Nickelodeon: Big Day Out (2 min. 2001) Directed and edited by Lester Alfonso. A contest promo for a Nickelodeon Asia Channel broadcast shot in Malaysia.
Day 14 of 360 videos from the archive. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to deliver a creative contest promotion spot for the Nickelodeon Asia Channel. You will take a plane to Kualalumpur. You will direct an all Malaysian cast and crew. You will feel incredible pressure to pull this off. You will take the film back to Canada in a can. You will ask your friends to rip off the theme song to Mission Impossible. You will then edit everything together and wait for approval from the head office. The approval comes but then you have to supervise the expensive color-correction that the corporation is paying for.
Saturation
(the following is an excerpt from my upcoming book Mark as Unread, coming soon.)
The year is 2000. Jeff Rustia is my boss. He’s with me at the $750 per hour colour-grading session for the new Nickelodeon commercial I just directed and edited. We are in a dark room with lighting recessed into the walls to optimize the viewing experience. The room is called the DaVinci room. On the screen, it’s a shot of three kids and a Mom standing by a swimming pool in Malaysia. Palm trees are in the background.
The colorist adds a bit of blue to the shot, the picture of the group now looks clean and a bit cold but stylish; it’s a stylish look. “What do you think of that look?” Jeff asks me.
“I like it,” I say.
“WRONG!” he snaps. “Never! If you’re going to work on a Nickelodeon spot, it’s always going to be warm and yellow. Never blue! Do you understand?”
“Okay,” I say.
“It’s always sunny in Nickelodeon,” he says, standing up. “Now, make it sunny in this commercial and you’ll do a good job. I’m going to lunch.”
“Okay thanks, Jeff,” I say.
The colorist hears all of this and says nothing. Seated in front of the screen, he continues to work with his stylus and tablet. He looks up; he looks down. The hue palette on his computer screen is a spherical rainbow; he points his cursor over the yellow. Click. The picture on the screen, a frozen frame from the commercial, flickers. The overall yellow in the picture intensifies.
It’s old-man-pee yellow, now.
I sit in the cool dark of the DaVinci room with my notebook. I write. Always turn up the saturation for Nick.
The colorist breaks the silence, “How’s this?”
I look up at the picture. The word “urine” comes to mind. I resist the urge to say “It looks like piss.” Instead, I say “Can we try turning it down ten percent?”
The colorist clicks. “How’s this?”
“Turn it up to five percent,” I say.
More clicks. “Check this out.”
“Okay, how about two percent down?”
Click.
“That perfect.”
“Saving the setting,” he says.
Okay, thanks.
Bing!
P.S. If you’re liking these daily posts, perhaps you can consider becoming a monthly donor for a year or making a one-time contribution. It would seriously help a lot. Your money goes directly into supporting an artist committed to continually become the best version of himself. Thank you so much! Much love, LA