Old Porte Bank – “Making Music”

“Making Music” was one of those rare circumstances where everything just seemed to come together to create something that was far beyond any of our expectations. The focus of the campaign was to feature non-traditional businesses to show that Olde Port Bank would work with a variety of business types.

One of those different businesses was vocalist Carri Coltrane and producer Gene McDaniels‘s production of Their Album “The First Time” being recorded in Portland Maine on a Saturday morning. I could not go and shoot that day, so it was up to Alex Hertzka to capture images onto Betacam tape with a Sony D30. Chris Donnellan (now of Birch Hill Media) was the producer/director of this series of spots, and had pushed the bank to go out on a limb and do something different this time. When Alex and Chris arrived at the recording studio to shoot that day, they found that the space in which they’d be shooting would be a challenge. The studio was small, with very little space to maneuver their equipment”. The string orchestra had a 15 minute warm-up period, and that would be the time allotted to shoot them in the studio. This was a pressure cooker situation that Alex and Chris worked handheld using one light. The Sony was pretty good in low light, but nothing like what we have today, as well as being very large and heavy. When Chris and Alex got into the control room, things were less rushed, but very cramped and dark. They got all they could given the constraints of the situation.

I came in that Monday and threw the tape into the deck and started scrolling through the footage with the Jog knob on the deck itself… boy do I miss that knob and the click of the servos kicking in and out as you shuttle through the raw footage. There was plenty of footage to work with, but I knew I would need massage it to tell Carri and Gene’s story. Chris gave me the rough CD of the completed songs and I listened to all of them. One of the songs stuck in my head. “Love Me Where I Live” and that was the track that I began building images to in my head. This is a process that I had gone through so many times in the past, and continue to this day; this time would be different though. It was 1997, and we had installed a brand new ImMIX Sphere non linear editor. Up until this point we had been editing in the old tape based A/B roll cmx style world. We had managed to cut one spot on a tricked out power computing Mac clone with Adobe Premiere and a Truvision NuVista card. The ImMixx was something totaly different though, it featured real time playback on a broadcast monitor of 2 tracks of NTSC video. You could have many layered video tracks, but could only play back the base track and a chosen 2nd track. In order to see a multi layered comp you had to let the machine render, and what I mean is, go for a cup of coffee and possibly lunch or even dinner depending on how complicated your spot was. But you know what, it didn’t matter, this was like a dream come true. You could manipulate your footage in real time right before your eyes. Resizing, moving, cropping, feather the edges, crude color correction and opacity changes. It was all just like a dream to me. With this new tool I would be able to finally realize a style that I had only dreamt about in the past.

I started digitizing the footage into the system, taking only what I really needed because in those days space on your drives was at a premium. We had a proprietory raid 0 server from ImMIX called a “storage dock” that held 16GB of footage. Laying down Carri and Gene’s track I began to massage the various clips into the sequence. I was now able to easily resize and place the footage where I felt it looked best, and use the internal wipes and keys to blend and feather the images together to create a feel and emotional message that was driven by the the music. I remember doing a lot of changes to the video levels and opacities of each layer with all the colors sort of melding and building off each other. When I had what I thought was close, I hit the render key and went home.
The next morning I played back what had rendered out; for me it was magical. This was the spot that was in my head. I don’t remember if there were any changes, but I do remember being very happy and very excited to have this shown to the client.

Mark Forrester (now the president of Marcus Myles Advertising) was the account executive on the Olde Port account, and I remember very well him coming back from meeting with the folks at Old Port and having a very large grin on his face. He then proceeded to hand each member of the production team an envelope containing a card and some cash from the president of the bank. That was a very good feeling indeed, and the beginning an entirely different way of composing a spot.

Enjoy
-paul