The Mini Mogul of TV Graphics

In the heart of old Hollywood, not far from Sunset and Vine, up the street from venerable Paramount Studios, near editing facilities and post-production houses and the sorts of companies that will rent you a wind machine or an artificial fog blower, Marc Karzen has achieved mogulhood.

Karzen is head of Karzen Communications, a broadcast design house--which is to say, a company that makes things that appear on television: commercials, title sequences for programs and any other sort of graphics a TV show might use.

Granted, Karzen’s studio is small, about a dozen people in half as many tiny offices strung along a first-floor hallway in the old Technicolor building.

“Well, I’m a mini-mini-mini-mogul,” Karzen says, looking around. Nevertheless, Karzen and his designer colleagues are able to do with a few thousand dollars’ worth of Macintosh personal computers what entire television stations could not do just a few years ago, no matter how much money they spent.

Karzen can compete in the biggest of the television industry’s big leagues because of incredible advancements in computer and software that take pumped-up versions of your ordinary word-processing, Web-surfing Macintosh computer and turn them into special effects and TV production systems that rival--in some ways, surpass--the million-dollar computer editing facilities the industry is used to dealing with.

Karzen, who was born in Louisville, Ky., but went to high school in Beverly Hills, started his career as a photographer. After dropping out of the Sorbonne, he shot fashion in Paris, then went to New York, where he photographed album covers for the music industry, among other work.

But nocturnal television watchers may have unwittingly seen dozens of his photos: Karzen spent about 10 years working for the former “Late Night With David Letterman” show, where he did the entertaining shots that came on screen just before and after commercial breaks.

Computer compositing and editing technology pulled Karzen out of photography and into the hypermedia of television. “When I saw these tools and how they could take all kinds of things--film, stills from photography, sound--and put them all on one machine, I made my decision to go into broadcast production.”

When Karzen meets with one of his advertising clients to discuss a television commercial, for example, he can create a “motion test” rough video of the piece in a few minutes instead of using the handmade storyboards that are traditionally used to demonstrate concepts.

“It completely changes our business,” says Karzen. “Now clients can come in and see exactly what we’re doing.” Most important, however, the client can order last-minute changes without causing the Karzen production team members to fall on their knives. “The ability to have control over the work is every creative person’s goal,” he says.

The biggest shocker is how new all this technology is, says Karzen. “Sometimes, my designers will complain about how long it’s taking for the computer to render a 40-layer composite animation,” he says. “I have to remind my young designers [as if Karzen, at 39, is ancient] that two years ago it wouldn’t have been possible do more than three layers.”

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BioBox

Name: Marc Karzen

Age: 39

Title: Creative director

Hardware: Apple Macintosh 9500 PCI, Genesis and Power Computing’s Macintosh clones

Software: Adobe’s Photoshop, Premier, Illustrator and After Effects

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Freelance writer Paul Karon can be reached at pkaron@netcom.com