- About Przyborski Productions
- Demo 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 (1997)
- Behind-the-Scenes Prop38 (2000)
- 1991 Pittsburgh Penguins
- Barth Bartholomae (1997)
- Behind-the-Scenes Pagetime (1998)
- Frontier Telephone (2000)
- Time Capsule: GNC 1992-1995
- Glenn
- Jimmy D
- Judy
- Map
- Contact Info
- Scrapbook
My good friend and creative filmmaker, Tom Schneider has an interesting new website & blog that features various people and stories about production in Western Pennsylvania. I was honored that Tom wrote a story about me in the first edition of his blog… click here to check it out.
Tom Atkins is an amazingly talented actor who’s appeared in dozens of major motion pictures and TV series. He often plays a tough guy on the wrong side of the law. Most recently, Atkins played Pittsburgh Steelers founder, Art Rooney in the one man stage play and movie titled, “The Chief”. Tom Atkins has a great sense of humor and is excellent at improvisation.
A few years ago, Atkins was the TV spokesman for Blue Cross of Western PA. I directed and photographed about a dozen spots with Tom, including an Addy winner that featured fishing on the Allegheny River.
On several occasions, after we finished shooting the actual on-air TV commercial, Tom would do his own unique version of the copy.
Just for fun, here’s a couple of Tom Atkins’ “interpretations” of the Blue Cross scripts. They’re pretty much identical to the original scripts, but I can assure you, they’re far more memorable…
AutoZone (via their ad agency, Doner Inc./Detroit) wanted to re-broadcast a successful commercial that I directed and photographed in 2003. Back then, TV spots were produced in standard definition as most networks and cable systems weren’t accepting HD commercials.
I shot the original Duralast battery commercial in 4:3 ratio, standard definition at 23.98 frames per second. Fortunately, we recorded the original video, non-compressed on a video file server.
I went back to the 16 original scenes and removed the 3-2 pulldown which yielded progressive scan video at 23.98 frames-per-second. My son, John Przyborski, who created the visual effects for the spot, had saved progressive scan versions of each scene that included mattes or re-touch effects.
The next step was to use the program, “Shake” to expand each scene so the progressive scan video became 1080 pixels high. Finally, on a 1080P timeline, I literally re-edited the entire spot, frame-by-frame. All title graphics, such as the Coast-to-Coast Warranty, Proven Tough, and AutoZone logos were re-inserted at full HD resolution. Doner’s art department created the shaded Duralast logo to pillar-box the left and right of the screen. The original audio mix from 2003 was re-used.
You may ask, “Why the pillar-box format? Why not expand the original scenes to fill the entire HD frame?” The original scenes were framed for the standard 4:3 ratio TV format. To fill the top to bottom of the 1080HD image required a 224% expansion. To fill the entire HD screen (while maintaining correct image proportion) would require a 306% expansion. Also, by filling the left-to-right, the top and bottom would be chopped off. The “pillar-box” technique that we chose, yields an acceptably sharp HD image that’s also compatible with center-cut, standard definition TV.
The concept sounds deceptively simple… real cancer survivors sharing their stories with the home viewer. We all agreed that the TV campaign would be most effective if these non-actors could talk one-on-one, directly to camera.
At Florida’s Lynn Cancer Institute, I mounted a through-the-lens teleprompter system in front of a Sony HDTV digital camera. The prompter’s monitor was fed by a video camera focused on an off-camera interviewer. Suddenly, our cancer survivors were talking and relating to a live human face, instead of a cold glass lens.
Producer/production coordinator, Judy Gurchak deliberately kept crew size to the bare minimum so the on-camera people wouldn’t be intimidated. Black flags and “floppies” were used to block the talent’s view of equipment and off-camera people.
During post-production, I decided to cut the best thoughts together and not worry about jump cuts. We made no attempt to hide the fact that the material had been edited. I felt that once the home viewer feels engaged with the talent and their story, why introduce random side cutaways, shots of hands or other distractions.
Church’s Chicken has over 1700 locations in 22 countries. In Puerto Rico they’re arguably the most popular chicken restaurants with over 70 units.
For years, Pittsburgh based food stylist Shui Ziegler and her husband have created the food stylings for Church’s in-store menus as well as broadcast and print promotions. Przyborski Productions was brought on-board to work with Shui & Zig to create the introductory TV spot for Church’s new “Breakfast Pockets” (or in Spanish, “Pockets Desayuno”.)
set stylist Zig Ziegler sets a "hero" egg
Przyborski shot the digital commercial in John Sanderson’s studio, located in Pittsburgh’s strip district. Felipe Flores, Church’s VP of Marketing, asked Glenn to create a warm, golden, morning feel to the scenes, emphasizing the product’s natural ingredients.
Everything was shot on the RED “Epic” camera system, primarily using Glenn’s Canon lenses. For the extremely tight macro scenes of bacon and sausage, the unique Innovision “Probe II” snorkel lens was employed. Glenn feels the greatest feature of the Epic is its ability to shoot at almost any frame rate up to 300fps. The falling tortillas were shot at 240fps.
The commercial was edited and mixed by the Kamikaze Group in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. They also created the original music track. The ad is currently airing in HD throughout Puerto Rico. In case you’re hungry, the closest Church’s Chicken to Pittsburgh is in Akron, Ohio.
Usually, I’m shooting nice things… like attractive people eating food while smiling. This project was completely different.
John Brabender (BrabenderCox) is one of the country’s top political media consultants. For over 10 years, he and I have worked together on many successful TV campaigns. John rarely thinks anywhere near the box, much less inside it.
John gave us less than a week to put together this project. Fortunately, I remembered scouting an old abandoned manufacturing building in Pittsburgh for a previous TV campaign. My producer and production coordinator, Judy Gurchak and I re-scouted the location and it was still available.
I set up most of the shots to take advantage of a wall of windows that lined the North side of the building. This became my primary light source, supplemented with 1200 and 2500 watt HMI’s. We used smoke machines to add atmosphere and distance to the scenes.
Growing up in Florida, I hate shooting in freezing cold weather. For the entire shoot day, our set temperature was less than 50ºF. We couldn’t use heaters because they quickly dissipated the smoke. Our shoot day was overcast and snowy, so we knew we would loose useable window light by 4:30PM.
I used a motorized, 7′ slider for the marching feet scenes and all ground level camera angles. This slider can smoothly move 25 pounds of camera.
I photographed everything with a RED Epic M using the standard set of RED primes including the 300mm telephoto. Every scene (except the fall) was shot at 30fps for playback at 23.98.
Thad Christian at Pittsburgh’s Phenomenom Post did an amazing job editing and grading the 90 second spot in less than 2 days including numerous effect shots. Michael Goodis handled original sound design. Steve Parys worked his butt off as my assistant director. Without the talents of gaffer, Ted Wiegand and scenic designer, Rich Schutte none of this would have been possible in such a short amount of time.
PLEASE: No political comments… I’ve uploaded this commercial to show an interesting assignment and production treatment… it’s not intended to be a political statement.
A few years ago (before HDTV) I directed and photographed a project for General Electric Information Services. Michael Doherty, Stan Muschweck and the late, Joe Baird of The Birmingham Group, created the original concept. The 3 minute video, titled “Reaching Beyond” was created to open GEIS’ national convention. The concept was to show how a person’s ability, imagination and creativity “grows” over their lifetime.
We cast 3 young girls, a teenager, and 2 adult women who could all have been the same person at different stages of life. The original concept called for each of the actors to be drawing or painting their version of a tree. We hired 2 local Pittsburgh artists to “pre-draw” and “pre-paint” multiple versions of the various stages of artwork. During the shoot, these same professional artists helped the actors do a believable job of working with pencils, water colors, charcoal and oil colors.
I shot all the footage with my Arri 35BL4 equipped with Zeiss super-speed lenses. The 35mm film was then transferred to tape in Nashville by colorist, Brent Clenny at Filmworkers Club. The music was composed and performed by Sue Hartford at Euphoria in Pittsburgh. I edited the long-form video at our Pittsburgh facility.
All of us at Przyborski Productions were happy to learn that our commercials for Boca Raton Regional Hospital won a “Platinum” award for broadcast media in the 2011 MarCom Awards. This is the third year that Boca Raton’s marketing team, headed by Tom Chakurda, has called on Przyborski Productions for the medical center’s on-air TV marketing.
MarCom is sponsored by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals. The mission of the MarCom Awards is to honor excellence and recognize the creativity of marketing and communication professionals. The MarCom Awards is a creative competition for corporate marketing and communication departments, advertising agencies and industry freelancers. The MarCom competition has grown to the largest of its kind in the world with about 5,000 entries per year. A look at the winners shows a range in size from individuals to media conglomerates and Fortune 50 companies.
CLICK HERE to screen several recent Boca Raton Regional Hospital spots, including the latest MarCom Platinum winner.
Back in the 90′s, 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.
I live a few miles north of downtown Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In our region, it’s extremely rare to have a mid-October snowfall. I woke on Saturday morning to unexpected, falling snow that was over an inch across. It was so beautiful that I grabbed one of our high-def cameras and shot a few scenes around my home.
In Pittsburgh, we were lucky. Our snow melted and was gone by early afternoon. The entire Northeast U.S. didn’t fare as well with a massive 6 to 12 inch snow storm.
