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.

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!"

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.

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.