Our Children’s Hospital spot for West Virginia University Healthcare is an award winner in the 2012 Healthcare Marketing Report’s national contest. There were over 4,000 entries in the 2012 competition. Here’s a link to the winning spot that features “Aaron’s story”: http://www.przyborski.com/award_videos/Award-WVUH-960×540.mov

We had a great 2012 and the opportunity to work with some new folks and lots of old friends. We’re optimistically hoping 2013 will be even better.

Not to be “crass commercialists”… but, we’d like you to take 5 minutes to screen our updated reel which includes some recent projects. The spots span the gambit from high-energy, effect-driven commercials, to sincere, one-on-one communications aimed directly at the home viewer.

It’s also our first reel where every spot was shot digitally… Sorry Kodak, it appears our $.65/foot, 25 year relationship is over…

“8 Track” is one of the nostalgic videos that were created for playback at the start of the concert and at the end of intermission. The house lights dim and the band begins as the video finishes. Thad Christian, senior editor and graphics artist at Phenomenon Post, edited and color graded the 90 second videos. Michael Goodis created the original sound design.

Przyborski photographed this digital project with a RED Epic at Pittsburgh’s 31st Studios. All footage was shot in an ultra-widescreen, 2.66:1 ratio. This unusual format was requested to allow the video to fill the on-stage, HD projection systems.

In 1995, Bishop Wuerl (now Cardinal Wuerl) was featured in a 35mm TV commercial, endorsing Giant Eagle’s “Apples for Students” program.  With the inauguration of Pope Francis, Cardinal Wuerl has been all over the news. Some say he was under consideration to be the next Pope.

Click the image above to replay this unique TV spot from 18 years ago…

Gateway Health Plan “No One Asks & Can’t Stop Me” :30 TV spots from Glenn Przyborski on Vimeo.

Gateway Health Plan offers “Medicare Assured” coverage to qualified residents of Pennsylvania. The multi-spot campaign featured people who have overcome their health problems and disabilities.

I’m confident in sharing that extensive pre-production is the primary difference between a successful project and hours of overtime and uncontrolled expenses. I elected to photograph the commercials with a Canon 5Dmk3. This camera’s 36mm x 24mm imager yields very shallow depth-of-field images. This keeps visual separation between the on-camera talent and the background. The 5Dmk3 also has great looking color, especially with flesh tones.
For the location spot, generator powered, HMI lighting supplemented natural daylight for the outdoor footage. For the garage scenes, the primary light source was a 1200 watt HMI through a 3′ x 3′ Chimara diffuser. Talent back-lights were LED lighting panels.

The white limbo studio spot was shot using incandescent lighting. 1K & 2K Arri fixtures were used combined with 3×3 & 3×4 Chimera soft diffusers. The BG white limbo rear wall was lit with 5K Arri fresnels. It’s very important when you shoot this type of commercial that the color balance of the light fixtures that illuminate your BG be exactly the same. Otherwise you’ll end up with a color shift from left-to-right or top-to-bottom.

The campaign currently airs in high-definition throughout the State of Pennsylvania USA.

Forbes Regional & Allegheny Valley Hospitals from Glenn Przyborski on Vimeo.

Over the years, I’ve directed and photographed literally hundreds of TV spots for medical centers across the country. This multi-hospital campaign featured similar commercials for Forbes Regional, Allegheny Valley & Canonsburg General Hospital.

Rather than using professional actors and voice-over talent, the campaign’s concept required a real doctor at each facility to talk one-on-one about the services his hospital offers to the community it serves.

Our challenge was a very tight, one day production schedule at each hospital with a limited time to shoot the on-camera doctors. Fortunately, I’ve had years of experience shooting, directing and working with non-professional on-camera talent.

We broke the scripts down to minimize each doctor’s on-camera segments. You can overwhelm “talent” if you ask them to memorize a long, complicated script. The doctors were told that they never had to deliver more than 2 on-camera sentences in each sequence. We didn’t waste time shooting copy that was intended to be covered with “B-Roll”.

Most of each production day was spent shooting the necessary, non-sync footage in and around the hospitals. Everything from intense operating rooms to patient-staff interactions were shot with a combination of HD digital cameras, including the Panasonic AF-100, GH2 and the tiny GoPro Hero2. To achieve an extremely shallow depth-of-field, the on-camera sync scenes were filmed with Canon’s new 5D Mk3. (A few of the cutaways were footage that I had photographed from previous campaigns.)

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…

I shot the commercial using a RED One camera at Pittsburgh’s 31st Street Studios. At the rear of the 31st facility is the interior of an old industrial warehouse. A crew erected a full-sized, professional boxing ring as our set. We used 4 “space lights” over the ring as a primary light source. Numerous other HMI’s and other lights were used to highlight portions of the old steel warehouse.

I used the RED for most of the camera setups outside the boxing ring. The fighter’s “punches” were shot at 96fps. Inside the ring, I used a Panasonic AF100 for POV shots from both fighter’s perspectives. All the POV scenes were recorded at 40fps to add a “bigger than life” feel to the action. For several intense fight shots, I wore the primary boxer’s glove on my right hand and punched past the lens to the actor’s face for action cutaways. In case you’re wondering, it’s hard (and very unusual) to shoot a scene while you’re punching your actor.

Senior editor, Thad Christian of Pittsburgh’s, Phenomenon Post edited the high energy spot and created the original title graphics.

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.