For the second story of November sweeps 2006, and the one which would air on Superbowl Sunday, we have this little number about gambling addiction. I shot some of my own material for this one, as the script talked about a roll of the dice…and no such footage existed and we were unlikely to be able to go and get it. So I set up an unlikely contraption at home (consisting of a TV tray, two wooden CD shelves and a slab of plexiglas set up in front of my trash compactor) and shot my own footage with my miniDV camera, rolling a couple of dice from a Monopoly game right into the camera lens (or, more accurately, right into the plexiglas that was set up in front of it). It quickly became apparent that it was going to be really difficult to get the dice to land where the camera could see them, while still making it look like I was giving them a good throw. Hopefully it looks more like a craps table than a crap table. The rest was filled out with some footage we requested from CNN and ABC; the only actual original footage from the package was that of our anonymous interview subject’s hands holding a Gamblers Anonymous pamphlet.
Though it reuses quite a few staples of my “medical promo style,” this promo benefits from some unusually strong - and unusually local - sound. It’s become our “house style” of late to stick to a standard set of Helvetica typefaces, but for this spot I wanted to go “out there” a bit and make it look like more of an event promo. The animation that shows up in the letterbox and the end tag is an ABC News breast cancer animation dating back to 2000, which I’ve used numerous times (remember the “Fat Virus” spot?).
