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Script Tales: “The AVL Commitment” (Part 1)

May 21, 2013 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve been following along with my scriptwriting series, you now know that a script can be almost anything, as long as it provides a blueprint to tell a story. Words, interviews, sounds, music and of course pictorial descriptions are all fair game. Pacing notes are fair game.  Stylistic comments (Quick paced montage of team building the house)” are fair game.

Which brings me to writing about in some detail the story of the “AVL Commitment” script.

Working for AVL is a bit like an actor or comedian being asked to host an awards show. It’s a great honor, there are limited opportunities, and you can make or break your career. There are smart producers that avoid this kind of thing entirely. But at Sorgel-Lee, we had made our reputation on high-risk ventures. Impossible situations. Tough clients. Drunk and impatient audiences. The type of situations that put you on the map or erased you forever. The type of situations where clients could get a major bonus, a promotion and a raise, or be shunned out of existence. Yes, there were some bumps in the night, but for the most part we had succeeded in working ourselves onto the national scene as a “regional leader” in the audio-visual multi-image business.

Multi-image was the adopted name of the creation of “shows” or “events” or “spectaculars” through the use of multiple slide projectors, animation stand special effects, sophisticated soundtracks and a major piece of computer equipment to tie all of that together into something that was often called a “film” or a “slide-movie” because the music and words matched the picture. It wasn’t film, but the use of multiple slide projectors and carefully photographed sequences gave the impression that it was.

The leqding provider of this kind of equipment was a company called “Audio Visual Laboratories, or AVL. There were other companies, but theres always a number one– a company cloer to the user, more clever in engineering and marketing, and m=better at customer service, and for many producers money (which wasn’t all that much money– thus wasn’t Hollywood, after all) AVL was the choice for people who wanted to do more, satisfy their own creative urges, and make audiences “eyes fall out”.

Being asked by AVL to produce a demo show for their equipment was equivalent to a coronation. Of course, you had to deliver  And a handful of great in the multi-image industry (oh yes, it WAS an industry) had: Richard Shipps, Dough Mezney, Chris Karody, Duffy  and Sherry White. New York, LA, Denver, Detroit.

Why would they ask a couple of guys from Milwaukee to do their next show?

They didn’t.

We had already won a couple of “AMI’s” at the annual Association for Multi-Image” awards banquets, so our name was somewhat known.

With that under our belt, plus other at-home “Big Show” successes, we decided that if they weren;t going to call us, we’d call them. We’d had our picture on the cover of our industry magazine, I was a monthly columnist writing about computers in that same magazine, and Ric was working up the food chain to be president of AMI. Why not?

But we needed an angle. We needed to do what we did best. We didn’t want to just show off equipment with nifty programming tricks, we wanted to tell a story. The AVL story.

So we pitched it, the old fashioned way.

We called Randy Klein  then Vice President of Marketing at AVL, and suggested that we had something important to discuss with him– a marketing proposition.

“Go ahead”, he said, perhaps sarcastically  since he was nestled in New Jersey on the east coast near the Big Apple and were in, well, Milwaukee.

No, we told him, we have to do it in person.

Flights back then were plentiful cheap, and not the hassle thay are today– you could get in and out in a day if you had to. We had some business in New York; we had been working for AT&T and Playboy’s Fashion Magazine, and I was finding whatever excuse I could to go back home.

We took a North Central Airlines Jet to Newark, rented a car, and drove down the Turnpike, then the Garden State, to exit 117, which said “Keyport / Aberdeen”, but was also the gateway to the shore, and Atlantic Highlands, Monmouth County, New Jersey.

We arrived at the AVL Headquarters, which at that time was an old abandoned grade-school building. AVL’s operations were actually spread over three locations. There was another space on Atlantic Highlands main street, where engineering and manufacturing took place, and a location in the San Francisco area where manufacturing and engineering took place as well. (That location would become significant later, for another story.)

We had written one of our classic proposals– Who What Why, How, and Whats in it for me, the client.

As usual by that time in our careers, I started by reading, then let enthusiasm take over as I went into the ad-hoc, from the heart, Don Draper-at his-best pitch.

Sold.

A minuscule budget was set, and we came home triumphant, although smarter folks on staff (including Linda Duczman and Tim Dodge) were probably thinking “What are we in for… that’s a budget?!”

But we were looking at this from a marketing perspective. There would be no argument now that we could stand head and shoulders with the biggies in New York and LA– if we pulled it off.

 NEXT: Developing and writing the script.

Filed Under: Corporate Media, Creativity, History Lesson, Proposal Writing, scriptwriting, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Corporate Scriptwriting 103: Say it With Music

May 12, 2013 By 2 Comments

Some people think pictures, others thing words. I think music.

It’s just the way I was brought up… show tunes, Sinatra, the Nutcracker, and rock & roll.

When I was a mini-kid, music came from the radio or 78rpm records.

The fifties– just before rock & roll and even in the early rock era– was an era of “orchestral” music. This was post-big band, and usually more lush. Leroy Anderson– The Syncopated Clock, Blue Tango, Plink Plank Plunk, The Typewriter. The Syncopated Clock was popularly used for “The Early Show” and “The Late Show”, movie shows (then) and Channel 2 in New York, and, I’m guessing, on other local stations across the country.

And there was movie music. “The Theme from Picnic”, “The High and the Mighty”, “Exodus”, “Three Coins in the Fountain”, “Pal Joey”, “Guys & Dolls”, “Carousel”, “Peter Pan”.

Finally, TV Themes– “The Fugitive”, “Hennessy”, “Ben Casey”, “77 Sunset Strip”, “The Saint”, “The Prisoner”, “The Rockford Files”, “WiseGuy”.

Okay, but that time I was no longer a mini-kid, but the damage was done. The Beatles, Beach Boys, Four Seasons, Herb Alpert, Leslie Gore, The Ronettes, with production from the likes of Brian Wilson and Quincy Jones and Phil Spector…. you get the idea.

The first time I produced a slide show (helping my father do a “documentary” slide show on his and my mother’s 1967 trip together to California, I was concerned with only two things– how would I do the titles, and what music would I use.

I figured out the titles by putting plastic letters on glass, shot through the glass into the sky and using the flash to illuminate the letters against the sky backdrop.

midnightcoewboy

For music? I stole. We were imitating a movie, so this should sound like a movie. One of my favorite soundtracks at the time was “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”, by John Barry. I loved the film– the only one starring George Lazenby but also starring Diana Rigg– and the music was fantastic, especially the main theme and a suite built around the flight to Blofeld’s secret mountain HQ, “Piz Gloria”. A took a number of the non-James Bondish cuts to buld around my parent’s trip to San Simeon, William R. Hearst’s “Castle” on which the Charles Foster Kane “Xanadu” is based. Add some cuts from “Midnight Cowboy”, also by John Barry, and I had set the tone, and much of the eventual soundtrack for the slide “film”.

My father had written a script he would narrate. I marked up the script with the cuts I was going to use.

Putting together the soundtrack first, I found it easy to edit the slides. I had a show.

Thanks, John Barry.

Of course, producing a real video (or slide show) for money has legal requirements, and that includes not pirating music.

chappell

When I began my career with Ric Sorgel at Sorgel-Lee Multimedia (when that world meant something different than it does now) I discovered “library music”. You sent to a music licensing company $10 bucks per album to a company called Chappell Music, and they sent back LP’s full of production music, usually composed and orchestrated by British and French Composers. It was heady stuff– it all sounded like the movies, was all carefully described by type, feeling and meter, and was a godsend.  I got to know these albums very well, as I was producing all the soundtracks and early on, writing most of the scripts for shows we produced that weren’t documentary in style.

But in either case, the soundtrack led.

If it was a formally scripted piece, I began noting the kind of music I wanted within the script.

If it was a documentary, I used the music to actually outline the show’s edit.

Music “commands” within a script might be (samples):

MUSIC UP AND UNDER (lush, transitional)

MUSIC UP FOR SUSTAINED SEQUENCE (High energy, with cutting points)

MUSIC UP AND SUSTAIN, MOTIVATIONAL

MUSIC UP AND OUT

To this day, I still think of a video in terms of music. I also on occasion have the opportunity to pay to have a score written.

Many music producers prefer to compose to a finished edit, but I can’t work that way. To both the editor and composer, I wil provide a written rundown of how I see the music: the segments, pacing and compositional suggestions, the breaks, the finale. Always the finale. If there is one area that both composers and music libraries can fall down, it’s the finally. A fade won’t do it. That’s cheating.

It’s one reason I never took much to the new “multimedia” as defined by Adobe (Macromedia) Flash. At least as it existed in the less recent past.

Early flash became quickly the standard for producing computer-based multimedia, either for the web, DVDs, or even to videotape. It essentially knocked its sibling, Director, out of the winner’s circle. It was great at animation, but there was problem with Flash. Synchronizing exact beats (even lengths) of music to picture was difficult. Narration, easy, that’s stop and start– different clips. Music is one continuous clip, or maybe five or six long clips. New multimedia creators, like so many people focusing on picture to the expense of sound, didn’t see the problem. They just looped the music, often a ten second “riff” that went on endlessly forever. When the picture came to an end, so did the music, no matter where it was.

This might be fine for a short training clip, or a funny short animation, but it did nothing for long form. Later in my career, breaking multimedia producers on my staff of this habit became a necessity for me if I wanted to maintain my self-designed style (which was a major part of our company’s marketing… we did eventually call ourselves “VideoStory”, after all.

Without total control over the music and how picture played against it (synchronized edits, quick cuts to the beat of the music) telling a story was difficult. Ticky-ticky dah-dah for five minutes is not storytelling. No ups and down, no audience emotional cues.

Because I think in audio terms, my two-column scripts (video column, audio column) are reversed. Audio comes first. I hear the music in my head, then describe the picture. This makes some clients crazy, cause every other writer does it the other way, video then audio.

But I sell emotion. And music is the emotion; picture in the information.

Filed Under: music, scriptwriting, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Corporate Video Scriptwriting 102: Write it Out Loud

January 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment

“What you’re reading here is meant to be read, not heard. So my words must do all the work. The writing is necessarily complete, formal, and structured like the sentences we diagrammed in grade school. Each sentence has a subject, verb, and object.”

If you read the sentence above aloud, you’ll find that it sounds like a lecture, not a conversation. It’s simply not the way people speak (except maybe your college professor.)

That’s because those words are written for eye, not the ear.

It’s simply the biggest mistake would be scriptwriters make. Because writing involves, well, writing, they write like they’ve been taught to write… as if they were writing a letter, or an essay.

Let’s say that the person writing the script does know how to write for video. They know the end result is not words on a page, or text boxes, or PowerPoint slides. It is an audio-visual melange, made up of visuals, music, graphics and words. And a picture is worth a thousand words, at the very least.

So the writer goes about the task differently. He or she writes “out loud“, visualizing what will be seen, heard, and said. Visualizing what parts of the story can be told purely visually, what parts of the story can rely on music to deliver impact, and what parts of the story need text on the screen, or when necessary, word written to be heard… out loud.

What do we mean by writing out loud?

Simple. Open your mouth and read what you’re putting on the screen. If it sounds convoluted or wordy, it is. If you need oxygen to read it, it’s too long. If it is so convolutedly complete in its coverage of every concept and fact, it’s a guaranteed video fail.

If you’re not sure from looking at the words you’ve put on the page are right for the ear, there’s only one way to tell– read them out loud.

Is your face turning red as you realize the pain the audience will be going through? Good for you– you’ve at least got a sense of self-conciousness, and an ability to feel shame.

Does your reading out loud allow you to hear music where there are no words, and envision picture sequences, sounds, interview voice clips, and animations that become part of the audience experience simply guided or led by the words?

Bingo.

When I started in this business, my job was the words and the soundtrack. I wrote the words, and I cobbled together music, words, sound effects, and interviews on two Sony 2-track recorders. We didn’t have an office, just a one bedroom walkup apartment in Milwaukee. And that bedroom had one closet.

I was just married, and just starting the business, and after I wrote the script, I had to narrate it by reading the words into the tape recorder. I was terribly self-conscious, so for that reason, and for better acoustics (this is Wisconsin– there were plenty of wool coats in the closet) I brought my tape recorder, microphone, a flashlight and words on paper into the closet. Doing my best “annoucer” voice, I began to read.

Within a minute my face was read, and I had stopped the tape.

This didn’t sound like Ed McMahon, Don Pardo, Dick Clark, Betty Furness, Kate Smith, Garry Moore, Durward Kirby, Arthur Godfrey, or any of the other great pitch-people of my father’s generation. It sounded like– like– a bunch of words!

I turned on the TV. I watched Ed McMahon, Arthur Godfrey, and others pitch products. There weren’t a lot of visuals  but the product was always prominent, along with simple graphics and the pitchman or woman. The person on screen sometimes did a demonstration, and sometimes just, well, talked., like he or she was leaning over your shoulder as you ironed or folded clothes (this was before two career families became the norm). And the “out-loud” words were succinct, brief, to the point, and not always in complete sentences. Just like a conversation.

Arthur Godfrey Time-C U

If you’re under 40, you may have no idea who Arthur Godfrey was. But he was big. He was a CBS TV and radio personality who defined that term. He was a talker, singer, ukelele player, daily TV and radio variety show host, and pitchman. People paid Arthur big bucks to get behind their products. He was known for ad-libbing a lot of his endorsements, the best known of which, in the fifties, was Lipton soup, which he would slowly savor in front of you from his panel discussion hosting desk on his daily morning tv show.

As daytime variety shows faded, and game shows and soap operas dominated the airwaves, Arthur was still busy, making movie cameos and endorsing products in commercials– although, to his credit, he was selective on which products he would risk his well-earned reputation of trust.

In the late 60′s, he was paid to introduce a new product via a series of commercials– the first laundry  ”enzyme pre-soak”– Axion.

His conversation, simple demonstration pitches were classic and sold tons of the stuff. Watch:[pb_vidembed title="Arthur Godfrey Introduces Axion" caption="" url="http://vimeo.com/55230386" type="vem" w="480" h="385"]

His use of conversational language and “you and me” familiarity is phenomenal. “Look,”, “uh-huh”. “Someone got punched in the nose”, “it would take an hour and a half to explain it to you, take it from me it works.”

Hell, his magic logo reveal is pulling a piece of tape off the box!

I’m not proposing minimalistic production values a a solution to communications complexities. I am proposing that the use of human conversational language in a medium partially intended  for the ear is a pre-requisite for corporate communications success.

Arthur GodfreyA good story, credibility, and decent visual proof. That’s at the heart of a successful product or image story.

By the way, Godfrey, an environmentalist, eventually stopped doing Axion commercials when he found out that the sponsors had withheld some information fron him: Enzyme action got clothes clean, but made rivers and streams a problem for wildlife.

Filed Under: Corporate Media, Geezersayswhat?, Historical Perspective, History Lesson, scriptwriting, Talent, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

The Customer is Always Right– Always?

August 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I had lunch with a music composer some time back, celebrating a successful video project he and I had worked on together, when we got to discussing clients. This is sort of standard operating procedure when creatives-for-hire get together.

We both shared something in common– we both as part of our modus operandi retained creative control over the projects we produced, at least most of the time.

He said, “I have a philosophy. I tell potential clients ‘if you know what you want, you don’t want me.’”

I tried to put my head around that, since clearly they wanted him, or they wouldn’t be discussing a project with him.

He went on. “What I mean is, if they have already figured out what they want musically, without even discussing the their need, goals, expected results, and more, then they want to skip the best of what I can offer them.

“How’s that?” I said, channeling Jack Webb.

“I offer problem-solving”, he replied. “If they’ve figured out the answer, then I’m just a contracter, not an architect.”

Which reminded me of the single most often asked question we used to get at Sorgel-Lee in the old slide days. After a pasrticularly successful project, one in which we had analyzed a need, suggested an approach,wrote a script, shot the picture sequences, created dazzling animations, and put the whole thing together to a remarkable, Hollywood-style soundtrack, the client would declare:

“That was great. What kind of camera do you use?”

Like the camera was going to grant that individual the sudden talents of the 10-person team it may have taken to create the multimedia project that had just gotten him a promotion or corner office.

Which is why we never worked by the hour, only by project quote. You need some video shot? There are freelance shooters for that. Our shooters are working on projects that we have written and are directing.

You’ve got a script? Good for you. There are plenty of production companies that will risk their reputations and highlight reels producing your script. But we had a style, and it including certain script-writing techniques, rhythms and meters we had spent yeats perfecting.

You want a hundred copies? There were far cheaper places than us, and we didn’t want to risk our reputation and your trust in us with an attempt to make a quick buck by hooking up a couple of VHS machines and given you muddy copies, or burning single DVD’s with paper labels that only worked on SOME DVD plsyers.

Put another way, if you want to hire us, you want to hire us, not our equipment.

And our most successful professional relationships are built on that fact, and the trust it implies.

Filed Under: Corporate Media, Creativity, CYA, Historical Perspective, History Lesson, Managing Creatives, Partnerships, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Corporate Communications Choice: Creativity or Committee

January 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Let me first say that I’ve been around the block. If I were a tree, I’d have 62 rings… Of hell.

And in February, I’ll have been doing this– this being creating visual communications projects– for 40 years. Slide Shows, museum events, audio-visual theater in the round, multi-screen extravaganzas, video in all its permutations, wide screen meetings, business theater, web video, interactive DVD’s, you name it. (Go ahead name it– I’ll wait—- yup, did that too.)

So, I’ve created a lot of media. Yes, that was my job. Create. Analyze a communications need, through research, meetings, reading, talking and listening, and finally, offering a solution that would accomplish the change necessary. I was right on the money about 94% of the time (that’s an educated guess; I’m guessing I was probably involved in nearly 1000 various projects throughout the years, some as a creative director, sone as writer, some hands on. Generally, because I either owned the company producing, or because I was a high level executive with the company producing, I had final responsibility for sduccess or failure. I took that pretty seriously.

But not always. Contract corporate communications– where a company executive or a communications or video department executive hires outside assistance– is a very complex thing. Some companies have media departments that produce much of what they do internally and hire out turnkey responsibility only occasionally. Others develop a relationship with a producer (or to make it even more complex, an ad agency) and rely on them to create solutions and accept responsibility, which CAN be two different things.

Corporates can choose to be their own producer– hire a writer, shooter, editor, graphics, editor, etc. Or they can hire me (alright, and thousands of other like me.)

When my partner Ric Sorgel and I began, we had the advantage of being early adopters of a technology– slide shows. But out love of the technology did not blind us to wanting to just play with the toys. We wanted to make complete, stand-alone, hey ma, we did this ourselves shows. The technology was so new (and the budgets compared to 16mm film so enticing to potential clients) that we were busy almost from the start. The clients– had no idea what we did or ow we did it, they only knew the end result. Despite our having conceived, outlined, written, shot, done interviews, created soundtracks and edited them altogether, the clients first question after applauding the show was– “What camera did you use?”

I wonder if Hemingway ever got the question, “What typewriter do you use?”

This syndrome continues to today. Avid or Final Cut? Red or Canon DSLR? Mac or PC?  Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter? (or Word with two columns?)

The questions are more complicated because video has become part of the language of communications, movable type was to the book. And the tools of video are more affordable. Thus, everyone’s a director / shooter, everyone’s a producer, everyone’s a creative. And almost anything can be seen by anyone… i.e., YouTube.

But pens and pencils and typewriters were used for many things– grocery lists, love letters, invoices, instruction manuals, summons, and, yes, novels, great and not-so-great. So, was the grocery list writer considered an “author?” Is anyone with a camera or web access a “creative?”

Add to that the interactive world– iPhones, Twitter, SMS, GotoMeeting/Seminar.com, chat groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, and we can be connected all the time! We can live, therefore, in a virtual committee. I’m not talking about production teams, where everyone has a specific role.

I’m talking about virtual groupthink, where quiet time vanishes and creative ideas are ground by a group of peers into sausage. I know, you like sausage, but is it really good for you?

There is a way to be successful on both sides of the fence in corporate communications. I’ve made enough mistakes to know how. In these pages, over the next few months, I’ll share– wait, I hate that word– I’ll provide– for free– ideas on how to avoid the sausage of creativity and allow the prime grade AAA meat  to sizzle.

 

Filed Under: Care and Feeding of Suppliers, Corporate Media, Creativity, Historical Perspective, Ideas, Managing Creatives, Partnerships, Talent, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,