A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS….On Tuesday I wrote a post about all those cool backdrops that George Bush has for his speeches and wondered aloud about where they all come from. Today the New York Times tells us:
The White House takes great pride in the backdrops, which are created by [Scott] Sforza, and has gone so far as to help design them for universities where Mr. Bush travels to make commencement addresses. Last year, the White House helped design a large banner for Ohio State as part of the background for Mr. Bush; last week, the White House collaborated with the University of South Carolina to make Sforzian backdrops for a presidential commencement speech in the school’s new Carolina Center.
“They really are good,” said Russ McKinney, the school’s director of public affairs, as he listened to the president.
Television camera crews, meanwhile, say they have rarely had such consistently attractive pictures to send back to editing rooms.
“They seem to approach an event site like it’s a TV set,” said Chris Carlson, an ABC cameraman who covers the White House. “They dress it up really nicely. It looks like a million bucks.”
“Sforzian backdrops.” I like that. The high point of Sforza’s career so far, of course, was the carrier landing on the Abraham Lincoln:
Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush’s right shoulder and the “Mission Accomplished” banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call “magic hour light,” which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush.
Yep, it was a golden glow, all right.
