Scenes from a County Fair

On September 22, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

I live in the City of Pittsburgh. Our company is in the city. Most of our clients and ad agencies are located in cities across the state. It’s easy to forget that Pennsylvania is mostly rural farm country.

Once a year, my wife Carol and I travel an hour and a half north of Pittsburgh to Meadville, Pennsylvania. It’s the annual site of the Crawford County Fair, the largest agricultural and livestock exhibition in the state. For an entire week, kids and adults from all over Northwest Pennsylvania show off the best looking animals they’ve raised. 4H members and others take pride in their sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, goats, ducks and chicken. Every exhibitor hopes to win a prize and the bragging rights to having raised a “best of show” animal at the Crawford County Fair.

I call this video “Scenes from a Pennsylvania County Fair” because every week in the summer, scenes like these repeat themselves in rural towns across the state and throughout the country. It’s was a hot, sticky 92 degrees at the fair but everybody enjoyed walking the fairgrounds, eating junk food and catching up with their old friends.

This video is a compilation of 1080P footage I shot in 2008 and 2011. It’s a salute to the hard working people we sometimes take for granted…

Executive producer, Jim DeVincentis & Coach Don Nehlen

For 20 years, retired WVU Football Coach Don Nehlen brought the WVU Mountaineers from obscurity to a powerhouse in the Big East Conference. Thanks to Nehlen, WVU has one of the best college football stadiums and training facilities in the country. His athletic leadership abilities have been missed in Morgantown since his retirement. You know you’re appreciated when the road to Mountaineer Stadium is named Don Nehlen Drive.

Several years ago, Nehlen’s life was saved by triple-bypass heart surgery at West Virginia University Hospitals. We had the pleasure of filming Don as he told his story for an upcoming WVUH Heart Institute commercial. It’s always fun working with the marketing team at WVUH and agency, Fahlgren Advertising. Stay tuned… I’ll post the commercial as soon as it’s finished.

American “Pop” Artist, Burton Morris

On May 3, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

Director, Glenn Przyborski and artist, Burton Morris

Just finished shooting an internet video project with Burton Morris, one of the country’s hottest artists. I love his energetic, vivid, fun style of unique “Pop” art, which is a tribute to artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Although Burton now resides in L.A., he has family and professional ties to his home town of Pittsburgh, PA. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Burton started his career as an art director at several major Pittsburgh ad agencies.

Burton Morris has created major works for CocaCola, The Academy Awards, Heinz, the Olympics, Absolut Vodka and hundreds of other corporations. Although he’s an internationally famous artist, Burton Morris’ is also one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet.

He just completed a fun project for Eat ‘n Park Restaurants. Burton created his own original art to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Smiley,” Eat ‘n Park’s corporate cookie icon. This summer, Burton Morris’ original artwork will adorn t-shirts, coffee mugs and other items that are sold in Eat ‘n Park’s chain of over 80 restaurants.

Sorry, I can’t reveal Burton’s original “Smiley” artwork, ’till it’s unveiled in June!… stay tuned!

Eat ‘n Park’s Strawberry Pie TV

On April 28, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

I used Panasonic’s new AF100 to shoot the latest HDTV campaign for Eat ‘n Park, a Pittsburgh based chain of restaurants. In one 10 hour shoot day, we had to set, light and stage a sequence inside the company’s test kitchen. This included several tasty food shots of strawberry pies. The second half of the day was used to film “customer testimonials” and customer interaction with country singer and company spokesperson, Sarah Marince. (Sarah just celebrated her 21st birthday!)

The shots inside Eat ‘n Park’s test kitchen were lit with 3, 1200 watt Arri HMI’s located outside the kitchen’s windows. To create a warm feel of early morning sunlight, we put CTO gel on the HMI’s. The interior fill light was from 12″ x 12″ daylight balanced LED panels. I manually set the AF100’s color balance to 4700K to keep the warm feel without going too yellow or orange. Most of the kitchen scenes were shot from a Fisher 10 crab dolly. For the pie cutaways, I mounted my AF100 on a small, homemade tabletop dolly with skate wheels. I used my Olympus 14-35mm F2 lens for the wide and medium wide shots and an older Canon 85mm F1.2 FD lens for close-ups.

A few of the in-restaurant scenes were filmed from the Fisher crab, but for most I used a Manfrotto mono-pod. This created a more spontaneous and unpredictable feel to the back and forth dialogue. Most of these scenes were shot with a EF series, Canon 24-70 F2.8L lens, wide open at F2.8. All the in-restaurant footage was lit with HMI’s outside the restaurant and LED panels and white bounce cards inside. We exchanged all the warm-white CFL bulbs for 5000K lamps.

The second portion of the video is a movie theater ad that plays between shows in hundreds of theaters in Western Pennsylvania. I shot this simple on-camera delivery spot at the end of our shoot day.

S&T Bank spot featuring Jerome Bettis

On April 21, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

I used Panasonic’s new AF100 HDTV camera to shoot this commercial which features former NFL SuperStar Jerome Bettis. With the exception of the airliner cutaway, every scene was shot at 1080P using Canon FD series lenses. I shot the Airbus 319 airliner cutaway in the pouring rain using my smaller GH-2 camera. The spot was fun to shoot and the folks at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe, PA and Spirit Airlines from Ft. Lauderdale were very accommodating. Jerome Bettis always arrives on-set with a great attitude and gives 100% to the project. The commercial will air on numerous stations and cable systems in Western Pennsylvania.

Pittsburgh based Elias-Savion Advertising is S&T Bank’s advertising agency.

Shooting in Florida

On April 21, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

Producer, Judy Gurchak dining at JB's Boca Raton, FL

Just got back from Florida where I directed and photographed a new commercial for Boca Raton Regional Hospital’s amazing orthopedic services. We had a great crew from Miami who primarily work on the popular show, Burn Notice. Pittsburgh based, assistant director, Rich Schutte made the trip with us. We shot continuously from 6am to 4pm! I’ll post the new spot as soon as its edited.

New Technology HDTV Cameras

On April 12, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

Przyborski shoots with Panasonic's new AF100 HDTV camera

The biggest trend in commercial production is to create images with very shallow, film-like depth-of-field. This “look” was easy with 35mm movie film. As a general rule, the larger the film frame or imaging device, the “tighter” the depth-of-field and more selective the focus. This contrasts with previous HDTV digital cameras that achieved sharp focus throughout the entire frame.

 

Although I love film and have shot over 2,000,000 feet of it… today’s budget for a typical spot doesn’t have the luxury of $10K to $20K for 35mm film stock, processing, HDTV transferring and sync-ups.

Using “film-like” shallow depth-of-field to separate actors or products from a scene’s background can now be achieved with new, cost-effective cameras from Sony and Panasonic. They use large scale digital imagers that approximate the size of 35mm film negative. Since these cameras record to solid state memory, there’s no added size, weight or expense related a tape mechanism.

I recently shot a series of commercials with Panasonic’s new AF100. I love the fact that all my Canon and Nikon 35mm lenses work perfectly with this camera. Plus, it will shoot 1080P, true slow-motion at 60 frames-per-second. I don’t have a lot in common with James Cameron, but we both agree that professional cameras need to be smaller and lighter.  Technology marches on…

Time Capsule: GNC TV Spots ’93-’96

On March 17, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

Here’s a 4 minute “mini time capsule” of GNC’s early TV advertising. General Nutrition Centers had an amazing period of growth and profitability in the early 90’s. During this time, TV Advertising helped GNC realize it’s first quarterly profit as it went public for the second time.

From ’93 through ’96, Przyborski Productions produced most of GNC’s network TV spots. We introduced their “Gold Card” and many product lines that are still in stores today.

All the commercials were filmed in 35mm, then transferred and edited on 1″ videotape. By the end of 1993, we were editing on D2 composite digital. (In the 90’s, everything was standard definition.)

Compared to what we produce today, most of these old commercials are dated and a little “corny.” Saturday Night Live even did a comedic parody on GNC’s “Colon Cleanser”, titled, “Colon Blow.” Eighteen years ago, sophisticated computer graphics were in their infancy. The stock music GNC used also dates the ads. The 8 commercials in this video were selected from several GNC campaigns.

Scenes from an AirShow

On September 13, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

Each year, the 911th Air Wing of the Air National Guard sponsors “Wings Over Pittsburgh” an air show that features military and civilian aviation acts from all over the country.

Even if you’re not an aviation buff like me, it’s a great time to get out and enjoy the sunshine. The second day day of this year’s event took place on Sunday, September 11th, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on America. (I’ll never forget 9/11/01. We were shooting a commercial in Jay Verno’s studio the day the Towers fell. We didn’t know if we should continue shooting or just go home…)

The sky was threatening all afternoon and everyone expected weather delays. As it turned out, the only delay was caused by the President and Air Force One as he departed from giving a tribute at the Flight 93 Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

I thought the most interesting aerial visual was a modern F-16 jet fighter flying in tight formation with a classic, World War II vintage, P-51 Mustang.

This video is a short collection of scenes from this year’s event.

Special Effects for Arena Football

On January 14, 2011, in Uncategorized, by Glenn Przyborski

This BrabenderCox, Arena Football ad began airing right before Christmas. Since then we’ve had several emails and phone conversations asking how it was done. The interesting thing is that many of the scenes aren’t either video or film… they’re a series of still photographs, blended together to form a moving sequence.

At night, Pittsburgh is not a very bright city. To create the super luminescent “glow” of the city at night. Glenn Przyborski shot many of the scenes as 1/2 to 1 second time exposures. Using an intervalometer attached to a modified Panasonic GH1 camera, Glenn shot approx 300 digital exposures per scene. Using After Effects, these sequences of digital still images were frame blended, re-sized, then converted into 1080P high-definition video.

Phenomenon Post, visual effects supervisor, Thad Christen and digital graphic artist, Danny Johnson painstakingly rotoscoped the various buildings and objects to create multiple traveling masks. These masks allow the lightning and storm footage to replace the sky and create the illusion of various lights being turned off. The moving blur of the running football player was an actor filmed in slow motion on green screen using a RED One camera at WQED’s studio.

An effect driven spot is greatly enhanced by sound effects. Michael Goodis created original sound design and other audio effects that help “sell” the visuals.