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

Though it was really considered one of the “minor” sweeps specials in May ‘04, this package - concerning attempts to keep the Cherokee language in circulation, while current estimates say that it’ll be completely out of use in two generations - spawned my favorite promo of the whole month. Reporter Melissa Kelly was far enough ahead of the curve for me to have some ideas hatching well in advance (and let me tell you, that much time to think about it is a rare and precious luxury), one of which was to morph the Cherokee translation for “keeping the Cherokee language alive” into the same phrase in English. (Morphing is one of the new Avid’s capabilities, and this is its first on-air use at our station.) I also grabbed a Cherokee language tutorial graphic off the web and dropped a few graphics treatments on it so it hopefully didn’t look like something I’d grabbed off the web, and used it as a moving background for the whole spot. Everything was edited before I dropped the music on, and I have to give Network Music a rare shout-out here - the music is dead-on perfect, and it looks like the spot was cut to the music rather than having the music added at the end. I finessed the audio levels on the music a bit to get that big note at the end good and loud, to drive home the point that if these people’s efforts fail, something will be lost. I’m pretty happy with this one.

A bit of a scare-piece about restaurants who print your entire credit card number on the receipt, this one isn’t terribly extraordinary, but I am showing it off here to demonstrate another of the new Avid’s advantages: vivid color. With the old Media Composer system, I got to a point where I actively avoided using color in the title tool because it would never, ever look right - a bright yellow on the palette on the Media Composer monitor would hit the actual video output monitor as the color of unhealthy pee. A canary yellow would come out that way too. Anything, in fact, close to yellow in the spectrum…it all came out looking a bit distasteful. The new avid is capable of putting some vivid colors, and more to the point, accurate to what’s displayed on the system palette, on the screen and onto tape. Other than that, this spot shows off a Matrix-inspired “falling number” wipe, and probably the best thing about the whole spot, a “credit card” I created in Paint Shop Pro. I just liked the idea about the promo “expiring” Thursday at ten.