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

After several years, I began getting back into the 3-D animation swing of things with some of the Avid’s more advanced features, resulting in the shiny “scooters” graphic at the beginning of this spot - but it took such a mind-bogglingly long time to render that I kept the rest of the spot reasonably simple. There was plenty of good footage to choose from this time around, which always makes my job a lot easier.

The funny thing is, despite the time spent on the animated portion of the spot, the one thing that made everyone sit up and say “hey, cool!” was the station’s logo digitally “painted” onto the street in the spot’s tag. It was actually a simple 3-D effect, and was somewhat transparent to allow for the street texture and one of the riders’ shadow to be seen, to make it look a little more “real.” It was just a little reminder of something I’d forgotten from my Fox days: spend all the time you want on the 3-D effects. All anyone will remember will be something that was exceedingly simple!

Normally I wouldn’t even mention this one, let alone offer even a minimal brag about it, except this was obviously one of those spots where nobody had a clue what to do with it. The footage we had of the original show in question was on a VHS tape in very questionable shape, and it looked horrible. So how do you still show it?

The answer in this case was to shrink it down as much as possible. To justify that, I used a bit of stock footage from a Hearst share reel (the woman watching the TV) and kept the entire spot on the TV seen in the spot itself. In case the result was something so tiny as to be illegible, I took the somewhat odd move of adding the blue bar near the station logo at the bottom of the screen, keeping the title of the special and its airtime as legible as possible for as long as possible. This was truly a case of trying to make a diamond out of a lump of coal. (Note that I said “trying,” not “succeeding.”)

The first sweeps spot of November 2004, this one involved one of our reporters swabbing shopping carts and having the samples tested. Just how dirty are shopping carts? Our findings: not very. Turns out the sun is very effective at baking bacteria into sterility - who would’ve thought? Not that this kept us from having to come up with a promo that would at least look scary enough to get people tuned in. Once again, I fell back on preparing some elements of the spot at home, namely the “oozy” animation of a bacteria photo from the news graphics bank. This was also the source of the shopping cart graphic in the background, which I subjected to two different “glare” treatments; I imported these different versions of the shopping cart into the Avid as stills, and created the photocopier-esque “scanning” effect by simply moving a cropped section of each across the original. All in all, it turned out rather surprisingly effective (and, as I’m sure everyone noticed, more than just a little bit Wachowski Brothers-inspired).