Bob Krieger: From Super 8 to Digital

Hi y'all, I'm Bob Krieger, I'm an editor and filmmaker and I'm offended. I'm on the NOLA Scene podcast.

Welcome to NOLA. Film Scene with TJ Plato.

I'm TJ.

And, as always, I'm Plato.

Bob Krieger welcome. Thank you for joining us. No worries, it's good to have you here. We just wrapped up a session with you on your podcast. And tell the audience the name of yours.

My podcast is called anecdotes or anecdotes 2.0 because it's a continuation of a podcast or web series I did about 10 years ago, very cool.

And this is a continuation of that one.

So we're part two, this is part two of of Bob's. So in yours you went around and asked everybody how we broke into the entertainment industry and how we got started. So to hear our answers, we also had Michelle Busquet and Dave the Barber Burdick on, because Brian and I just shot a 48 film project with them and they told us how they met and how they got involved. Bob, how did you get into it, into editing and filmmaking? Wow?

Well, a long time ago, on the land, far, far away, when I was a young kid, my dad got a Super 8 film camera and I stole it from him, basically, and would go to KB. For those of you who remember K&B Drugs- that's right. Yeah, it was purple kb purple baby and would buy three minute super eight cartridges that were very small, throw it in the camera and we would make our films from that, and then I would for those kitties out there.

That's film it wasn't digital, you know film and then analog, had to get it developed super eight millimeter that's right had to get it developed and that was actually the fun thing because it only took a week. I would bring it back to K&B and they would say it'd be done in a week. And it came back in a week and I'd look at it and I'd like, okay, let's reshoot some stuff. But then editing was actually taking the film and using a razor blade and cutting it and then taping the pieces together and making the film like that. Special effects I loved science fiction, so a lot of my special effects included lasers, which was me taking a needle and scratching on the emulsion one frame at a time to make the laser go across. Oh, wow, it was horrible and it was fun and it was great. And my favorite film was a spoof of the Six Million Dollar man, which we called the Five Million Dollar Kid. I wish I still had it. It's somewhere, I think, mainly at the bottom of the Gulf, because Katrina washed it away and that would have been so horrible and fun at the same time to look at. Oh, it was awesome. But then in high school I studied just regular study, but we had a film or a video class where we actually had a two camera video studio and played in the switcher and did all that other kind of fun stuff and that was great. I mean I love that my dad was working at Channel him all the time to go behind the scenes and see all the equipment they had. And that was fantastic as well because I wanted to hit the what do they call it? The quantel. That was the graphics machine and the graphics that it made. They were cheap and chintzy compared to what we can do today on your phone.

I went to Loyola for college and was going to get a film degree and we shot 16 millimeter film. Then the best part of dad working at the TV station was that he could get me a few rolls of 16 millimeter black and white tri-X and I would throw that in the cameras that we had and would shoot, and it saved me lots of money but we'd be able to shoot a lot that way. It was great. And then from there, when I was graduating, I had a choice of following a couple of acquaintances out to California, sleep on couches and try to make it big in Hollywood or join the Navy. So of course I did the next best thing. I joined the Navy. I wanted to be a photographer's mate and make films for the Navy. They didn't want that. They wanted me to be a bosun's mate and anybody who knows about the Navy.

They dragged their knuckles on the deck and they move heavy things around.

It would have been great. No, but they basically said if you don't want to do what we want you to do, you're not going to do what you want to do. So I went next door to the officer recruiter, said I'm a college graduate, what you got for me. And he, uh, got something for you. And next thing I know I'm a brand new enswine in the united states navy and sailing in seven states.

Yep, it was so much fun and actually I enjoyed my time in the navy. Didn't do much filmmaking, trying to become a pao public affairs officer that didn't work out, but I am qualified to drive any ship in the fleet and service warfare officer. Very cool, that does be here, you know, uh, but that's all right. It looks cool and a shadow box on the wall. That's about it. But I always kept my hand in in filmmaking and editing and playing.

I remember my ship went to Japan and in one of the stores near the docks I bought a Panasonic camera which was connected to a VHS, a portable VHS recorder. And you have this thing, you wear the recorder over your shoulder, you put the camera up here, this big heavy cable connecting it, and it was great. And I bought a second recorder and put them in my stateroom on the ship and had a controller so I could actually cut edit from tape to tape on the ship. And it was great and I would take what we made and give it to the guys in the TV station on the ship and they play it, usually late at night because no one really wanted to see what I was coming up with. But we had fun with that. But you always keep your hand in, you always try that.

So, as I'm working a regular job because I'm married, I've got kids. They like to eat, they like to have a roof over their head, so that really takes priority. But I've always tried to innovate and keep up with the time. I got an old Mac, the blue iMac, and edited on Final Cut there and it was great, it was fun, and then progressed to other machines. I built a few editing machines, pcs. In the meantime. After I got off active duty and became a reservist, I stayed Navy and every place I went I always carried a camera with me, just because it was fun. Who knows what kind of footage I could get and then you edit and you play with it. But I've kind of stuck with that whole thing of filming or shooting with a camera and then coming in and seeing what I can do with it. Edit wise, I always like to have the latest and greatest equipment, but of course the boss in the house has to make me justify it and sometimes I can't do that.

That's right. I don't get the latest or greatest. You have to justify it to the comptroller.

You know how that works, but editing has always been my passion. I always love just kind of getting in front of the computer and trying to figure it out Like. I've edited a number of 48 hour film projects I can't remember how many. I mean I started when in 2009.

Seems to me that you've also won some awards editing 48.

A few, a few. Last year we had one best editor for the Grind.

That was a great film, oh, thank you. Last year we had one best editor for the Grind. That was a great film. Oh, thank you. Love that film.

We had fun with that. I work right now at a school and that school makes a lovely location kids acting class or teenager acting class so it was like what better location to do than a school and have them pretend they're school kids and it just all worked out well there. I did have one of the kids take the cards after we're done shooting or filling up a card and shooting a scene, taking that card and downloading it to a hard drive for me. So he was kind of assisted editing, which helped kind of clean things up. I did think I did spend more time showing him what to do and telling him that it's okay, you did well here, or please change that or make that. It would have been quicker for me to do it, but then he wouldn't have learned anything. And now you're ready for this year, now maybe? No, he moved off to college.

You got to get him as a freshman.

They got to come in and stay.

But I don't know how many college kids I've had.

Okay, I'm going to do something else or I got. But the idea is just to I like teaching. It's kind of what I do now. I'm a tech director at a school but I teach kids and it's just fun to impart knowledge. So when I'm editing or shooting or doing whatever it's always like let me explain what I'm doing to the people that are helping. Let me, to the ones who want to know, let me explain what's going on and they just love to kind of understand and like, oh okay, I get it. And they just love to kind of understand and like, oh OK, I get it. That's why this happens All right, and it gets a little bit more excited with how things are going.

Yeah, you know it's funny that you mentioned that about the camcorder setup, that you were using the portable. My dad was somewhat of a technophile and in the early, early 80s I always forget this part of my story when I'm talking about my love for acting and how I got into it, because when I was little we made our own films with his camera. My niece nieces were close to me in age and they would come down and stay for a few weeks during the summer and then we had some of the neighbor kids that would come as well and we would do skits and film it. My dad was traveling one time. You remember the scene from Home Alone when the mom is trying to get home and she's given all this stuff to the older couple to swap seats with her. My dad had that coming back from Japan.

A man needed a different flight and he gave my dad a really high end camcorder set up. It was two that were not much bigger than a sheet of paper and came with a bag. So you take the one side that the VHS tape actually went into portable and it had a cable. I think it was an RCA and a camcorder and, of course, if you use the remote to watch movies or whatever, it was a cabled remote, but he had that. It was a really nice setup. He had a nice tripod and we would set that up in the living room or in the backyard and, you know, make some little films we didn't edit. He knew how to cut and splice and fix tapes if they were damaged inside, but that was too advanced for what we were doing. You know we were nine, 10, 11 years old doing that. When you talked about that, it reminded me of that part of my story Makes me wish I would have stuck with it as I was growing up.

It's fun to think back about where things have gone and how things have progressed from way back when, from just film and waiting so long to get three minutes done and that's before editing To now I have this little camera in front of me, this little webcam that's shooting me and everything is going to some place online in this high quality version that we would not have been able to dream of years ago. And I wonder if the kids today shooting with their phones and doing their little TikTok videos and YouTube shorts and so on and so forth, if they will have the same fond memories when, 30 years from now, there's something even better than that available and running and going. I can almost imagine having a constellation of three, four, five little drone cameras that always follow you around and buzz around.

You get 360 footage, and so you Just tell them what you want and it'll. You know that's very possible. It'll edit it itself, no human touch, and you've got everything right there. So it's actually here.

But it's coming yeah.

And but are they going to have the same fondness for that? I mean, yes, it was a pain to wait, the waiting part was difficult. And then the editing and cutting. It's not like now where I can edit and I want to reuse a shot. I can reuse that shot multiple times, no problem, I don't care. Cut and paste, copy paste. It's all good, but in film that shot is just this little bit of film. You know this. 12 frames, let's say, or 18 frames, so it's one second 18 frames of film. I can only use it in the one spot.

There we go For the audio podcast. His camera automatically zoomed in on him. Bob felt the pressure of an actor which he's not used to. It wasn't good this is one of those.

You were beautiful, babe, you were beautiful. It's one of those AI cameras, so if you do a hand gesture, it reacts to it and says hey, you want me to do something Like nope, we're not doing that.

But I think what you're saying the painstaking way you had to edit films, the difficulty to having to wait for film that when you finally got the product it made it that much more enjoyable. Oh, it did.

We would have premieres. When we did the $5 million kid silly thing, it ended up being 12 minutes long and it was great. I can't believe how much money I put into film doing this. And we had a premiere in my carport, had a bunch of kids, a bunch of my friends who got folding chairs from their houses and we set it up like a little theater. My mom helped out in the kitchen and pop popcorn and we got sodas from the store down the street we got. Actually, I wish I was able to talk people into these things like I did there. I said, hey, do you have sodas for us that we can use for our premiere drink, you know, for free? And he was like sure, whatever, he had some expiring big shot sodas all right big shot and we have so everybody's got their, their bottle of big shot.

Oh, keep my hand out of the bottle of big shot, their little bag of popcorn, because mom went all out and bought little brown paper bags and filled them up and everybody had their popcorn. We showed the film like three times in a row Rewound it showed it, reround it showed it, and it was like the same audience no, not three audiences and it was great. It was just so much fun. My brother brother starred in it and so he was like I'm a star baby, I'm doing pretty good, I could do all this fun stuff, but it was.

I think the fun part was trying to figure out how to do special effects. Back then and I'm not talking about just scratching on the film this was a parody of the $6 million man. You know, astronaut Steve Austin, the bionic man.

We know it to those who are younger. He was in a crash. They gave him a robot arms, a robot eye, robot hands. So he was stronger, he was faster, he could see further, he could jump higher.

I think when he parachuting, or he had to punch out from a test plane or something.

I think so. Yeah, it was a test shuttle is what it was that crashed in the desert, and we can rebuild them, we can make it better, and I always thought they only spent $6 million to do this. That's pretty good. So my brother he was in a horrible bike crash. That's what we came up with. Okay, we lived in New Orleans East at the time, near the lake, so we had him riding along the levee and then going down the levee and we found an old bike somewhere that had been mangled and we threw that on one side of the train tracks that were up there. Train didn't hit it.

We didn't want the train to run over it because we didn't want to derail a train for this, which we did in my kitchen on the kitchen table and hung white sheets all over the place and kind of draped white sheets over everybody with handkerchiefs over their faces, masks, you know that kind of thing. Okay, doctor. And then we did the three stooges tool thing, you know where. Okay, doctor, I need the anaphano-phanistan and then a big pipe wrench would go in the hand.

And then you know, another kind of tool, kind of tool maybe the paint roller, all these different things are in there doing its thing. And I broke apart an old transistor radio and used the transistor boards as the computer boards and it was fun. But then to show how strong he was, he needed to lift weights. One of my other brothers had a barbell set up in the carport. So it's like, okay, how do you make it look like you're strong? Well, you lift the weights. Well, these were real weights. Okay, well, he can't do it anyway. But it just took framing. So we brought the actual weights themselves in on the board a little bit, on the pole a little bit, and had two people on either side holding the ends of the barbell and just frame those out.

And so lift, and then he just used his two fingers to lift it up and put it back down again and it was great, it worked. Everybody was like how did he do that? Oh my gosh. Then he started. Something went wrong with his leg. Another neighbor had a car with a huge dent in the fender and so we just kind of went to one side of the car where the fender wasn't dented and had him walk by it and then flipped around to the other side and had him jerk his knee into the dent and pull back.

Like, oh my gosh, I dented the car and it was easy enough just to flip the film when I'm editing. And there it was like how did you do that? And it was like special effects, but a lot of it was just during the time we didn't plan anything out. It was like, oh, look, this looks cool, let's try that, All right. And that right there just kind of brings out that whole joy of filmmaking and editing. It's like what can we do? How can we tell this story? I've just always loved that part.

Yeah, and you started young. You had the equipment to play with, and then you got deferred and then came back to the dream. I had a chance. A company came to town. My mother actually went down and paid the money for me to be in the movie and it turned out to be a scam. So that crushed me, so I think that I never thought about it. Now, later in life, the dream is coming back. I don't know if TJ's were deferred like that, but he's finding it later in life, and so many of our friends. So it's always an inspiration and hopefully we can inspire younger ones just to get out there and do it while they're young.

Oh yeah, but it's never too late.

No, it's never too late, and I wouldn't say that my dreams were deferred. I just had different priorities throughout life. I've always had a camera and a computer or some way to edit, you know, vcrs and all this, which was always fun because I'd be sitting on the living room floor with the VCRs in front of me. You know going play, start, record, stop. You know boom. How do I add in special effects? I was able to get an Amiga computer. I don't know if anybody remembers the old Amiga.

They had a card inside called the video toaster, and the video toaster was such a wonderful invention. This Amiga, a very slow computer, it worked. The video toaster card inside. You would put video into it. It would actually do time-based correction, and that means when you have different video signals coming in from different VCRs that's what it would be. Vcrs coming in, the signals wouldn't match up and so there'd be a break in the video as you tried to cut from one to the other. Well, this one had automatic correction in it, so you didn't have to worry about it, but it did all these wonderful effects, the transitions, dissolves, wipes, slides see your basics plus things they called kiki effects and those people who've ever used or seen an old video toaster, know what a Kiki effect is?

There was a girl who worked at New Tech the company that made video toaster called Kiki, and she was one of their spokespeople, you know, and she would do tumbles and twirls and things and they would use her silhouette as a transition to the next scene and it was a gimmick. It was a big gimmick but it was fun. You know, we kind of do that. You could also add in, create your own graphics using the Video Toaster's built-in graphic thing and throw graphics up there, so lower thirds, other little things like that. And it was just like an eye opener to see that, but seeing the changes as they come. There was a friend who had access to Adobe Premiere I think it was before it was called Premiere but he was able to edit video on his computer and the frame size was it could only do, of course, up to 480 interlaced, which is what normal television was at the time. And I looked at that and again it was like wait, all that is on a computer. You did that all on your computer. And he says, yeah, I did.

You needed to bring it in a certain way, using a certain kind of card, you need to have a certain kind of computer. The thing weighed like 10 pounds, and the battery lasted for at be more than 10 minutes long because of the processing power that was necessary to do that, and I was like, well, this is pretty clunky, but this is like the first iteration. What else can it do Now? Looking at the way what things can do now, it just blows your mind. There are people, though, that look at the effects and the capabilities of all these different editing systems and think this is the end all be all.

Let's see what kind of special effects I can throw into my film. Let's see what I can do with this, this actual story, and that is what's important. It's not how you get there, but that end result. Does the special effects you do, do they help tell the story, or do they take away from the story and make you focus on the special effects? Got an example for you. We did a film, good Girl for the 48-hour film project Didn't win anything, oh well.

And the story was about a girl who had cancer and died and her dog who helps her brother cope with it. You know it's a tearjerker.

We got drama.

And in one scene the boy goes to the graveyard where his sister is buried and has a conversation with her, and the dog comes and helps him and takes him home. That's near the end. Well, I looked at the names that were on the tomb and they all belonged to our director. It was his family tomb and the names we had to use in the film weren't that. So we needed to change that. So I went into Photoshop Premiere, grabbed the frame and, basically, using graphics, re-edited the tomb. So it read and we saw the little girl's name and the date she died and so on and so forth. So it updated it and that shot was only in there for about three seconds because we focused on the kid rather than the tomb. But if you looked at it you could see oh, this is the little girl's tomb, this is what that is.

And I was kind of upset because I wanted to win best editor, I wanted to win best graphics, and it didn't work because everybody thought, oh well, that's just what it is, it's no big deal, what's, who cares? We just shot it there with somebody with that particular name who happened to just die, who happened to be that girl's age. It just happened that way. But that is when special effects in editing adds to the story and doesn't take away from it. It's not the star of the show With most editing. You know, if you have a film, people come away and talk about the story, what happened, why this character did this, why that character did that, and don't talk about the editing. Then it's actually pretty successful. You know, yeah, you can say, well, I edited it and they're like okay, so you know they don't understand what really goes into it. Editing is the third rewrite of the film. I don't know if you ever heard that story before.

Second chance to direct. The second chance to direct. It's a very important thing and people seem to dismiss it but it's very difficult to pick up. But once you get it it's not that difficult really to get it, but you have to kind of work out a little bit. It becomes easier, you're able to see clearly and how things go If you have a scene and the scene has a lot of coverage, that's multiple angles of the same scene shot here and there and you do have to spend time looking at each shot and seeing which one best relates the story at that particular moment.

Which take of an actor shows their reaction that actually emphasizes what's going on in that scene and does cutting to a different shot take away from the scene or add to it? There've been plenty of times with editing. I'm looking at a scene and it's best when it's just a standard two shot and you leave it alone and let the words and the acting carry the scene, and that's a choice that sometimes needs to be made. There's other times when you're editing and you see these great shots and great scenes and great stuff that you need to just cut and get it out of there.

Okay, We'll put it in the director's cut for the director. We'll do this, but it's not what the audience wants to see. It doesn't help the story, so you have to what they call it kill your babies. You know they get rid of that Lean and mean.

That's the hard part of it.

Oh yeah, but sometimes, like the technical side in terms of cutting for the 48, we'll use the 48 as an example you have to make a film that's between four and seven minutes long and a lot of times, you know, you end up with that first cut and it seems pretty tight when you look at it and it's eight minutes, nine minutes, it's longer.

So you need to cut things and so you have to. First thing you do is you look through it and it's like what line of dialogue can be lost and not lose the story? What little action can be shortened? And then you go through where you start cutting a frame off the beginning and the end of each cut and tighten up a transition from a minute to, say, 20 frames, and you kind of move it like that and you realize, wow, that actually moves pretty good, it's pretty quick, and you're working at it. And next thing, you know you're under seven minutes and there it is. And then the director looks at you okay, we got 10 extra seconds, what can we put back in? That's when you look at him crossly and say no, and you're good, and you move on.

There's a lot of content in two minutes. When you write the way you have to write for a 48, it doesn't sound. Two minutes doesn't sound like a lot. But when seven minutes is the limit and you have two minutes, that could be a lot of dialogue, a lot of story content right there and that people don't understand. I've always said that the challenging part of a 48 is telling that whole story in a short period of time. Sometimes it's more difficult to tell a short story than it is a full narrative piece. Oh yeah.

I mean, I taught a class at school on filmmaking before COVID. Then the class ended but I had an exercise for one of the students who said oh well, that doesn't sound like it's that hard to do four to seven minutes. I'm like, okay, that's fine the class, here's your assignment. We're going to do a 30 second commercial and, of course, since these were high school kids had to tell them what a 30 second commercial was, because no one watches broadcast television anymore.

And you're going to do a product. And I looked around, we were in a library and I pulled up a book. I said you're going to advertise this book 30 seconds. I want you to advertise this book and this is what I want you to do. I want you to tell me why I should buy it and what's so great about it. And they're like 30 seconds. That's easy, that's so short. Yeah, I can do that right now. So we'll go do it. And they spent like three class periods trying to figure it out. Most were terrible, of course, and they realized at that point like, oh yeah, at 30 seconds, isn't a lot of time to get information out To tell the story.

It's all storytelling.

It's all storytelling. How do you tell the story? What can you do? And they had one kid, though, who did it 30 seconds. He showed a quick shot of him getting the book off the shelf, looking at the title of the book, and then it dissolved into a narration of what the story was about for about 20 seconds. What a great story of love and redemption, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they just kind of cut from different pictures in the book, and so he took a picture these are just stills flashing back and forth and at the end, buy it now on Amazon for $5,000 or whatever. He did at the end and it was very effective.

People were like, oh okay, I like that story. Well, that was easy. Yeah, but you didn't think about it. Think about what you need to do. How can you tell that story in that short period of time? So we did it again, another, not a commercial, but another short film telling a story, and they all seem to get it at that point. It's not about the time, it's not about how easy it is or difficult. It's about telling that story, getting that story out, a beginning, a middle and an end, and the ending is the hard part, because people don't seem to end things, they just let it go. It's always rewarding to see the light bulb come on and they get it.

Yeah. So, bob, I'm going to have to be the editor now and cut you off because we're out of time.

That's all right. That's all right. Anybody who wants to find out more about me can follow the Anecdotes podcast that's going to be released real soon. I'm on Facebook at Laughville and Productions and more on that as I get it, so be welcome. More followers, stay tuned.

And we'll link to your podcast and any socials you want below when we publish this Excellent.

Thank you so much.

Maybe, if you pay us enough, I didn't pay you enough already Got to work on that. Well, that was the entry fee to get out of the room. That costs a lot. No Wait, you got paid, don't worry about it, tj. Thank you a lot for coming, bob, it's been a pleasure. Oh, it has been a blast. I appreciate it, guys. Thanks for joining us.