Coffee Break

Chris Kelly wrote this funny scene between Birdman and Falcon-7.
I remember editing this in Avid and conforming it on a Quantel Editbox.
Most of the footage is re-use of an old Birdman episode.
Chris touched up a couple frames in Photoshop. We lip-flapped the VO, added gate weave and old film dirt and the result is pretty convincing.

Coffee Break from Jon Dilling on Vimeo.

TBS

On November 3, 1997 I began working at TBS.
I was hired to work for the in-house production facility known simply as "Turner Production", later named "Turner Studios." I remember at the time getting a lot of advice from peers to not take the job. Turner was viewed as a backwater of production. A place to start your career, not the place to get ahead. I've seen the picutres and videos that support that viewpoint and if you've seen "WKRP in Cincinnati" you'll get some idea of what Turner was like in the early days.

Well a few years after I started, Turner built the Southeast's largest production studio, a $50 million full service facility. And most of those people that told me not to come here are now my co-workers.

Tycolene

This funny little spot is for an aspirin I've never seen it in stores. I don't know if they even still make the stuff. But it does represent the kind of work I was doing circa 1995. This was one of a series of 3 concept spots for the Pfeiffer company. I think there was a Scrooge spot a Frankenstein and a Dracula spot. All selling different things. The Dracula spot was for some kind of iron poor suplement. HA. Those witty ad men! Well, you get the idea.

Tycolene from Jon Dilling on Vimeo.

A notable part of the spot for me is the end page. It is hard to tell from the small image played back on this blog, but the Pfeiffer logo is clearly a Hi-con stat camera luminance key. What we would have done is place a black card under a camera with lights surrounding it. The camera would be connected to the video switcher in the editing room. When the edit was made for the end page, the camera image would be keyed over the footage of the pill bottles and the additional type was added from a CG font machine like a Chyron or something similar. It would be years before Photoshop became the industry standard for handling graphics like this.

Creative Post & Transfer

Here are a couple spots I did during my time in Charlotte, NC at a post house called "Creative Post & Transfer." This was my first job out of college. I had interned there in the summer of 1991 during my last summer in college and made a good enough impression that they hired me after graduation. When I started at Creative Post, they had a DaVinci - Rank Cintel Film to Tape telecine, a linear Online suite with 1" and betaSP decks, and a Quantel PaintBox for graphics. Clients would get window dubs of their film transfers and go to a tape-to-tape edit bay to rough together the off-line version of their spots. The timecodes would then either be written down by hand or simply transposed by the online editor as the spots were conformed in the Online edit suite. The spots below represent the emergence of non-linear editing. Creative Post bought one of the first Avids in Charlotte. It was a media composer (version 4.5 if I remember correctly). The top editors at the time were so busy they didn't have time to learn the system. And frankly at the time Online editors kind of looked down on offline editing as being crude and not too sophisitcated. Online ruled! So I had pretty much unfettered access to this new technology. Before long a client named Mark Claywell recognized the creative potential and freedom non-linear could offer. Mark was an emerging director with Boulevard Films in Charlotte. He had lot of creative energy and was excited about trying new technology. Lucky for me he was generous enough to give me a shot at working with him. The Presbyterian spot is pretty straight forward stuff. The footage really does all the work here. But, we were free to play with timing, version and add dissolve transitions in Avid that would previously have had to wait for Online.

Presbyterian from Jon Dilling on Vimeo.

This next spot was a spec spot that Mark wanted to cut to fill out his reel. He had shot a bunch to athletic footage for a Belk department store campaign. He brought in a bunch of CDs and had me pull in several tracks which we assembled in a montage fashion. I was fascinated by his vision and the way he freely embrace the possibilities that multiple versions and non-linear editing opened up. I knew just enough about the system to keep up with Mark's vision. By the end of the session I was hooked.

Nike from Jon Dilling on Vimeo.

I believe this spot of conformed in Creative Post's new D2 online suite. Oh, the heady days of composite digital!