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Originally we planned to make this documentary using only voice-over narration. But halfway through post-production, we and the network decided to add a new component: Tony Hawk as our on-air host. As a video game fan and icon himself, Tony was one of our primary interviewees for the more contemporary sections of the show. But he was such a natural on- camera —not to mention a huge draw for our target audience of young male viewers—that we all felt he would make an excellent host, too.
Tony’s involvement gave the special even more of an irreverent attitude. To showcase his talents and add production value in general, we built a custom set with a Tron-style look and feel to it. For the background, we created gigantic pillars covered in computer circuit boards and then we lit them in an effervescent blue light. In the middle of all this, we put an enormous rear-screen projector showcasing game footage in montages that complemented the subjects Tony was introducing at that time. To complete the picture, we set up classic arcade games , including a PacMan like the one that Tony used to play in his local pizza parlor.
This was a pretty complex shoot for any new host: He had to walk, read from a teleprompter, and skate, all at the same time, while the camera was flying over his head. Plus we shot all his on- camera stuff in one day! But the beauty of Tony Hawk is that he’s totally focused, and extremely determined. If you’ve ever been to a skateboarding contest, you know that these guys will try a stunt 20 times before they hit it. If Tony blew a take, he’d get right back on it. If we had a camera problem, he’d get right back on it. A lesser host would have crumpled at certain points, but he would not give up.
Finally, we decided to shoot Hawk in high-def, using a Panavision HD camera , and giving it a video look. We did that by dubbing it down to Digibeta and posting it in a traditional video environment, using the 3-2 pulldown process to translate the 24 frames per second film into a 30 frames per second video medium.
In post-production, we offlined on Media Composers and onlined on Avid Adrenaline. And we added a lot of graphics, especially with the still photography . In a traditional documentary, if you’re showing a still photo, you just put a photograph up there and pan up and down, Ken Burns-style. But since we were talking about video games , we had to give these still images a poppy, graphics-oriented look. So our graphics designer, Taka Ikari, used AfterEffects to create a swirly ’60s background for a photo of Nolan Bushnell, for example—or he’d put monetary images behind Bushnell’s photo when we were talking about how much money Bushnell made when he sold Atari. Taka would come up with graphic backgrounds, scan in the photos, and create animated QuickTime sequences that would be brought into the offline at a low resolution. Once everything was finally approved, those sequences were re-digitized at an uncompressed resolution during online. We also found this other software, Moving Picture, that allowed us to load jpegs, tifs and other graphics files into Avid, and use the software to pan around the images. We used this same software on another recent project that we helped post for Prometheus Entertainment and Lucasfilm, a documentary called EMPIRE OF DREAMS: THE STORY OF THE STAR WARS TRILOGY. We had a lot of archival images to deal with on that one and Moving Picture turned out to be a real godsend because it allowed us to pan and zoom over digital images very quickly and accurately.
Most of our music came from the Zomba library. Because we were appealing to a younger audience, we purposely didn’t use period music when talking about the old video games and the original designers. In fact, we used a tongue-in-cheek approach. We talked about how these designers were the equivalent of rock stars—cue up the heavy-metal music—and the original rock star was…Willy Higginbotham! And we showed an image of this scientist with big horn-rimmed glasses and a necktie, looking like Mr. Peabody, as heavy metal is playing in the background.
We mixed everything using ProTools. But since the games had their own distinctive sounds, we didn’t use many additional sound effects . Except whooshes. We like our whooshes.
Press Restart
After a few months of editing, we had done it—we had translated the entire history of the video game industry into the exciting, dramatic epic adventure everyone in this business has come to know and love. We also created the on-air promos for the show, and helped GSN expand its reach among the coveted young male viewing audience.
As it turns out, we were riding a nostalgic wave of interest in all these old games . Today, since the technology has gotten smaller and smaller, you can put a chip containing five of these old games into a joystick. And you can play PacMan and Donkey Kong into your ripe old age.
About Beantown Productions
You can find out more about Beantown Productions by visiting them on the internet at http://www.beantown.tv
You can also contact them via:
Alison Hill or Jill Swartz
CurrentPR
(714) 444 - 9731
Andy Stabile
CAA
(310) 288 - 4545