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.

The post Script Tales: “The AVL Commitment” (Part 1) appeared first on Brien Lee.

And the Beach Boys might have faded into a nostalgia act (which they later self-imposed during a 80′s nostalgia craze) except for the release on May 19, 1966 of Pet Sounds.

Although he was their main writer / arranger, this can truly be called the first “Brian Wilson” album.

Except for the the instrumental “Pet Sounds”, it would be hard to call this a carefree, upbeat, “sun, sand and surf” BB album. It took the introspective tones of “Sandy”, “In the Back of My Mind”, “Warmth of the Sun”, and “California Girls” (think about it) and brought them into a universe so layered and lush that at first you heard music, not lyrics. Then on second listening (almost always immediately after the first listening) you begin to get the message. “I’m growing up. I have doubts. I’m losing my innocence. I have dreams. I sometimes feel defeated. I sometimes want for love. I want to be somebody.”

Yes, there was “Sloop John B.”. their most recent hit. So skip that if you want.

But the rest of Pet Sounds belonged together, sequenced eternally as Side A then Side B, ending with the etnernally depressing but beautiful “Caroline, No”, actually eventually released as a Brian Wilson single 45. (I found it at Woolco in a cut-out bin).

Go to Amazon ot iTunes and buy it and download it, if you don’t already have a frayed, scratched album or previous CD reissue. It was released in mono, but there are versions (including the current release) of Pet Sounds remastered in real stereo by the genius engineer Mark Linnett who was nominated for a Grammy for the wonderful Pet Sounds Sessions boxed set.

If you want to know a person ask them their favorite recording. This is mine. I was 17 years old.

The post It Was 46 Years ago Today: Pet Sounds appeared first on Brien Lee.

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.

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.

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.

The post Corporate Scriptwriting 103: Say it With Music appeared first on Brien Lee.

Somewhere along the line, I figured it had enough exposure and retired it.

Now, after quite a few requests (seriously) I’m re-posting it here on the Brien Lee page, under the menu item “The AVSquad (Early History).

It is virtually unchanged, which means you can view it in all its lo-res glory, and simple html goodness. I have added a few links to media files where appropriate, and I will add more as I digitize them.

Because this was written 15 years ago, I had the advantage of a mid-40 year old’s memory. So in re-reading it, I re-remembered what I had forgotten.

Big ideas are often thought of simultaneously across the country or around the world. Ric Sorgel and Brien Lee weren’t the only guys who though doing slide shows for a living would be a good idea. What makes this interesting, I guess, is how closely this reflects the state of technology and the state of some creative minds back in 1972. And let’s not forget the state of the economy back then. Pretty rotten, which as I have said many times, is the best time to start a business.

Hint, hint.

The post “AVSquad” History of Sorgel-Lee and Slide Era Reposted appeared first on Brien Lee.

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.

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.

A 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.

The post Corporate Video Scriptwriting 102: Write it Out Loud appeared first on Brien Lee.

First of all, there is always a script, even if it’s only in one’s head. (Who is “Number One”, by the way?)

Also, can you really trust a writer that uses nothing but parentheticals?

Okay, back to the point: Scriptwriting is the center of any production, even those without words.

The scriptwriter will get to know the client and the subject matter better than anyone else on the crew. He or she will be the only person familiar with the products, descriptive terms, visual features, physical surroundings, client goals, hot buttons and politics surrounding the subject matter of the video.

Scriptwriters are thought be word experts, but they must also think in terms of images, sounds, and rhythms, or a video could fail.

They know how to surf the subject matter, place it in order, and reveal it in the fits and bursts that can compel an audience to believe or buy, or whatever else the client’s goal is.

So, if I had to give advice to someone who could write, generally speaking, but hadn’t written for video, I’d start with these basics:

A corporate, business, industrial (whatever you want to call it) script is different from a a screenplay. They’re written differently, on different templates, and serve entirely different purposes. What they share in common is that time is money– except Hollywood has a lot more money.

The corporate script uses an “audio-visual” style: two columns, audio on one side, video on the other. This allows for more video detail than the narrative style of a screen play. Product names, shot description, text call-outs, shot listings, etc. are all fair game for inclusion. The audio side is for the words, audio descriptions, sound effects, etc.

The first trick to a/v style writing is to develop the discipline to know when you should let the visuals do the talking. Why say what we see?

The second trick is to write for the ear, not for the page.

“This truck has the new Dynaflow® (a registered trademark of Megacorp) style engine. Its chrome exterior belies the power inside.”

The A/V equivalent, assuming you’ve got some great product shots?

“This baby has Dynaflow.”

or

“Dynaflow.”

Finally, the third trick is to know that “prose poetry” is not often called for in most scripts (There are exceptions). The poetry will be in the music, the visuals and the overall pacing you create knowing where and how to build this mix of elements on paper so the rest of the team can execute the plan and pacing you have outlined.

There’s a lot more to this, but knowing where to start should at least give you an assist in hiring a great scriptwriter or becoming one.

The post Corporate Video Scriptwriting 101: Words Only Where Necessary appeared first on Brien Lee.

World Wide Web, 1991

This week marks the 21st year of a Hypertext, Interactive World Wide Web. My experience with the Web (or internet) began with Mosaic, one of the first, if not the first, true graphic interface web browser. But prior to that, Tim Berners-Lee had already demonstrated hypertext on the web, the ability to click on a highlighted word and have that click “branch” to another page entirely. What a concept.

But not a new one. To producers of interactive video discs, it was a concept they understood only too well.

I produced my first interactive video disc in 1983, for AT&T International. Using their control technology, which involved touch sensitive monitor screens overlaid on graphic interfaces playing back on videodiscs, screens seemed to magically interact with any button push by the user. Of course, getting people to touch a screen back then was a different challenge no one had anticipated.

AT&T Interactive Display

It was our job to plan and write the creative plan and pathway possibilities the end user could choose. The basic question was always “where do you want to go next”, which was represented on screen by buttons. To prepare the “plan” for the choices consumers could make (or branching), we had to lay out a flowchart. This was before the Macintosh or graphic software, so any branching plan would have to be done on paper. But this was a new concept, one hard to get our heads around. So we literally created pathways of paper and masking tape on a floor to plan out the choices users would be offered. Early hypertext if you will.

AT&T “wireframe” 1983

Later that same decade, Apple introduced Hypercard, which used black and white text and pictures to allow authors to develop learning and entertainment “stacks” that could be distributed on floppy disc. I found it relatively easy to adapt, since I already had hyperlinking experience.

This merged into interactive cd-rom, which allowed for the inclusion of high-density graphics and movies.

While the web was interactive, it was also slow, so interactive cd-roms enjoyed a gaming and e-learning period of growth despite the web’s appearance.

Macromind Director (Later Macromedia Director, and later, Adobe Director, and still later, Adobe Flash) was used as an authoring device for cd-rom, but soon also circumvented web speed issues through clever graphics compression and a similar use of the hypertext concept. Now you could load your entire project to the web, offering the end user what had taken large proprietary interactive boxes and videodiscs just a decade earlier. Again, I got it.

So doing a web page– essentially an interactive videodisc or DVD– was no challenge for me or my team. We had done it all, on slower, more challenging equipment  and when clients came to us for e-learning systems and interactive web training, we knew exactly what they were talking about. Heck, we had literally walked through this virtually world nearly 15 years earlier. There was very little learning curve. Given our past experience, we could offer these new solutions to clients, quicker, better.

So corporate buyers,  next time you’re buying production solutions, think age before beauty. There will be less risk and quicker prduction times.

And producers, sometimes older is better.

The post How Experience Makes Each Learning Opportunity Easier and Faster (Happy B’Day, Interwebs!) appeared first on Brien Lee.

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.

The post The Customer is Always Right– Always? appeared first on Brien Lee.

What we have here… is a failure to communicate.

Frank Pierson, the writer of some of my favorite movies, especially Cool Hand Luke, died recently, and the New York Times had a particularly insightful tribute piece featuring interviews with those who new him or his work best (Including his current employer, Matthew Weiner of Mad Men;

Media Decoder: The New York Times/

The post R.I.P. Frank Pierson: Cool Hand Luke, Cat Ballou, Dog Day Afternoon appeared first on Brien Lee.

Pair that with his recent comedy special sold direct to the fans and you have a textbook case of creative control paired with financial success.

By the way, he not only stars in Louis, he writes, directs, and EDITS it (on Final Cut Pro).

He is the “showrunner” and more.

Here’s a guy who has a vision and is loyal to it– a prescription for success.

Interestingly, he had less luck (and control) with his prior series, “Lucky Louis”, on HBO of all places.

I recommend both series.

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