And now back to Arts Coverage...

2012 was neither a great year nor a terrible year for the work I'm trying to do. Just sort of unexpected. When I last wrote a blog entry, "Culture Wire" was rolling steady: Shoot, Edit, Complete, Repeat. This Godwaffle Noise Pancakes video was shot in April, with every intention of turning it around that same month. But I was taught something in Basic Training that I had to voluntarily recall and enforce within myself.

Everybody is a unique Special Snowflake until things go all wrong. Then you are an Infantry Soldier, son. Time to fight.

In our very small shop, we lost two people to illness, three people to transfer, one to a multi-month project, and then two people were asked not to come back. Fifty per cent of the workforce was disrupted for the better part of 2012. The people left standing, such as myself, had to drop all the Special Snowflake projects, find some grit, and deal with all the everyday ugly stuff for months. And months.

At the end of this unexpected year, I was able to turn back to "Culture Wire," right where I left it. And I think the battles might have helped. This isn't the same "PBS magazine package" that I would usually crank out. It's the kind of video that plays in a museum for a self-selected audience. The editing is strangely both more affected and less manipulated. When it was finished, I had to take it home and loop it for six hours to figure out if I was truly settled with it.

But if you're not settled with it, you are welcome to remix your own version. I've made some alternate clips and released them as Creative Commons. Have fun.

Interview only - http://youtu.be/ldj0Lg0bSXs 
Black and White - http://youtu.be/pjd2Xs4kuzA
Unaltered Color - http://youtu.be/CyEpCeV0qdQ 
Extra B-roll shots - http://youtu.be/lHNEto_1ZyM
Original Aired Version - http://youtu.be/GOwp79mhw-4

Lit Event Coverage

Michelle Tea and RADAR are undeniably important to San Francisco's literary community. They deserve to be profiled on Culture Wire. The only thing is… it's just pictures of people reading.



There are only a few shots- Wide, Medium, and Tight. Fortunately, there are several authors each night… but it still doesn't add up to much. Three authors times three shots only equals nine shots per night. A camera operator costs me $65/hour, with a four hour minimum, so I'm looking at $1,000 just for acquisition. The only thing that makes this a good expenditure is that the subject is very evergreen. I can play this video for over a year.

Aside from the budget problem, the rest of it was a lot of fun. Michelle is delightful, the crowd was welcoming, and using the 1990s Indie Rock was an un-ironic pleasure for me.

Nobody Loves Me!!!!!

Actually, nobody loves SFGovTV. When I post YouTube stories about arts organizations, the views all depend on whether they promote it on their own Facebook wall, web page, or Twitter feed. SFGovTV doesn't have many fans- we're a service organization without any brand identity.

I recommend -

Do not post video after 3pm. People won't see it and won't have time to share or re-tweet before the end of the work day.

No thumbnail on the video link? Delete it and post it again. And if it doesn't work, wait an hour and try again. You have to have a thumbnail to get clicks.

Do not make multiple posts at the same time. Facebook doesn't share if you overshare. You have to allow a few hours gap to make sure people see the video, instead of your other reminders.

Post to your own wall. Don't sign in as "you" and post to your organization's wall. You have to post as the organization for the video to be seen by your fans. Even if a fan posts on your wall before you do, you have to go ahead and re-post the video as the organization to spread it.

Post it again first thing on the next Monday morning. "Hey, in case you guys didn't see this last week…"

It works. Trust me.

We were playing in the pocket by the end of the set.

A wonderful way to spend August and September- recording and editing 11 jazz concerts around San Francisco. "People In Plazas" was a discretionary budget project that I had been wanting to do for a while. This past July, the FY projections finally looked solid enough that I was given a green light.



Each concert was awarded 21 man-hours for production: three crew members for a half day, then eight hours of editing, and one hour of closed captioning. These productions had to have conservative zone-play camera operators who could keep their heads in the game for a full 60 minutes. That's a bit more of a sports analogy than I'm usually comfortable with, but that was the situation during these weeks.

The wide shot was a lock-down camera that recorded four channels of audio. The audio operator did a live mix-down on a three channel Shure feeding channels 1 and 2 on the camera. Channels 3 and 4 on the camera were direct feeds of audio from the bass and snare drums, which didn't need much babysitting during the show.

As the coach, I had to cut a few people from the roster. I gave camera ops a detailed explanation of what I wanted. If they didn't do it, I showed them their video and repeated what I was after. When they failed again, they were cut from the team. I'm sorry, but we're only doing 11 of these and I have been waiting years to see this project approved.

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.

Culture Wire returns to SFGovTV!

Arts coverage for the City of San Francisco returned to SFGovTV in November 2011 with the re-launch of Culture Wire.



A successful partnership with the SF Arts Commission produced 50 videos between 2009 and 2011. Due to budget constraints, the SFAC was forced to discontinue their support of the program for Fiscal Year 2011-12. After two months of budget evaluation, SFGovTV has committed to continuing Culture Wire by providing 100% underwriting for the next six months.

In the first month of Culture Wire's return to Channels 26 and 78, producer Rich Bartlebaugh has profiled three local artists:

Aron Meynell http://youtu.be/qvZS5Pm5eyM
Sanjay Patel http://youtu.be/nQMm57B7l-U
Jim Campbell http://youtu.be/bxQRLFyVifk

Upcoming programs include a visit to the Meridian Gallery near Union Square, and a look at some of San Francisco's most adventurous dance companies.

The Talking Business Card

Candidate Statements are an annual ritual for government television stations. Last time, we tried to use an HD monitor hooked up to CG with a loop playing out of it. It was "okay…" I guess. The height of the monitor couldn't be adjusted, so there were only two positions- the candidate was either on the floor, or on an apple box. It was a bit sloppy.

This year we gambled on using our small folding green screen. It's a gamble because it isn't being keyed out live, so you can't feel 100% confidence. We did test shots a few days before, and we were very clear that candidates could not wear green. When they arrived we demonstrated how their hands would be "cut off" if they were too animated. It went pretty well.

I was very conservative on the lighting and gave a hard edge on the back light for a clean key. For the rest, I used three chimeras and did dance lighting- people are flooded from both sides. I must admit that one of the short candidates (and one extremely tall one) looked a bit spooky.

During editing, I made a dumb producer mistake. I had the official Department of Elections list of candidate addresses, URLs, emails and phone numbers. I used this for the background info. When I was ready to publish, I felt compelled to be a nice guy and double-check with all the candidates. This meant I had to re-type and re-render 13 of the 25 videos because they had new offices, business phones, etc. The other information would have been "correct" but the new information was more helpful to a voter. I could have saved myself three days of rendering if I had a yellow legal pad in the studio during taping and just asked them to write this all down for me.

In the end, it was a huge success. Every one of the candidates posted the video to Facebook and many put the video on their front page. The view counts were way up compared to last year. It was wonderful positive feedback for me to see the candidates supporters give "likes" to my effort. One of the people called it "Cool… It's like a talking business card!"

A Working Vacation in Greene County, PA

My good friend Greg Ayersman was kind enough to buy me an airplane ticket to Pittsburgh, in exchange for doing some camera work and editing for him. We picked a ten day window in August 2011 when four tourist events were happening.

The first was a portrait of the last day of the historic Jacktown Fair. The farming communities around Wind Ridge have had this celebration for well over one hundred years. But now, as the economy changes, so does the feeling at the Fair.



We went with a classic "hands-off" documentary approach for this one. Some viewers found it gloomy, others were reminded of their happy experiences at Jacktown. For me, it was just fun to be in PA during the summer, edit to a pop song for a change, and to test out the "cinema" settings on the Canon Vixia.

A few days later, I stopped for an hour and captured the Waynesburg Farmers Market during the height of the season. My production goal was simple- get some pretty pictures and focus on one message. I came up with the line "Wednesdays in Waynesburg" as a persistent mnemonic device.



The best part of editing the Waynesburg Farmers Market video was writing the music. By doing a cut-down video edit, I was able to see how many pictures I liked and what the approximate pacing of the video would be. I had used GarageBand in "Music Project" mode and wasn't impressed. This time I opened up "Movie Score" mode and had a completely different experience. I was able to write a short song that contained the pastoral country flavor of the market, contained a faster section to show off the products, and then returned to the laid-back sound for the closing.

The next Saturday I stopped at the Historical Museum for the opening of the annual Quilt Show. This is "in their own words" event coverage. Greg and I turned it around quickly, so it could be embedded on the front page of the local newspaper to promote attendance the following weekend.



This showed the limits of the Vixia, though. It did not capture great pictures with only ambient indoors lighting. And even though we closed the door and turned off the room's fan, the built-in mic's audio is not acceptable to me.

The last video was for a small section of The Warrior Trail in western Greene County. I shot some pretty pictures and then headed for the airport and back to San Francisco. So of course it's still sitting on my computer, waiting for an edit, behind all the regular daily edits I have to keep up with. Soon. I promise. Soon.

Allan Alcorn for PBS in San Jose

Personally, it was a real treat for me to meet Al and spend a few hours with him.



Very similar to the structure of Guy Kawasaki's piece: there's an opening scene, a linear story of his life, then a return to the opening scene (which allows me to re-cap the story you were just told).

Graphically, it's based on the box of the Atari home version of PONG. Not an outright copy, but it uses the curved line and the bands of orange color. The rest of the graphics were a real egg hunt. Al provided a few pictures from the 1970s, but the rest came from trolling around on Atari tribute sites.

I was very sad to cut out an early section about the importance of his Berkeley years. He witnessed the tear gassing of rioters on Telegraph Avenue and considers it to be an important event in his life. It took about thirty seconds for Al to tell the story, and it was only cut because This Is Us had to fit it's running time.

Guy Kawasaki for PBS in San Jose

This profile was scheduled around the same time that Guy's new book "Enchantment" was coming out. I read the book before the interview, and decided that the design of the book cover would be the design of the profile- strong red gradient and Helvetica font. When we arrived at his office, he had the original butterfly model framed in the corner. Perfect!



The main narrative is in three parts, built around his three careers. The hockey rink is a frame for the introduction and the closure. (It is also a more exciting start scene than a writer just sitting at his desk.) A moment of conflict was placed near the end of the story- where I question Guy's credibility.

The writing and editing didn't take long. The graphics were time-consuming, but I had a quick jump-off because I already knew what the general look was going to be. During the final edit, there was an early section of Guy's history that had to be deleted. I didn't have family pictures to cover up the narration, so the information had to be cut.

Edit for a national show - Nightly Business Report

My friend Tom calls some jobs "making Chicken Salad out of chicken sh!#". This is one of those cases.



The story is solidly written, but it's mostly about abstract ideas. Those are harder to edit than stories about physical objects or events and happenings. This cuts-only story uses SD footage, web video, press handouts and staged shots (people talking, walking, answering phones and just pretending to work in general).

It was a total charge for me to be in "news mode" again after several years of being in "post world. You sit down to work at 9am and you know the Fed Ex office closes at 5pm. You better be done before 4:40.

End of Summer Highlight - Matt Mullenweg

As Bigge Crane was winding down, I started working on a profile of Matt Mullenweg for KTEH, the PBS affiliate in San Jose.



This is built around a sit-down interview with Matt. I talked to him for nearly an hour, beginning from his religious and social background to his philosophical influences as a young developer. We also covered the facts & figures surrounding the success of WordPress and Automattic.

The challenge was finding video to cover the thoughts. Luckily for me, Matt is a photography fanatic and there are web videos from WordPress's fans around the world. By using those assets, plus Photoshop and After Effects animations, we were able to turn abstract ideas into visual expression.

The reaction to the story was VERY positive. The folks at WordPress put it on their company blog and Matt himself posted it and recommended it as a good introduction to WP. It was re-tweeted and re-posted onto other blogs around the world and received many positive compliments.

First item: Summer Job!

I've been too busy to post during the past few months, but that means I have a bunch of good stories to share during the Christmas break. First item: Summer Job!

My full time employer, The City & County of San Francisco, had to reduce the pay of 25,000 workers by roughly 5.5%. This meant I would have 12 unpaid days of furlough coming up in the fiscal year, so I found a part-time job as a videographer and editor for Bigge Crane & Rigging.

The company is a market leader in the US for rentals of cranes, but they had no video presence on the web. Bigge wanted a half-dozen direct sales videos to be done quickly. Management was interested in creating softer videos, like recruiting and overview pieces, but they didn't want to waste time by doing those first.



The camera was a Canon Vixia 30 with a shotgun mic. By setting it the camera to "auto-everything" I had good pictures 90% of the time. The CMOS sensor "jelly" effect ruined a few shots and the auto-iris became confused by foggy weather sometimes, but for speedy production I could ignore the few bad takes. During this job I edited on Sony Vegas for the first time. It was a great product that filled the niche between Avid and low end tools like MovieMaker. For editing news-style pieces, it was a snap. The compression tools were a time-killer though. If you work with HDV and output m2t files, you'll be fine, but many people can't play m2t on their desktops. For internal review I needed mp4 or .mov, and Vegas is very slow to compress those.

After making five or six of these of these videos, we had a script template and the production process was understood by the full time Bigge staff. I knew that I was leaving in a few weeks, so I created another short piece to use as a template.



This was made from an old press realease that I found on their website and a half dozen photos from Bigge's archives. I thought it was a good example of how to turn old content into a new experience. Bigge has hundreds of photos in their archive, dating back to the 1920s. I enjoyed seeing them, so I assume that others will as well. These videos only take a few hours to knock out and can be done when other shoots are delayed. It's a good corporate image series to complement the hard sell of the other pieces.

Volunteer Work - Hacks And Hackers

Two weekends ago I helped a Meetup group by doing some volunteer camera work for them. Hacks/Hackers provides an environment for journalists to meet application developers and work together on new forms of storytelling.

I used two Sony VX2000 DV cameras from KQED, where the event was hosted. The medium shot fed the live feed for LiveStream, the wide shot was the live feed for uStream. The cameras were generally good for locked-down shots and worked well on full Auto mode. The wide shot ended up looking better than the medium shot, which I was trying to operate in manual mode. The Sony flip-out viewfinder isn't detailed enough to show you sharp manual focus. The manual iris control is also the same dial that rides the audio input levels. As I changed f stops, it didn't roll through the exposures- it clunkily stepped from one level to another. When the room's power went out for a few minutes during the first morning, the camera's settings weren't saved. It came back with auto-white turned On for the last two presenters. The bright LCD projector in the picture frame caused a continuous psychedelic effect as the camera tried to compensate for the blue, then green, then red, then back to blue. And it wasn't visible in the flip-out viewfinder.

Despite the power interruptions and my unfamiliarity with the gear, I still managed to come up with six hours of tape from the two cameras. During the next week, I ingested all the video and started locking up the audio waveforms in the timeline. I had five guest presentations, one open forum, twelve project presentations and one award ceremony.

http://www.youtube.com/hackshackers#g/u

Each of the nineteen segments were about seven minutes long. During the Memorial day weekend, it took 24 hours of labor to do all the meatball editing- cuts and dissolves, ride the audio. Forget color correction. Forget ProTools. Just keep grinding.

Not my best technical work, but a yeoman effort for an interesting group of locals.

I accidentally wrote an essay.

This is a clip from a job application.
The question was: "Describe your experience producing and/or directing live or live-to-tape television productions."
Eventually, I transitioned to answering the question... after the philosophy lecture--


I have directed talk shows, community celebrations, on-location commission meetings and in-house legislative coverage while working for the City and County of San Francisco.

The primary responsibility of SFGTV is to provide live access to government meetings. In-house coverage of city hall meetings generates approximately 30 new hours of programming each week. This coverage must be complete and impartial. Directors do not use dissolves, cutaways, reaction shots or subjective framing that is noticeably different from the coverage given to other speakers. When commissions leave city hall for community meetings, the direction changes slightly; extra cutaway wide shots are inserted at a regular rate to provide the viewer with an understanding of the remote location.

The laissez-faire approach to coverage of official meetings is a conscious choice. The flow of information during the legislative process is a "push" style of information sharing: each person speaks in turn and pushes their information towards their audience. There is not a personal or intimate relationship between the participants. Using an active directing style is inappropriate because it visually suggests nuanced relationships that do not exist.

Events that are sponsored by city departments but are not regular meetings (panels, interviews, seminars) are directed with a more dynamic style, in order to convey the "push-pull" interaction with the group. This includes audience shots, over-the-shoulder two shots, dissolves and on-air camera moves. City departments host these public events to provide a welcoming and inclusionary environment that both informs and entertains the attending audience. The television coverage should have the same effect for the viewing audience.

City-sponsored community celebrations have the most subjective coverage. During speeches and proclamations, the direction is similar to conference coverage. The direction changes to an entertainment style during the performances and includes more dissolves and on-air moves in an attempt to show as much color as possible. This again is to engage the home viewer in the same way that the city department is engaging the live audience.

SFGTV's primary talk show is a weekly political roundtable, shot in a black box studio similar to the Charlie Rose show. The program uses "peaks and valleys": there are scheduled reads from the host that brake the action and frame the topic, followed by argument between guests with opposing viewpoints. The director has to follow the action of the conversation and react to the dynamic of the table.