Details
Category: Feature
Media: Video
Turnaround time: More than a day but less than a week
Description of story
My assignment was to photograph Jerry Stiller in Queens in front of the Costanza home used in Seinfeld. He never agreed to do a video but when we met up with him I asked to put a mic on him and that is when the fun began. Once at the house he decided to ring the doorbell to see if anyone was home. That was when it became a story.
Feedback requested
Any feedback is always greatly appreciated. I am aware of all the imperfections of this piece, there are many. Visually its a mess but I will say the story was a fun one to tell.
Gear used in production
JVC Everio (getting rid of it after this assignment)
Sony Wireless mics
You've got quite the unique story here. I commend you calling the audible here and capturing the unplanned story. What I think this needs, though, is a lot more polish. At eight minutes, it's rather long. The text tease and the fact that I'm a big Seinfeld fan kept me watching, but I think you need to get to that climactic moment of him ringing the doorbell a lot sooner. Four minutes is too long to get to that point.
His reflections on the show are somewhat interesting, but that's not really the story here. I would trim the opening four minutes to something very brief, under a minute, with perhaps one good quote. Just enough to set the scene for the real action.
Then once we're in the house, you have several nice moments between Mr. Stiller and the couple, but it's very clumsy and sometimes slow as we get from one to the other. I would have liked to have heard directly from Mr. and Mrs. Lopipero. Some quick quotes from interviews with them would have moved the story along.
I think the best part of this video is the ending. I would have cut a little bit at the beginning of his last quote, but other than that you have a nice reflective quote from him and a nice series of images, of the Lopiperos and the view from the car as it pulls away. The story would have kept my attention more if you could have kept this kind of pace in the rest of the edit.
To me, one of the hardest types of stories to shoot is where you have one subject doing one thing. In this case your subject is riding in a car and visiting a house. It's tremendously difficult to come up with a nice variety of visuals to keep a good pace in the editing and to avoid jump cuts.