the art of deception and hair-tumbling
Sometimes, corporate deception is the only way to get shit done. Case in point:
See that 1lb hairball tumbling across our great nation?
yes…doug ohlin is not only a photojournalist, but also a purveyor of fine works of graphic rediculocity.
…our art director at the station doesnt approve. on account of multiple “misunderstandings,” he has a bit of a problem with my self-expressions manifesting on the same screen as the station’s logo.
misunderstandings, you say? I offer an example:
Our web manager, who has since been laid off, had a weekly segment on our morning show where he would present 4-5 websites/services/etc. within that weeks theme. an interactive flash-based fireworks display and some cookout tips on the week of july 4th, for instance. well said webguy had been asking the art director (politely, i may add) for an opening clip for his segment for some time. and by “some time” i mean roughly 5 months.
I, having learned of such evil, agreed to make an open for webguy. it contained the words “webcellence” and “webtegrity,” and involved pictures of hillary clinton and baby ducks and such flying off his computer screen and past his head, all while some mid-90s-radio-sports-show-esque music blasted in the foreground. webguy and i then exported the final product to a thumb drive, and conned one of the production-folk into loading it onto the clip playout server. this meant that the producer needed only type a 4-digit number into the rundown, and the clip would load and play out on-air.
well, we almost got away with it. one hour before the show, both the art director and the director of promotions came barreling into the newsroom, aimed squarely at webguy’s desk. he got a stern talking-to, the clip never aired, but…
the next day, there was a brand new (approved!) open for his segment.
there were 3-5 other instances of me subverting the will of the almighty art director, which served to cement his opinion, and his willingness to work with me.
so when i decided that the best way to illustrate the relocation of the donated hair clippings was to fly a giant hairball across the country, i had to:
A) figure out how to do it, given the limited power of our news-based editing software, and
B) figure out how to get a nice-looking map of the country, with only locators for fort myers and san francisco, from Captain Graphics without letting him in on the rest of the scheme.
all was going according to plan. i had submitted a formal graphics request form, with a crude ballpoint illustration of what i needed. since i was hard at work editing the rest of the package, i sent my reporter back to the Art Cave with the paperwork. what i hadnt counted on was holly telling him about the entire plan.
request denied. no tinkering with graphics after getting them from the art dept.; any additions/alterations are not approved for air.
so what did our hero do?
i called him up, submitted to his will, and told him “OK, just give me an arrow then. it’ll work just as well.”
mission accomplished.
so i got the graphic from him, and now had to figure out how to get that hairball to fly. i slid on over to webguy’s desk, and handed him a thumb drive containing a still frame of the shot in question. he was kind enough to, using photoshop, remove the background and export the image, in the same size and format, as a .gif, since that format includes, some sort of alpha channel. i then still-framed the final frames of the hairball clip, and dissolved from that to the map graphic. on the overlaying video track, i placed the “hairball-only image. i then, using “3D picture-in-picture” (which allows not only positioning and effects plug-ins, but also keyframe-based movement), shrunk the clump down to a manageable size while positioning it over fort myers, and sent it along on its journey.
it aired exactly as you see above. i dont thing our beloved art director ever saw it, because he wasnt at work yet when it aired, but i haven’t gotten any grief from him. in fact, the reporter, morning EP, and everyone else who saw it, loved it.
the kicker?
CNN picked the package up, and it aired nationwide (i believe on headline news network).
yet again, victory.
