Symphony

San Francisco International Airport
Public Communication Project

It was 1998 and SFO was behind schedule on the construction of the International Airport. The project had strung out and the public (SFO's customers and partners) were getting restless. We were called in to produce a video that was warm, authentic and told the story of the development in an original way. The character of the jazz artist reliving his youth, and all of the musician's playing throughout the airport were fictional. The footage was shot in Super 16 on Dec. 21-23, 1998 in the midst of the holiday rush! It's strange to think of the level of freedom we had shooting all over the airport in those pre-9/11 days. The final video was so successful that SFO built a special kiosk for it in the terminal where it ran 24 hours a day for months. It's rare to feel emotionally engaged with the construction of a terminal at an airport, but there you go. An enormous amount of the impact had to do with the original score by Michael Becker which he worked on for months, and brought in some wonderful session musicians to record.