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MillimeterOvercome by emotion
Nov 1, 2001 12:00 PM, By Cody Holt
After two hours of sleep, Steve Rosenbaum awoke wondering if he had dreamed the previous day's events. It was Wednesday morning, September 12, and his mind raced with the incomprehensible images of buildings falling, a frantic, fleeing melee, and the surreal, overnight Gotham hours of destruction and loss.
Twenty-four hours earlier, as the morning's unimaginable events began to take shape, Rosenbaum had been thinking only of the job at hand. As president of Broadcast News Network (BNN), which makes news documentaries for cable networks like MSNBC, Rosenbaum had sent six camera crews out to tape the devastation. In the evening, he went to Ground Zero himself. But not until this moment, as he lie awake in bed, was he ever truly alone with the images. A new song from the rock band Live played on the radio. Rosenbaum got out of bed and went back to work.
In his New York City office, which is also home to BNN subsidiary CameraPlanet.com, Rosenbaum watched the previous day's events unfold again. This time, he saw the scenes as documented by the six CameraPlanet crews, each one of which had taped with a Sony VX2000 from 10:15 a.m. September 11 until 3 a.m. September 12. As he watched the images, he remembered the song from the radio. “Overcome,” it was called, seemed to have been written for this moment in history. He went to his computer to download the song.
“I started listening to the words of the song while watching the images and suddenly I just broke down,” Rosenbaum recalls. “I'd been trying to understand how I felt about the events at the World Trade Center. I wasn't scared, or terrified, or angry, or any of the other words the media was using. I was overcome, just like the song says.”
Convinced that the song was the appropriate musical backdrop for his crews' images, Rosenbaum went down the hall to ask his wife, an editor at the company, to spend an hour on a rough cut. “I was completely blown away by how somber and almost cathartic the images were against the soundtrack,” Rosenbaum says of his wife's edit. By the end of the day, he had a final version, which was cut in Final Cut Pro, dumped to DV, and output to Digital Betacam.
The next morning, Rosenbaum cold-called VH1, the cable music network, and within an hour the video was on the air. With its grim, desolate images of the overnight Ground Zero rescue efforts and the hauntingly prescient lyrics of Live's lead singer, Ed Kowalczyk, the video immediately went into heavy rotation.
On Friday, three days after the WTC attacks, Rosenbaum got a call from Chris Harden, the band's manager. “I was thinking, ‘Oh great, we're in trouble now,’” says Rosenbaum, who didn't get permission to use the song. “But he said, ‘We only have one thing to say to you: Thank you.’”
The band was so impressed with the concept that it decided to shoot another version of the video, this one with studio shots of Kowalczyk against a backdrop of CameraPlanet's images. Exactly one week after the attacks, director Mary Lambert filmed the singer under an artificial waterfall in a Los Angeles studio. But when Harden asked Rosebaum to send him CameraPlanet's rescue footage, Rosenbaum balked.
“I told him ‘no,’” Rosenbaum says. “I just felt like whatever they did needed to be honest. And I told him if Ed [Kowalczyk] wanted to get involved, he should come to New York.” Amazingly, he did.
The very next night, Kowalczyk, Rosenbaum, and his wife spent four hours walking around the southern tip of Manhattan, in and around Ground Zero. As the group stood near the West Side Highway, staring at the void in the skyline once dominated by the Twin Towers, Rosenbaum asked Kowalczyk to sing “Overcome.” Once again, Kowalczyk agreed. Rosenbaum's wife captured the moment on a VX2000, and the band's video was born.
To view September 11 tribute videos, visit these websites:
www.worldtradetribute.com
www.cameraplanet.com
www.ifilm.com
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