Two Traditions

Middlebury College of Vermont celebrates a precarious tradition.

Fifty years ago a Middlebury athlete escorted Butch Varno to a football game for the first time. Varno, then a young teen, was disabled by cerebral palsy and could not attend on his own. Now in his 60s, Varno continues to attend Middlebury football and basketball games, escorted by generation after generation of varsity athletes in a ritual of compassion and love.

Senior Producer Ben Houser wondered how to do visual justice to the tradition. How to convey its timeless values? How to convey its inherent fragility?

On a drive through Vermont, Houser and his wife stopped at an antique shop. They spotted an old film camera, a Keystone 8mm, made in the late 1930s by a now-defunct Boston company. An idea took shape.

“No real film existed from the 60s. I thought, if I can shoot something in old film, and something in HD, and place the two next to each other, it would give a sense of the passage of time, visually,” Houser recalled.

Houser bought the Keystone. Film for it no longer is made, but he found a hobbyist in California who owned an old supply of ASA 50 color film – tiny spools in a metal disk. The Keystone has settings from ASA 10 to ASA 40. He bought five rolls of the ASA 50 color.

“Those old cameras don’t have iris control (which regulates light), so you hit-and-run and you get whatever image you get,” Houser said. “I got the ASA 50 knowing I could fix a little of the brightness or darkness in post-edit.”

Wielding the Keystone, Houser and production assistant Megan Anderson shot the nursing home where Varno lives, a campus archway, and the football field.

“It was hard – I had never used anything like that before,” Anderson said. “Luckily I had a cameraman – Jim Greico – who knew how to work with it.

“Each roll of film was only about eight minutes, and you had to crank the camera, and it would only roll for seven or eight minutes. So you roll, and crank it, and then roll and crank it again. You were constantly getting one shot and stopping and trying to reset.”

At a climactic moment honoring Varno at Middlebury’s homecoming ceremony, film ran out.

“It’s not something you can easily replace,” Anderson said. “You have to go somewhere out of direct sunlight and reload and re-string it through – it took like 15 minutes.”

Developing the film was the next hurdle – and not a small one.

“Old 8mm has two sides to it – when you run it through the first time, you take it out of the spool on the bottom and put it back at the top and run it through again,” Houser said. “Because if you think of an old film strip, think of two images next to each other, and that’s what old 8mm is.

“We had to find a guy who could take that film, split it down the middle, so now there’s two separate rolls. The rolls are 25 feet long, so you get 50 feet out of it because it runs through twice.”

Houser found a small studio in Seattle that pulled off the feat. The developed film then was sent to a New York studio, where the images were transferred onto digital beta tape. With that, Houser completed the journey by converting the digital beta into the 4x3 HD format used by E:60.



“It took five states – Vermont, California, Washington, New York, and Connecticut – to get 10 shots,” Houser said.

He thinks it was worth the effort. The new ‘old’ film will augment two authentic shots from that era culled from a Middlebury College promotional reel.

“Artistically it made a lot of sense because this is a 50-year-old tradition,” Houser said. “It shows you what it would have looked like in 1960 if he (Varno) had walked on the field, versus today when you see the pretty HD and slo-mo cameras.

For Anderson, the Keystone connected her to her own tradition of film technology. She said it heightened her empathy for producers of that era.

“It made me realize how lucky we are that it’s so easy and how hard it must have been for them,” she said. “It made me feel sorry for them.”



posted by Steve Marantz, November 3, 2010

The Shower Scene

Film fans of a certain age have ‘Dr. No’, when Ursula Andress emerges from tropical surf, bikini-clad as Honey Ryder, to the delight of Sean Connery’s James Bond.

Football fans now have E:60’s shower shot – 25 seconds of water pouring over the bare torso of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ running back Maurice Jones-Drew.

“Unique and different,” producer David Salerno said.

It was conceived at an initial interview, in Jacksonville, in which Jones-Drew talked about his late grandfather, Maurice Jones. He told Salerno and reporter Lisa Salters that his mental preparation for games involved relaxing under a shower and thinking about his grandfather.

“We’ve got to shoot that,” Salters said.

Jones-Drew consented. The shot took place in the locker room at De La Salle High School, Concord, Calif., where he starred early in the decade, known then as Maurice Drew.

Some viewers will be disappointed to learn that Jones-Drew stripped only to his shorts.

“We had the shower lit, and had one mini camera, and one Varicam to shoot the 60p slow-mo stuff,” Salerno said.

Salerno had Jones-Drew strike several poses – head down, hands in front of chest, hands pressed against the wall – as water sprayed and tumbled over him.

Over the sensual imagery Salerno laid Jones-Drew’s voice, “There is one thing I do the night before a game...turn on the shower and turn the lights off...put my head down and try to relax...and the only thing I think about is him, man, and everything he done for me...”

Salerno led with the shower shot. It was a triumph of access, but that was not Salerno’s first consideration.

“It was more of an artistic thing,” Salerno said. “The dim lighting and the moodiness – you don’t see it that often in stories about athletes.”



posted by Steve Marantz, October 26, 2010

From Finish to Start

Newton Marshall’s journey took him from Jamaica to Alaska, from reggae to frostbite, from obscurity to E:60.

         Producer Mike John’s journey was the opposite – minus the obscurity.

         “Mush Mon” is the story of the first Jamaican to pilot a dogsled in the Iditarod, the 1000-mile Anchorage to Nome race.  It is a light-hearted story, a variation on ‘Cool Runnings’, about the Jamaican bobsled team of 1988, and as inspirational.

         To tell it, Johns and reporter Seth Wickersham, a native of Alaska, started near Fairbanks, where the 27-year-old Marshall trained last February.

         “You think of him going from Jamaica to Alaska, but we did the main interview in Alaska and the follow-up in Jamaica,” Johns said.

         Johns shot Marshall on a rural expanse owned by Lance Mackey, the four-time Iditarod champion who was hired by sponsor Jimmy Buffett to teach Marshall the ropes. The weather was milder than expected.

         “Zero degrees,” said Johns.

         To shoot Marshall on his dogsled, Johns put a camera in a sled towed by an all-terrain vehicle.  But when the ATV braked, the sled kept on going.  Wipeout.

         Minus a smashed camera battery, Johns soldiered on.  He shifted from an outdoor shoot to a heated indoor location.  Oops.  His cameras fogged up from condensation.

         “They needed at least 45 minutes to warm up,” Johns recalled.

         The crew flipped on the light switches in Marshall’s cabin, adjacent to Mackey’s house.  No light.  Broken generator.

         They used natural light from a window.

         “Given the humble nature of the cabin that kind of limited lighting worked,” Johns said.

         Marshall, raised in poverty with little education, proved to be a strong character, after he overcame his initial shyness.

         “Our first day around him I was a little concerned that he wasn’t going to be as expressive as you would like to tell his own story,” Johns said. “But this was a kid stuck in a cabin in Alaska for four months – after a couple of days with him – in some ways he was anxious to talk to people.  Once we sat him down we couldn’t shut him up.”

         When the race began early in March, Johns was gone.  Footage from the race and interviews at four checkpoints came from Iditarod organizers. 

         Johns finished in Jamaica, where it had begun for Marshall.   He shot the back-story about how Marshall came to be in the race, as well as Marshall’s reflections on his 12-day mush and 47^th place finish.

         In the telling Johns and Wickersham managed a bit of story magic.  Marshall had related that at his lowest point, in the second week, he had sung to himself – a popular Jamaican tune.  Wickersham asked him to sing it for the E:60 camera. 

         Marshall offered up his front porch version of “All Will Be Fine”, by Buju Banton.  Johns transitioned from Marshall’s song, at the Jamaican location, to the Buju Banton studio version, over a shot of Marshall guiding his team across a frozen trail.  

         Johns called it “a device for emotional resonance.”  He could have said it was a device to tug at the heartstrings, or to make the spirit soar.   In the end, “Mush Mon” did both.

posted by Steve Marantz, October 22, 2010

Roundtable: Not A Con

Production assistant Max Brodsky senses something amiss. The E:60 roundtable segment on disgraced former basketball star Rumeal Robinson is into its 12th minute, and has yet to yield what Brodsky needs.
As the cameras roll, Brodsky signals Executive Producer Andy Tennant, at the table with six others, and mouths a question: “If he’s not a con man what is he – without giving away the details.”
Tennant nods, turns back to the table, and breaks in. He references a comment by reporter Lisa Salters, who earlier had called Robinson a “con man”.
“Go back to what Lisa said,” Tennant says. “If he’s not a con man, what is he?”
Reporter Jeffri Chadiha re-focuses. He ponders Robinson, convicted in September of eleven federal counts from a sham business deal, and of Robinson’s adoptive mother, who lost her Cambridge, Ma., home in her effort to help him.
“What he is...he is a guy who had a lot of success as a basketball player, and got in way over his head, and once he was over his head, didn’t know how to reach out for help. He wasn’t humble enough to go to the people he loved and ask them to help him out.”
Chadiha says more, in a tidy and poignant summary. Brodsky has enough.
“Cut”.
The 10-person production crew and the roundtable participants relax. Brodsky shakes his head. He is 25, with a thick shock of brown hair, three-day stubble, and wry sense of his work.
“Sometimes they forget that it’s about the big themes – not about the details,” he says.
The shoot is into its second hour, at a meeting room called the “garage”, at ESPN the Magazine, East 34th Street, Manhattan. Roundtables for three of the six fall shows – 15 stories total – are being shot on a weekday evening early in October.
The roundtable is a simulation of a news meeting in which producers and reporters discuss the news value, characters and themes of stories.
When E:60 was conceived by ESPN Content Development early in 2007, the roundtable was not unanimously embraced - some feared it would appear “phony”. But advocates believed if it was unscripted, and captured the spirit of a real news meeting, it could work.
Fast forward to October 2010. E:60 is the first show to migrate from Content Development to Production. Now in its fourth season, E:60 features the roundtable before and after most segments – as a preview and postscript.
It reaches for big themes, as Brodsky insists. It also evokes casual banter, and a thoughtful and irreverent take on sports.
At the table, which is not round, are Tennant, along with coordinating producers Robert Abbott and Michael Baltierra, and, by turns, reporters Chadiha, Salters, Jeremy Schaap, Rachel Nichols and Seth Wickersham, magazine editor Gary Belsky, and columnist/commentator Bill Simmons. All are made up and miked.
Only Tennant, Abbott and Baltierra are familiar with all of the stories. The others know about their own, but hear about the rest with fresh ears and opinions.
Brodsky directs the crew, which includes an overhead camera, two handheld cameras, and a dolly camera that moves on a semicircle of tracks. Production manager Sue Friedman hovers at the periphery.
Tennant acts as a moderator – initiating and guiding discussion. Typically, a reporter explains his or her segment, and others chime in with comments, questions and wisecracks. The conversation, at its spontaneous best, mirrors an actual newsroom.
Typical is the discussion about Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez.
Nichols pitches it as a story about a second-year quarterback facing high expectations because Jets coach Rex Ryan “loves to talk and draw attention” and because Sanchez is the “first Hispanic-American playing quarterback in a market like this” and because of Sanchez’ popularity with celebrity/gossip media which taps into the cultural legacy of Broadway Joe Namath. Whew.
Schaap disagrees – he thinks Sanchez is not burdened with particularly high expectations because the Jets aren’t built around him the way other teams are built around their quarterbacks.
“He’s in a position where he doesn’t have to be a great player,” Schaap says.
Nichols demurs – she points out that after the Jets lost their opener he was pilloried. She goes on to say that he draws more attention because of his USC pedigree, which draped him in the glamour of “Hollywood”.
Simmons points out, as a Los Angeles resident, that Sanchez was not as big a deal as two USC stars that preceded him – Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush.
“That’s like following the Beatles – nobody is going to win in that situation,” Simmons says.
“I think he did quite well,” Nichols says.
The discussion veers – with ribald humor - towards Sanchez’ sex appeal. Abbott mentions that the Jets’ off-field problems – the DWI charge against Braylon Edwards, and the harassment of reporter Ines Sainz, are making Sanchez’ job more difficult.
Sanchez is up against a phenomenon, Nichols explains, in which opposing defenses get ahead of second-year quarterbacks.

“We got behind the scenes to see how he will hold himself together for this season,” Nichols says.

At this point, 12 minutes into the Sanchez discussion, Brodsky has what he needs – and probably too much.

         “Cut.”

         The participants wander off to snack on pizza and Friedman’s brownies, save for Simmons, who taps furiously on his Blackberry, absorbed in a white-knuckles Twitter drama.


Soon the roundtable will enter its fourth and final hour. Shoulders will sag, eyes will glaze, and voices will drone. The dolly camera will de-rail. Brodsky will shrug and help put it back on track. The dolly – and the show – must go on.
On the seventh floor of a deserted mid-town building, a custodian leans in the doorway to watch the making of journalism and entertainment.
“Roll ‘em.”

(Posted by Steve Marantz, October 12, 2010)

E:60: More B-Boy from E60 on Vimeo.

E:60 B-boy teaser

E:60 B-Boy Teaser from E60 on Vimeo.

The Prime of E:60

TRAILER: E:60 Bhopal India from evolve. J EDWARDS on Vimeo.

E:60 shooters Joel Edwards and Bill Roach went to Italy in August – for a story on model/skydiver Roberta Mancino – and India in September – for a story about children who play cricket on the toxic fields of Bhopal.

         Before they left they acquired new equipment that – they hope  - will deliver those stories with greater impact.

         The just-out Zeiss CP.2 prime lens, Edwards said, “offer serious upgrades to image quality, aperture control and dynamic range.”

         Filmmakers long have used older versions of prime lens. Now, television is using prime lens as it gravitates towards digital cinema.

         In Italy the new lens were used for some specialty and scenic shots.  In India they were used, when possible, on the A and B cameras, for interviews, scenes, and scenic b-roll.

         Prime lens creates a “huge” depth of field, which leaves some of the image out of focus, and draws the viewer’s attention to what is in focus.

         For a shooter, the prime lens poses a challenge.

         “The big difference is that it slows everything down – it makes you think out your shots,” Roach said.  “You can’t zoom – you have to walk closer or change lens.  It’s a very methodical way of shooting.”

         Said Edwards: “It's all about mood setting and image control when choosing a lens - so depending on the creative content of the scene - we'd use the best matching equipment setup accordingly.”

         Shooter lexicon is rich with arcana such as iris ring, flare suppression, aperture, and t-stop.  My personal favorite is “bokeh” – the out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a lens.  But viewers need not know any of that to appreciate the next flight of E:60 stories, which starts October 5.   You can just watch.

         Posted by Steve Marantz, Sept. 23, 2010

          Here’s the link to Zeiss:

http://www.zeiss.com/compactprime