If your video production career is more than 20 hours old, and if you work for clients rather than your own personal enjoyment, then at some point during a session you're sure to have been asked something like: "You know so much about television ... what kind of fancy effect can you do here?" Whoa Nellie, hold it right there!

The end product of television production is deceptively simple. It's pictures and sound telling a story — irrespective of the prodigious amount of technical firepower that we have in our video arsenal. The end result that we're attempting to achieve is, of course, communication. Communication of an idea, a concept, a feeling. My 2-year-old son has just as valid an opinion of what's on the tube as I do. As he dances merrily around the living room shouting "Cookie, Cookie, Cookie ..." to the blue furry monster on the screen, that video is communicating to him. He doesn't need any special effects for the sake of special effects. That show is moving him. In fact, it's moving him all over the living room.

In The Beginning ...

The first book of video production: Genesis 1:1. In the beginning, there was the shot. You saw what you shot and there were no edits upon the face of the land. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And then, lo and behold, D.W. Griffith gave us the cut and it was good. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And on the third day, bestowed upon us from on high was the dissolve. And it was good and long. And well, that was the third day ... And then they wanted to produce "Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe" and lo and behold, wipes of all manner and kind were invented. And borders with soft drop shadows crawled across the face of the land. In 30 frame transitions. Yea, if that were not enough, frame stores were called upon, generating recursive feedback, movable rasters, Z-Axis rotation warp factors, explosions, solarization, sparkle trail matte fills. Days 5, 6 and 7 were utilized for making a graphics pass, sweetening, and VHS dupes. And it was a wrap.

Well, Lord knows that a lot of video can use a little bit of razzle-dazzle to spruce it up. We should never be afraid of going to our bag of tricks to dig out a little bit of those pyrotechnics to enhance the production. But each time, before we make one of these fancy moves, we have to think: Is it benefiting the production? Or are we doing it just because we have the capacity to do it? Often, when you've worked very hard to achieve a complex technical effect, it's difficult to step back, look at it, and say: "This doesn't contribute anything to move the show. The effect is only succeeding in calling attention to itself." Now, unless you happen to be doing a show on special effects, the last thing that you, or more realistically your client, wants — or should want — is everybody paying attention to your digital video moves.

A couple of years back, I was editing a feature film whose name shall remain nameless. Let's just say that it contained an Elvis clone, a Marilyn clone and a Buddy Holly clone. They were all in the same room at the same time along with two thugs who beat up the Elvis clone because he hadn't paid the money that he owed for his last record's production (hey, it was reality-based programming). As I viewed the long shot of the scene, I thought to myself, "That works pretty well, I like that." But since I'd been employed to edit the film, I felt that my job description required me to put a few cuts in it ... So I slaved away for 18 hours, and at the end had 183 cuts in that scene. There were reaction shots of eyebrows being raised. In between the King's words, there'd be a cut back to the hoodlums for a quick sneer of the lip. Then cut back to Elvis for a bead of sweat falling from that famous brow. And so on. Well, come morning, the director came in to look at my first cut, and I reeled up my Editing Tour de Force. He watched it through ... and at the end commented, "That's nice — but it's a bit bitty, don't you think? Why don't we put up the master and see what that looks like?" Shattered, I loaded up the master shot and he commented, "That plays. Yeah, let's use that." (As I recall, the final part of his comment was gasped out from between his clenched teeth as he lay on the ground, with me astride him throttling him around the neck.)

But in recent times I've mellowed a bit, and come to understand that the director (God rest his soul) was correct: That no matter how much sweat and time I'd put into placing those cuts, if they distracted from the content of the scene, they had no business being there. Likewise, before you reach for the button to make that next big-time DVE move, ask yourself: Does this particular piece of video punctuation that I'm about to insert help the story along, or merely distract from the flow of the message?

... That, I Can Tell You in One Word: Transition!

Now, don't get me wrong. Transitions are great things. They can magically move you from one scene to another so that the audience is unaware that you've delivered them to a totally different place. Or they can provide shock and excitement to introduce a new subject or idea.

Some examples of very effective transitions:

A long dissolve when you want to make a time transition from one scene to another and you don't want to have to maintain continuity of action. For example ... you have some windsurfers arriving in Hawaii and you have to get them off of the plane and on to the beach. You could cover the whole trip in forty cuts. You know — plane lands, they exit, walk to rental counter, get luggage, get car, enter car ... ETC, ETC. Or, you could do a nice dissolve from the airplane landing to a driving shot along the highway and then dissolve to them running out onto the beach. Simple, pretty and effective.

Or let's say that you're editing an industrial presentation for Mr. Client. It will contain many testimonials to the wonderfulness of his Product. Unfortunately, when they taped these glowing compliments, it was done in a single motel room against a pale green wall with the interviewees being rushed in and out in a scene reminiscent of a cattle branding party. Now, your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to cut several of these interviews together without the transitions looking like a magical head in a Michael Jackson video, framed by a pale green wall ... (One effective transition out of this particular mess might be to cut to a frame of white with an immediate 5 frame dissolve to the next talking head — the ever-versatile "white flash.")

Another item to keep in mind is that any transition takes a finite period of time to occur. Take this into consideration when you are preparing to make the edit. The producer says to you, "I'd like page turns between each of these interviews. Each interview will curl up and roll off the frame to reveal the next interview behind it. It'll be beautiful, just like a book." Well now, for a page turn to be effective at all visually you have to allow it 30 to 45 frames to occur. This begs the question: What are these interviewees doing while the page turn is taking place? Murphy's Law states that they will not be sitting quietly waiting for your page turn to finish before they answer the inquiry. Most likely they'll have their lips flapping, but we won't be hearing them. And as our audience wonders about what those lips were saying as they were peeled away, we know they aren't paying attention to the message that we were trying to convey. In a bad case, you may have to freeze both the outgoing and incoming picture until the peel is done and then release the freeze. In a linear online session at a small operation without multiple slo-mo playback decks, this could be tough. For a big operation, well, we just sell a bit more editing time. This page turn has presented us with a myriad of problems to solve for an effect that won't impress the audience one bit. I've heard this defended a thousand times with the line, "It shows some production value." ... B.S. It shows a lack of understanding of effective video communication.

All it goes back to is: what are we trying to say? Whatever the message is, it probably isn't "look at my page turns." Eliminating an effect that causes you both story and technical problems is normally the simplest and most elegant solution. As they say, keep it simple, right? After all, the audience certainly isn't aware that a page turn had been planned there and, guaranteed, they won't miss it.

About eight years ago we were doing the Aloha Classic windsurfing championships from Hawaii. And during editing of the various competition segments of the show, the producer kept telling me, "We've got to have a hot open, just like Miami Vice. You know, full of those hot effects." Well, I knew that Miami Vice had a hot open, but I couldn't recall what effects they used, so I taped the show. The next day, I showed their open to the producer, and pointed out that it was ALL CUTS. There wasn't one effect. Meanwhile, the finished open for our show was comprised of squeezes, peels, flips, wipes, letterboxes and key-thrus. Needless to say, it was nowhere near as hot as Miami Vice.

We Got the Beat

Every piece that you work on has a rhythm. It has a beat. Whether it has music or not, there's a beat. The dialogue has a beat. The natural sound effects have a beat ... This is where you need to aim and direct your cuts. When we go to see a band, it won't matter how good the singer or the lead guitarist are — if the drummer and bassist don't have the rhythm bed together, it's not going to be a very strong song. A common practice in too many post-production situations is to add the music last. Then, the client sits there, beating her fingers against the console, and when a cut happens to fall on a beat, she'll gleefully comment: "Well that's right on, isn't it?" You sit there and note silently to yourself, "Just imagine, if we'd put the music track down first, every cut we'd wanted to could have been on the beat, rather than just a few by sheer coincidence." Hey, most music has lots of beats and so, when you lay music underneath your edited piece ... voilà! ... the odds are very good that some beats will fall close to some of your cuts. Or essentially the same predicament happens — more often than you'd think — when the editor does meticulously edit to the music, but then someone comes up with the brilliant idea of changing the music bed to something completely different at the last minute ... Suffice it to say that proper attention to the inherent rhythm of the piece can add tremendous impact to your production.

And speaking of audio, video's sorry semi-forgotten stepchild, we can enhance it with sound effects. When doing digital video or other transition effects, add sound effects in conjunction with the move. A whoosh, whoop, zap, zing, slide, ETC. They'll add a significant amount of substance to what is essentially a few electrons being shoved across a raster.

Hand-Tailored Versus Ready-To-Wear

Probably the most powerful section of your special effects generation equipment is your keying circuitry. Keyers allow us to stack two or more images together. Keyers allow us to drop shadow, border, outline, matte, matte fill and chroma key. They allow us to create transparencies. They allow us to selectively isolate certain colors so that we can take an entire scene to black and white, except for the client's product, our hero, which remains in color. The power and flexibility of most switchers lies in the number and quality of the keyers. Their versatility is determined by where they can be placed in the stream of signal flow, from input video to program DA out.

Or maybe you want to create some truly special effects — what I like to call organic effects. These aren't effects that you call up at the push of a button. They're effects that you custom make yourself. Here are a few ideas: Try taking a white board and pouring black paint over it. Shoot it with a camera and then matte key this for a pour-through effect. Take a piece of glass and paint it black. Put it in front of a white background, focus a camera on it and smash the glass. Run this video either forwards or in reverse and use it as a key-through effect so the screen shatters and falls in shards. Drop shadow it to give the pieces depth. Or try burning or ripping a piece of black paper in front of a white background and use this video for a key-thru. This is a very interesting effect. The beauty of these "organic" effects is that no one else, even with the same equipment, can punch a button and have the identical effect that you have just created.

Or learn how to mask your digital video moves so that they appear to come from behind an object on the screen. Since we are working in a two-dimensional medium, anything we can do to add a feeling of depth to it, enhances it. If your background scene contains a doorway, mask the edge of the doorway, and then slide your DVE out from behind that mask. The new video will appear to enter through the door ... If there's a shot of a Roman column in the background, mask the column and slide your DVE out from the top so it appears to emerge from behind the column ... You get the idea. These are very simple DVE moves. But they can be extremely effective because they have an added dimension, having been motivated by the picture itself, and so are much more striking than your multi-page-split-spin-trail move, which is only there because you happen to have the button on your box to put it in. Just remember: that's the same button that 50,000 other producers have as well! And keep in mind that there really aren't any new special effects on our shiny desktop video toys. Every one has been used before. So before you use one, make sure that it's going to complement the production, rather than looking like a transition they've all seen a thousand times before anyway.

Seeing is Deceiving

Perhaps what I consider to be the most ingenious use of special effects are those which the audience is totally unaware of. Movies have been doing this since the very beginning. They've used special effects to create a reality that doesn't really exist. These effects are used in such a way that the audience accepts what they see on the screen as reality, not an effect.

Probably the most elaborate effects job that I've ever had to do was for a company which started distributing Russian cartoons in the United States. They re-recorded all of the dialogue in English, but the problem was that there were various road signs, signs on the side of buildings, signs on buses, characters reading newspapers, etc., where all of the printing was in Russian. These, obviously, had to be changed to American words.

We used every bit of horsepower that the studio had. We used dual ADOs, Paintbox, Chyron Scribe, matte camera, Ultimatte, animated traveling matte shots. It was a bear. When one of the little cartoon characters would run in front of a sign, his shadow would have to fall on the new sign, as he moved. Different parts of his body would have to mask different parts of the sign from frame to frame. All of these effects layered together had to be invisible in the final product. No one should have been aware that any changes were made. They just had to feel that it was a sign in the background that said "Pacific Coast Highway," instead of #$@%^&*.

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So in conclusion, be knowledgeable about every effect that you have. Mix them, match them, layer them, and discover new applications for them. We're on the cutting edge of new video technology, where there are exciting new effects to be designed every day. But when you go to use that new multidimensional move you've created, make sure that it moves the story along. Because if it doesn't, you'd better have the guts to make a cut and tell a better story.

© Copyright 1993, 1998; Edward Lapple. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Over a thirty year career, Edward Lapple has produced, directed or edited more than 200 TV shows and 25,000 commercials, and has won six regional Emmys as well as two Associated Press awards. He currently runs his own studio, Video General in Fillmore, California.

His essay originally appeared in the newsletter of the Los Angeles chapter of the International Television Association (ITVA).