For those of you in the advertising business, this may seem like a drop in the bucket, but I am talking about local television here!
I was about halfway through my career when I had the opportunity to work with an animator who had just worked on a top video effect movie in Hollywood and his team of producers, who could sell anything to anyone.
The problem is I was working for a news station, and VFX and news station promos didn’t really go hand in hand. But it was going to be great, so we tried it.
We would soon learn that working on a big-budget Hollywood movie meant drawing pictures of little men for hours and hours at a time and didn’t have anything to do with the kind of animation we were wanting to do.
The storyboards clearly showed an 11-ton news van flying in the air and leaving a trail of magic that formed into a news logo. Cool, right?
So, we needed a green screen big enough to hold a news van. Remember, this was before everyone with a Mac had the power to animate anything. This was when graphic computers that could animate cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and had names like Hal and Henry.
So, what is close to the size of a big giant green screen? A football field. Surely the animator could take out the white line markings.
And it wouldn’t matter that the field wasn’t the vibrant green of the green screen.
Anyway, that was the first of many failed assumptions that cost us money and added up to the cost of the spot being 100K. The best part was when I showed it to my boss, and he said to me, “Karen, I’ve always wondered what a 100,000 spot looks like. Now I know!”
Not a career highlight, but a quote I will never forget. I have tried to use it in my career, but somehow, I just can’t deliver it in a way that works.
P.S. The spot was successful. It made an up-and-coming news station look big, and it was the first of many that helped us inch our way to the top. I wish I could find it to show you. Maybe someone out there has a copy?
What are some of the best quotes of your career? I’d love to hear them.