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MillimeterPolitics in High Def
Nov 11, 2008 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding
“Every town has its industry, and you have television people to support that,” says Jef Huey, senior editor at Henninger Media Services, “and obviously the industry of Washington is politics.” Therefore, politics in one form or another drives the video industry in Washington, D.C.—advertisements being one of the largest areas. The District of Columbia has the largest concentration of firms that do political consultancy, and they mostly make political commercials to support their candidates. While some have inhouse facilities, many of the larger consultancy groups use out-of-house facilities such as Henninger Media in order to keep up with the volume of ads they run.
While the main industry of Washington is politics, there are other things as well: The Discovery Channel and National Geographic both have locations in the city, and Henninger actually has a second facility that's located across the street from National Geographic. So the big challenge for the folks at Henninger during the political ad crunch time is to continue to serve these other clients as they have deadlines for their projects as well.
Henninger has a regular staff of 85 people who work both locations, and with the 2008 political season being so hot, this year the company added seven freelancers. The locations, set up for both HD and SD workflows, have nine Avid DS and Symphony dual-boot systems, seven regular Symphonies and eight audio suites in order to handle the bulk of the workload for both major political parties.
“Our Arlington, Va., facility is almost the length of a full city block—and the Democrats are on one end of the building and the Republicans are on the other end,” Huey says. “The principals of the Republican and Democrats firms are great friends; they share Nats tickets. So there’s competition and everything, yet a lot of camaraderie between the two. It’s a very interesting game.”
One of the reasons Henninger serves the larger political consultant groups—sometimes running 20-30 races—is that a few years ago, the company added a shared storage system enabling its staff to push projects from edit room to edit room. The staff found the 90TB Facilis Technology Terrablock system, which they divvied up into various arrangements for the different editing situations to be a very open system. But being the only facility doing the variety and volume of both HD and SD projects this year, Henninger had to write its own manual on workflow and content security.
As one can imagine, security is a big issue when you have major Democratic and Republican firms in the facility at the same time. So in order to accommodate, Huey says, the company basically carved the storage allocation into two hubs, with four Avid DS shared storage systems each—separate so there would be no security problems.
“We’ve always prided ourselves on having high security and serving either side of the aisle as effectively as possible,” Huey says. “And the clients responded very well to that. The funniest thing is that when you’re doing an ad on Monday and on Tuesday, you’re working for the other side and you’re using the spot you did the day before as the ‘bad ad.’ And, everybody knows it in the room, but there’s never any discussion about it. It’s unspoken.”
Creatively speaking, Huey says the spots move along the arc of the campaign, starting generally with biographies of the candidate then becoming more “comparative”—when the ads start becoming more like a tennis match and everything speeds up. “One candidate says something about your candidate, then you have to respond. And then they may respond and it goes back and forth faster and faster, causing tighter turnarounds,” Huey says.
While Henninger did a lot for the Obama team this year, including the 30-minute Obama TV show, the company did not do any McCain projects. Nonetheless, it still churned out a huge number of TV and radio ads for both parties. Estimates show the largest number of spots that went out in one day was 16. Huey says he can’t even guess the amount of political spots the company does in a year, which is a testament to the facility’s efficiency—partially due to the Avid workflow the team put in place.
“At the election watch party, we were sitting here watching the 10 to 20 races we’re intimately involved in,” Huey says. “As an example, I’ve done at least 15 spots for one senatorial race and that’s just one campaign. … You actually end up knowing those people better than those running for president.”
At this point in time, most political ads are run in standard definition. However, most parties are shooting HD as each campaign needs to have a library of footage to call upon—for preparedness for the future and the eventuality of when, not if, delivery of HD spots occurs. Additionally, they need to be able to illustrate certain points at any time during the campaign, and being able to pull HD footage from their own library is the most cost-effective way.
Huey says that one of the Democratic firms he works with acquires footage via the Panasonic AJ-HDC27 Varicam—on tape, not P2, because of the huge volume of footage and because they are shooting in HD for library purposes. The large Republican firm that works out of Henninger shoots a combination of Varicam and Sony HDCAM. There was one greenscreen shoot, Huey says, where the team decided that it would be worth shooting with the new Varicam AJ-HPX2700, 1080 10-bit acquisition because they wanted to evaluate it for future, potential special needs. But as soon as they walked back into their facility, they transferred the footage to Sony HDCAM SR tape for archive.
“The classic [reason for HD] is that many of the shoots are done on horrible deadlines, and sometimes you have candidates who are not actors,” Huey says. “Sometimes just on a simple little candidate speaking directly to camera shoot, if you can’t get in one take, it’s optimal if you shoot in HD you can cut two takes together and zoom in on one take and make an esthetically pleasing cut and it doesn’t look like you’re blowing it up in the DVE. Simple things like that have made the producers like shooting in HD. It offers a little bit more creativity and flexibility in the edit sessions.”
Additional flexibility of note was the fact that during editing of SD spots, the team could reframe the HD shots to fit their needs. However, one commercial in particular the company did do entirely in HD for The Obama Media Team. It was called “Hands” and was aired on NBC during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. This spot may, in fact, be the first and only political spot that’s ever been produced, delivered, and aired in HD.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
