- About Przyborski Productions
- Show Reels
- Misc Videos
- Introduction of 24P (from 2002)
- Americana
- Images from a Summer Carnival
- River Rafting
- Scenes from a County Fair
- America Lost
- Moments@24fps (1999)
- Behind-the-Scenes Prop38 (2000)
- 1991 Pittsburgh Penguins
- Barth Bartholomae (1997)
- Behind-the-Scenes Pagetime (1998)
- Frontier Telephone (2000)
- Time Capsule: GNC 1993-1996
- Glenn
- Jimmy D
- Map
- Contact Info
- Scrapbook
Every year Glenn Przyborski directs & photographs major healthcare campaigns. He shoots for agencies across the country as well as clients who internally handle their own creative marketing.
Przyborski is one of the few commercial directors who realizes production inside a busy hospital is not the same as filming in a studio. He knows how to work with doctors & medical teams to get great footage with minimal disruption. Everyone on the production crew is aware that real patients take precedence over the filming process.
The commercials featured on this reel demonstrate Glenn Przyborski’s directorial styles & techniques that enhance a project’s concept. All featured doctors & hospital staff are real. Testimonials are given by actual hospital patients. All operating room scenes were photographed during actual procedures.
CLICK HERE TO PLAY JOHN’S REEL
My friend, director/cinematographer John Pytka recently passed away. It happened shortly after his 82nd birthday.
For years, John and I would get together for lunch every month or so. We’d share stories about film production in the 70’s through 90’s. Back then, John & his older brother Joe, were Pytka Productions, one of the country’s top spot production companies. John directed & photographed network commercials for Alamo Car Rental, Gallo Wine, Budweiser, & many more. He was often used by San Francisco’s Hal Riney & Partners for iconic ad campaigns, including Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America”.
John’s reel from the days of 35mm film, showcases a different style of production than what’s en vogue today. It’s well paced, beautiful photographic images. Many of the scenes incorporate slow-motion that creates a bigger than life feel to the action. I describe them as “moving stills”. This contrasts with today’s fast cuts, punchy graphics & rapid camera moves.
John spent much of his retirement with his wife, Jennifer on their farm North of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We’ll all miss him.
For 25 years, I directed and photographed almost every Eat’nPark TV campaign. During that time, Cliff Miller was the driving force behind Eat’n Park’s advertising. First as Creative Director at Ketchum Advertising, then as Eat’n Park’s own VP of Creative Services. It was Cliff’s idea to use Eat’n Park’s iconic “Smiley Cookie” as a key part of the company’s image & logo. (Cliff retired from Eat’n Park in 2016.)
From 35mm standard definition to HD digital, I thought it’d be fun to look back at a dozen Eat’n Park’s TV commercials from 1990 to 2015.
For the 50th Anniversary of Boca Raton Regional Hospital, Tom Chakurda, vice-president of marketing and communications, asked Przyborski Productions to create a moving video that would be a tribute to their doctors, nurses and thousands of employees.
For the celebration, the medical center secured the rights to Barbra Streisand’s “Ordinary Miracles”. This inspirational song celebrates the work that people do everyday for the benefit of others.
Clients sometimes ask if I miss shooting commercials on film as we used to do on every project. Our last “film” production was in 2006. Looking back, my business partner, Jim DeVincentis and I had a lot of fun on film shoots in the late 80’s, 90’s & early 2000’s.
In the mid-90’s, JVC introduced a small mini-DV camcorder. We bought several of them and asked clients and crew to shoot some behind-the-scenes video during our film productions. I located several of the old tapes and edited them together with the actual footage we were filming. Of course everything back then was standard definition.
Most people think of the past with nostalgia… as if things were always better in the “good old days.” Do I miss shooting film? I’ve always enjoyed working with agencies & clients to create commercials that everyone was proud to air. The specific production “medium” was never the most important part of a project.
My son John said, “Dad… If the vinyl LP record can return to popularity, movie film has a good chance of a come back.” You never know…
Here’s a visual “time capsule” of KDKA-TV (CBS Pittsburgh) promos from ’79-’96.
Friends at a retirement party for KDKA’s Drew Moniot reminded me of the many promotional campaigns Przyborski Productions produced for KDKA from 1979 through 1996. Those were the “analog” days of 35mm film production, film-to-tape transfers, and tape-to-tape video editing.
I was fortunate to work with 3 of KDKA’s creative services directors… Brad Crum (1979-1982), Art Greenwald (1985-1988), & Lorraine Sneebold (1988-1996). The promos we produced were often music-driven, high-energy spots that featured KDKA’s on-air talent and their interaction with the community.
The earliest of these promotions aired 45+ years ago. They’re a visual tribute to KDKA’s talent and staff, many of whom are retired or unfortunately, no longer with us.
I directed and photographed many TV campaigns for Cleveland based ad agencies. The most talented agency creative director I worked with was Alan Glazen. His agency was given an assignment to produce a TV spot and long-form video for Action Technology (now part of the Invacare Corp.) The company manufactures specialized, wheelchairs that are used throughout the world by athletes. The video was produced to be played at a major wheelchair athletics competition.
The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) had just been signed into law, but many public buildings weren’t “wheelchair friendly.” Alan Glazen created an amazing script that was designed to let the world know, that people who have a physical disability, don’t want your pity or sympathy. They just want you to get out of their way and treat them as you would anyone else.
Alan and I filmed the intense, stylized action scenes of the wheelchair athletes in an old basketball gymnasium at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University. I shot all the scenes with my Arriflex 35BL4 equipped with Zeiss super-speed lenses. During film-to-tape transfer in Nashville, the clipped color and accentuated grain was added.
The “news event” scenes were filmed the following day in the lobby of an old downtown Cleveland office building. After transferring the 35mm negative to 1″ analog tape, I edited part of the project in Pittsburgh, with Glazen handling the final edit, original music and audio mix at a Cleveland facility.
As a footnote: Some years ago, Alan Glazen sold his ad agency and today is the successful owner of multiple restaurants in Cleveland, Ohio.
Over the past 30 years, John “Buzz” Moyer has become one of the most sought after cameraman and Steadicam operators in the film & TV industry. John has shot over 70 feature films & TV series including Marvel’s, “The Avengers” and Stephen Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story”. John won the 2022 Society of Camera Operators (SOC) Camera Operator of the Year Award for his work on “West Side Story”.
He began his career as a Steadicam operator working on numerous TV commercials, including hundreds of ads for Przyborski Productions. In the mid-90’s almost every major TV project included Steadicam cinematography. In the early 90’s, John bought a used Steadicam and taught himself to be an excellent operator. Today all his camera equipment is state-of-the-art.
John’s filmed projects all over the world, but still lives in Pittsburgh with his wife Kathy and their sons, Hayden & Grady. He’s also an excellent woodworker and talented pianist.
SmithFoods of Orrville, Ohio is a family owned company, founded in 1909. They supply premium dairy and other food products throughout Ohio, Indiana and Missouri.
The Innis Maggiore Agency of Canton, OH chose Przyborski Productions to produce SmithFoods’ latest TV campaign. The concept called for casting 5 children and 5 adults who could be those same kids, only now in their 40’s.
Glenn Przyborski directed and photographed the commercial in 4K digital. Props and wardrobe stylists selected kid’s clothes and table props that were popular in the mid-to-late 80’s. Back then, all TV was standard definition, so we rendered the opening sequence in the 4 x 3 ratio of older TV sets. After several visual tests, we decided not to alter the color or contrast of the opening sequence.
The commercial runs throughout Ohio and selected portions of the Mid-West.
Here’s a fun look at a crazy network ad campaign produced for Stanley Steemer, America’s largest residential and commercial cleaning service.
Corporate creative director, Jim McCabe called with an unusual production request. In 2006, the company had marketing success with a funny commercial that featured “Toby” a Labrador Retriever scooting his butt across the living room carpet to the shock of the homeowner and her friend. Jim wanted to revisit the concept, only this time “Toby” would scoot over carpet, tile and hardwood floors. Plus, Jim also wanted a trained parrot who harasses Toby.
Glenn Przyborski directed and photographed the campaign using 2 cameras on each shot for more editorial options. 2 cameras also gave an “insurance factor” just in case the trained animals “lost interest” after several takes. Everything was shot and edited in 4K UHD, then downsampled to 1080 for final release.
