The Making of Ciao Chicago
by Gordon Lake
When you’ve produced more than a thousand episodes of television, it’s hard to pick a single show for a case study. I chose Ciao Chicago for this case study because it’s a good representation of what low budget Entertainment Magazine shows will look like in the future.
Ciao Chicago was a weekly series on Channel 25 covering Chicago’s Italian community. I was brought on board as an editor and eventually became the cameraman as well.
By episode 6 it was decided that there needed to be a major campaign to bring more advertisers on the show and I agreed to produce an episode that would serve as a marketing piece to solicit advertising.
In this episode I wrote, produced, shot and edited everything except the bus footage in the band story. That was shot by another videographer. I created the logo and 3d animation for the opening and did the art work for the DVDs that were sent out to potential advertisers.
Below is the breakdown and case study of that episode, “Ciao Chicago: Episode 9’.
Show Opening:
The video below is the opening. Because this episode had 8 stories I wanted to build excitement by quick previewing the lineup with the associated reporters, cutting to the Hosts and flying in the logo before going to break. I used my voice as a placeholder until we could find a strong Italian male voice as the announcer but that never materialized and my voice remained as the show opener.
Until this episode we didn’t have a show logo. So I wanted to create a logo that would be instantly recognizable as the show’s logo when seen from a distance like on a poster or a baseball cap. The logo had to have class and it had to look good flying in and out of bumpers and breaks. It took about a day to settle on the design and I built three versions hoping everyone would agree on the gold version. After about a half hour going back and forth we went with the gold.
With a gold logo in place the next decision was the style and color palette of the backgrounds, effects and transitions. I show the Executive Producer about ten different styles and he fell in love with a blue color palette and we were now set with our graphics package.
The show had two guys as Hosts, but there was also a woman (Gina) who would make a great addition to the hosting team but the personality of the guys were such that they worked well together and to add a third person would hurt the timing of the humor. To get around this Gina became the Senior Correspondent and would do a lead story as well as at least one additional story during the show. And during shows when the guys weren’t available, Gina would bet he stand-in host.
Gina would also have equal billing in promotional materials related to the show, so when it was time to shoot the packaged opening I took all three on Michigan Ave. in Chicago and shot the opening package.
In past episodes the two hosts (Pasquale and Dominic) would host the show from different locations in the Italian community like a restaurant or neighborhood. I felt we could add to the prestige of the show by hosting from in front of the Chicago skyline at night. We would then keep the reporters in the neighborhoods and put Gina in front of another night time landmark but send her to the neighborhoods in during the day for coverage of a special lead story.
The first story involved coverage of the Italian superstar Gigi Delesio’s concert in Chicago. Part of the coverage was Gina interviewing the band on the bus ride from the airport to their hotel. One problem. The person who shot the footage used the camera mike and had it set to automatic. So we heard the load bus sounds completing covering the interviews making them unusable. To get around this we would have Gina do a voiceover for the entire story, but the package would have to be tight to pull it off.
We also wanted to give Gina as close to an equal billing with the hosts as possible so we went with a split screen to give the impression that Gina and the hosts were interacting with each other live. Obviously we didn’t have a satellite or microwave truck so it took some careful planning to make it believable. I also added a ‘tease Gina’ piece to set the tone of the relationship between Gina and the Hosts.
We had now completed our second commercial break and were about to launch into the Claudia story preceded by a ‘get everyone on camera’ concert coverage piece. The goal is to get as many people on camera as possible in order to help build the buzz about the show. The crowd package was easy, the Claudia story was not.
A little background about the Gigi Concert coverage. Most news crews get to shoot about 10 minutes of a concert and use no more than 30 seconds. We had a treasure trove of footage because the concert promoter had hired me to shoot promotional coverage of the concert and allowed us to use whatever we needed on the show within reason.
When Gigi called this girl from the audience (Claudia) on stage to help him sing a song it was magical. I thought at the time if we could do a story with her it would be a great segment. The only problem was, Claudia was shy and didn’t want to do it.
After weeks of pleading our hosts Pasquayle and Dominique got her to agree to do it. Dominique was a warm and fuzzy kind of guy so it was decided he would be perfect to do the interview. We had Claudia meet us on the shores of Lake Michigan so we could get footage of her and Dominique walking along the shore with the waves coming in. The interview itself was more than I expected. It was perfect, and well worth the effort.
The next segment was a story on a Joe Dimaggio Marilyn Monroe memorabilia auction at the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago. This was the first time we covered a story that all the local media also covered. I felt we did a better job than the Chicago media but we also had more time to work on it.
Gina did the standup and reporting on this which brings up an important point. The hosts and reporters don’t have to go out and cover stories. They only need to be available to do the voiceovers and standups. Segment Producers can be used to cover and write the stories which for a show that has 6 to 8 segments, one Producer is all that’s needed. This saves the budget and makes it more worthwhile for the talent because you’re only using a couple of hours of their time per week.
The next segment is a good example of another budget saving feature. On of the other shows I produce is CityVisor.com which is an Entertainment Show that looks at the best restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, attractions and other destinations that a city has to offer. We’ve filmed over 500 segments in Chicago over the years and have stories on over 30 Chicago restaurants. So Ciao Chicago will never have to cover the Italian restaurant scene because we can just repackage the CityVisor stories.
On the Lavita story I used on of my CityVisor reporters to do the standup for Ciao Chicago using a CityVisor segment. In this piece an Italian chef is demonstrating how to make an Italian dish.
The next segment was the interview we did with Gigi. The original plan was to do a sit down interview at his hotel. But as we waited for his limo to arrive it was becoming obvious that we would be cutting it close since the concert would begin within hours of his arrival.
We were set up in a hotel room for the interview but I put a camera light on my camera and went down do the lobby with a Gigi fan who was selected to do the interview. The goal was to get a quick comment from Gigi in case he didn’t have time to do the sit down interview.
When he got out of his limo he looked beat and I told the reporter we were going to do the interview now. When Gigi walked through the lobby door I got my b-roll footage and after a few minutes of greeting people in the lobby, the promoter of the concert pulled Gigi over to us for the interview. The reporter asked Gigi did he feel more comfortable doing the interview in English or Italian. Gigi said Italian and she proceeded with the interview.
The other headliner with Gigi was the Italian Legend Mauro Nardi. He and Gigi did a song together and we put a segment of it in the show.
The final segment. We wanted to make sure the show ended on an inspirational note and the idea came from playing with logo ideas because I wanted this segment to have its own logo. I started play with this cool marble texture that seemed to have an ancient Italy feel and out of that grew the segment ‘Now That’s Italian’.
This segment would feature each week people would represented what was special about Italians. The first story was about Gina’s grandfather whose story was a perfect ending to the show.
We did a sit down interview with him and I lit him well using some extreme camera close-ups as not to miss a moment of a deep emotion. He fought for Italy in World War I, became a prisoner of war, immigrated to the US and worked until he could afford to bring his family over, eventually becoming successful.
The biggest point of this case study is not that a show like this can be produced on a weekly basis, but that it can be produced on a local level appealing to a specific audience within the confines of a limited budget.
Local television has a tendency to produce weekly shows that have simple public affairs type formats rather than News or Entertainment Magazine formats. And the reason is budgets. It’s cheaper to do studio interviews than complete packages. But I suggest there is a sweet spot in the $2,500 per episode range that advertisers can support and shows can be produced for. The internet and mobile video is were shows like these will ultimately flourish because the potential to gain international audiences for local shows is very real.
