If you can't be deep, then be brief.

I did a 20-minute interview with the curator, covering visual specifics and making a narrative that would work for a four-minute package. Then the videographer started taking the first half dozen b-roll pictures. Which is when the lights in the museum automatically turned off for the night.



I was able to come back the next day for a b-roll shoot, but was told that I only had 35 minutes to be there. That's appropriate for a news shoot, but not for the work that I produce. I managed to machine-gun 45 shots in 35 minutes and remain polite. The 20-minute interview was no good because there just weren't enough pictures to cover the words. Instead we have a music video advertisement with a few spoken bits. I'm happy with the final product and pleased that my budget expenditure was successfully recovered. Keep moving forward, team!

Back up, pivot, go forward.

This is a news-style package about Meridian Gallery in Union Square. That wasn't the intention when I first left the office.



Profiling Meridian was originally recommended by a co-worker. When I saw there was a "world premiere" reading by 92 year old Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I thought I could make a great evergreen package about him.

Except… he's 92. The poem was only three minutes long and he didn't want to do any interviews. Since I had already invested four hours of labor into the story, I decided to reduce Ferlinghetti and make Meridian the focus. The PR contact was very accommodating and lined up an artist and a curator on the same evening as a performance. I could get sights, sounds, and words in another four hour trip. Adapt and overcome.

Holiday Special - ODC "The Velveteen Rabbit"

The arts coverage gets a little tricky in December. I always look to create evergreen programs that we can run for a few months on SFGovTV, but there are mostly holiday-themed shows happening now. My answer was to do a story about ODC's "Velveteen Rabbit" which I know we can run again next November and December.



This was a pretty easy shoot. KT Nelson was available 15 minutes before the final dress rehearsal started. We set the camera in a spot where we could talk to her quickly and then swing the camera 180 to start shooting the show right away. John R and I took turns running the the camera and just tried to make best guesses on a program that we hadn't seen before. Later during the editing, I spent 2/3 of my time working out the narrative and the audio. The pictures were fairly easy once there was a natural story to hang them onto.