Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
This story from May sweeps 2005 dealt with a serious issue – whether or not cashiers even bother to glance at your credit cards and your ID to make sure they match – but was written in a humorous, attention-grabbing way. I originally put some lively and maybe just a little bit silly music on the spot to reinforce the fun angle, but when it aired it had a far more serious music bed that seemed to strain against everything that the spot was trying to do visually and in the script. This is a "producer's cut" with the more light-hearted music bed that didn't air.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
This story from May sweeps 2005 dealt with a serious issue – whether or not cashiers even bother to glance at your credit cards and your ID to make sure they match – but was written in a humorous, attention-grabbing way. I originally put some lively and maybe just a little bit silly music on the spot to reinforce the fun angle, but when it aired it had a far more serious music bed that seemed to strain against everything that the spot was trying to do visually and in the script. This is a "producer's cut" with the more light-hearted music bed that didn't air.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
