Life After Wife Swap
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.”)
