all too familiar with. At least, so I was told when I was briefed on the story for the promo - the reality of it, we discovered, was that the local Red Cross volunteer who had shot the footage with his camcorder got no closer than a relief site on Ellis Island. While it’s acceptable to restrict the tease to long shots from across the bay, the story being promoted didn’t show much that the promo hadn’t already given us. Still, my chosen approach for this was to use text (over succeeding static backgrounds of red, white and blue) to tell the story, with a nice pensive music bed in the background. I also had to ramp up the chroma of the amateur video drastically to get it to look like it wasn’t in black & white.
