Hostage Negotiator
The dark side of November sweeps. This was, to put it bluntly, the spot from hell. It arrived with copious footage, and was put together with that footage…and very late in the game, I was told that none of the footage was usable because we couldn’t show the faces of any of the hostage negotiators whose training session had been recorded. And that left me with absolutely nothing visually. I grabbed some photos off of the news graphics service again, and ran some of them through JASC Animation Shop 3.0, outputted the individual animation frames to floppy, and spent at least two hours on just importing those frames into the Avid. I was still working on this spot when the morning show crew arrived before 5:00am. Nothing that happened with this spot should’ve happened the way it did, and while it’s quite striking visually, it was pure pain to get it to turn out this way.
