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

For Oscar night ‘04, a story was scheduled about a small town in northwest Arkansas which has seen increasing use as a movie location in recent years. There was footage for this, but a lot of it was locked-off interview footage, or locked-off footage of various parts of that community. I pulled an animated filmstrip element off of an old ABC stock footage reel (circa 2000), which was also the source of the black & white film leader element. The opening animation and closing tag were both done in Paint Shop Pro, using as many “movie logo fonts” as I could find (thanks yet again to FontFreak.com). I’m not sure that anyone, either within the station or on the outside looking at the promo as a viewer, caught that those elements were supposed to look like famous movie logos. In the end, I was trying to jazz it up, but it may have been too much effort to put into it. (Then again, I’d argue that we’re up after the Oscars. It better look like some effort’s been put into it.)

Another spot with very little footage, this was a case where there was footage, but not a lot of it, and what was there was deadly dull (it consisted, at the time the promo had to be assembled, only of the police interview and a very, very brief demonstration of a cell phone’s photo feature). I wound up, once again, creating everything in Paint Shop Pro, and integrating that with a little bit of that video in the Avid. And it sucked - it really did. So many of my February sweeps promos were done “in the computer” that everything was starting to look the same. Out of sheer desperation (and completely out of ideas), I then shot the finished promo running on the monitor from various angles, and then went back in and dropped that footage over the original. It almost works.

One of my first spots from February 2004, this is yet another case of “nothing’s been shot yet, we don’t know what the package will be like, but the promo starts airing a week ahead of the story.” Once again, Paint Shop Pro bailed me out of this one, as did some extremely helpful dingbat fonts downloaded from FontFreak.com (the various road signs, hazard symbols, etc.); the map shown in the background is actually an aerial map of Crawford County, Arkansas (circa 1990 if I remember correctly) snatched from the web. The map was originally very high resolution, but due to problems with our Avid’s storage system lost a lot in the translation - it should’ve looked sharper than it did.