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MillimeterPolitics in High Def
Nov 11, 2008 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding
The Obama Media Team decided to create something special to air during the Olympics. It was decided that since this was a national ad buy during an international event, the spot “Hands” should be produced in HD. And since they had been filming the senator in HD for months, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.
“When the 'Hands' spot happened for NBC, the producers were all interested on one level and groaning on another,” Huey says. “There was a lot of excitement because the producers had not delivered a 24p HD political spot before. And integrating a variety of stock footage into that format can be challenge. But they decided that’s what they wanted to do. It was a fun trip.”
But seemingly producing any political commercial can be a bumpy ride; Huey notes that sometimes the turnaround happens literally in the edit room. At 10 a.m., the script is being written as the rest of the team looks at material for vague ideas for visuals. The campaign may be continually changing the script as they’re going through edit, color-correct, and mix to get it out the door by 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. that night. Even in such time crunches, they turn to their post tools to keep visual elements strong.
“We’ve noticed that because of the strong effects tools in the Avid DS system,” Huey says, “the producers are getting more ambitious with their ideas. We constantly look at regular ads and say, ‘Hey, can we rip that idea off and make a political ad about of it?’ We’re always trying to catch viewers’ attention and make them not just tune out and say, ‘Oh, it’s just a political ad.’ So we’re always trying for unique, interesting looks. But as it gets to final weeks where things are crazy, you’re working around the clock and you tend to get more formulaic.”
Beyond just television spots and the 30-minute Obama show, Henninger Media Services also helped put together the Michelle Obama documentary that was shown at the Democratic National Convention called “South Side Girl.” This 6.5-minute piece was also edited and delivered in HD and it was eventually projected onto large screens inside Denver’s Pepsi Center.
Having the capability to deliver in HD is one thing. But getting approvals from sources scattered across the country is another. So just as important as producing everything big was being able to portray their work just as effectively small.
“We use the Web for approvals and basically send things to the campaign so they can get a sense of what the spot is like,” Huey says. “It’s interesting that there are lots of people out there like John McCain that don’t use a computer, so you’re trying to get the most simple bulletproof compression that anyone can open—maybe even on a cell phone—so they can see what they need to see.”
“Almost every spot has a variety of different compressions made as we capture an uncompressed file and then just run it through various scripts to make the three or four different versions,” Huey says. “Most of the groups want both Windows Media or Real Player as well as QuickTime so they can have choices. Because they want to be able to open them up and look at the version they can see at that time, wherever they are in the field, and make comments. It’s just not feasible to make DVDs and have them couriered back and forth from wherever they happen to be in the country.”
Doing all of the compressions can sometimes be the biggest problem, because Henninger has two or three compression rooms cranking with other projects waiting to get in. When the company is swamped with work, the facility’s engineer sparks into action to bend the facility’s technology to get everything done. Therefore, the team sometimes compresses in the edit room using Sorenson Media Squeeze, which came with the package purchased from Avid. At times, they also use the Telestream box, of which Huey says, “even though that’s a front end for DG, it does a nice job of compression when you’re in a crunch.”
As a whole, the speed of putting together political spots is increasing every year thanks to the communication capabilities between consultants and their candidates. And when there’s more client communications, there are more revisions.
“It’s a lifesaver to have an edit system set up where you can have four Avid DS [systems] tied to shared storage so that all of a sudden we can revise what they did in Edit 1 by shooting it over to Edit 2,” Huey says. “Before we had shared storage, it just became these huge nightmares.”
All of the compression that Henninger does isn’t just for approvals anymore. With the changing landscape of information in the modern world, the company also posts a lot of the spots online—to the point where it has an encoding setting on its machines titled the “YouTube preset.” This year, more candidates posted video online, so can we depend on this as a trend?
“I tend to think that what we definitely saw was that there was a lot more ads made specifically for the Web,” Huey says. “It’s cheap, and sometimes I think they use it for strategic reasons—'Let’s just throw this ad up on the Web, and then we don’t have to pay for [air time], but the news media will still talk about it.' And that’s almost as good as having paid the money to have a real buy. Sometimes some of the more unsavory ads are done that way.”
In the end, the trend will not only be small, but back to big, in the form of HD content. And while all of the political media teams are used to the HD footage from the shooting end, getting ready for everything on the HD post end is a little more daunting.
“I sit and talk to the producers, and they’re all scared to death to switch to HD,” Huey says. “Because they know the moment—let’s say—they’re in a race and their opposition does it, they also have to do it. And they’re nervous because all of a sudden all the simple things start to haunt them—now they have to compose all of their graphics for a 16:9 environment. A lot of these ads that are so graphically oriented, that ends up being a big deal because what’s it going to look like on an SD TV because we know that a lot of people will be seeing it that way. So it starts complicating areas that they’d really rather not think about.
“Plus, they know that cost can go up a little bit. Renders take longer and the turnaround time—if renders take longer, then it takes longer to get a spot to the client and then there are deadline issues, etc. And it’s the classic sort of unknown of how will this really impact me.”
Whatever the impact, we can rest assured that every two years, there will be plenty of political ads to watch.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.