Earl Green - Freelance Television Writer / Producer

Shot with two miniDV cameras over three days, the Classic Gaming Expo 4-DVD set was a full-service gig: shooting, editing, post, and DVD authoring (in this case, I did not handle duplication). Since it also happened before, after and around the period of time in 2007 when my son was born, it took an unusually long time to finish (the show itself was filmed in late July 2007, while various delays meant that the DVDs weren’t released until early 2009). Some 23 hours of footage were shot, including multi-camera coverage of every keynote presentation given by the Expo’s variety of classic (1970s/1980s) video game programmers, designers and hardware wizards, and fast-cutting, multi-camera coverage of the Expo’s famous auction, where some of the most prized relics in the video game collecting hobby change hands. All of this was edited and posted in Avid, and featured cutaway footage of various classic games in action, recorded as a direct A/V signal from the original hardware via my custom RF-to-A/V rig. More »

Several years in the planning and taking over a month of intensive editing, Phosphor Dot Fossils is a three-hour DVD documentary based upon the web site of the same name, which I’ve been writing and adding new material to since 1995. Tracing the history of video games from their inception as a mass-market item in the early 1970s, through the rise and fall of their mass-acceptance in the pre-Nintendo 1980s, Phosphor Dot Fossils features game footage, rare (and in many cases, extensively restored) commercials, and photos and mini-essays (in its unique everything-on-the-screen “video book” format) of extremely rare prototype games and hardware. I wrote every word, edited every second, composed every note of music, and embarked on an extensive DVD authoring project to create the disc’s extremely concise menu system. To date, despite this being a self-published project aimed at a small niche audience, over 200 copies have sold, with more orders always being taken. A follow-up, Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2, is in the planning stages for early 2009, and I’m brainstorming possible further projects using a similar format. Phosphor Dot Fossils debuted at the OEGE live event sponsored by Oklahoma City Community College in April 2008.

Not a lot of production work on my part here; I was contacted by the producers of this History Channel show about using photos and video that they had seen in the video game history section of my web site, and I wound up providing them with quite a few options to choose from, including video of the game itself being played. The video of the one-of-a-kind Pong prototype was shot by me in August 2005 in San Francisco.

My first big freelance assignment was a biggie indeed – I stepped up from 30 second spots to editing and posting a 30 minute show; I started working on this immediately after leaving 40/29, and had actually been contacted about it before I was even actively soliciting business as a freelancer. This was a pilot presentation for a local daytime news/public affairs show, hosted and produced by Lydia Joseph, who I had worked with at Fox 46 years ago, and shot by Kirsten Cutsinger, who I knew from KPOM (back when it was KPOM, before the relaunch of their newscast). Once the stories and intro material were shot, everything was my responsibility, from developing and implementing the graphic “look” of the show, to editing, and even doing the voice-overs for the show’s intro and bumpers. As of 2008, the show has not sold, so the pilot remains the only produced work on this project.

The Odyssey2 DVD is a direct-to-DVD compilation of archival clips and historical footage related to the groundbreaking (but these days rather obscure) Odyssey2 home video game console, marketed internationally in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I did not author the DVD, but instead restored and remastered nearly all of the assets used on it; in some cases, the footage was in very poor shape, requiring many hours of work to bring it up to the level of merely being viewable, let alone at an audiovisual quality that most consumers expect from a DVD. Footage included classic commercials, internal sales tapes from Magnavox and Philips, rare footage, and even a full-length video recording of an employees’-eyes-only performance by the Second City comedy troupe from 1983. The assets required color correction, contrast and brightness enhancement, and numerous audio fixes ranging from minor (sound level adjustments) to major-league enhancement and restoration. At the client’s request I also composed music, complete with sound samples from the Odyssey2′s infamously primitive voice synthesizer, to be used on the disc’s menus (the client handled DVD authoring for themselves in this case). The Odyssey2 DVD is still available from Packrat Video Games.