NEW YORK - Editor Robin Burchill at Slingshot (www.slingshotpost.com) recently completed work on a humorous spot for Verizon Wireless Broadband out of agency Lowe Worldwide. The :30 "City Water Workers" takes place at a construction site on a busy city street, with workers digging deep into the pavement with traffic stopped.
The foreman and crew wait patiently for the go-ahead to continue digging as an exec slowly downloads a pipeline schematic. Looking at his watch and the time it's taking to download, he hesitantly makes the decision to continue work. As the backhoe strikes pavement a geyser of sewage spurts into the air. The narrator asks, "Problems with long wireless downloads?"
Burchill cut the project on an Avid Media Composer running V.10.1 software. According to Rachel Reinhardt, who served as assistant editor on the project, the spot was shot on film and was transferred to Digital Betacam at Nice Shoes for ingestion into the Avid. Reinhardt says that while a spot like this follows a storyboard, they can end up with as much as 45 minutes worth of footage to sort through. The team becomes very familiar with the different takes, she notes, and that helps when doing the edit.
Eric Kaye Music provided the track for the national spot and Fluid handled the sound design.