So, you're a good photographer (better than me, I'm sure of that). You spend a lot of time perfecting your art, and of course you want it to be seen. You've got some stuff out in the world — on the Web, maybe even in galleries and books. What next?

Well, how about television?

I'll show you how to make a compelling piece of video from your still images, make it fit TV broadcast standards, and get it shown on TV — with a potential audience of millions — for free.

Sounds like a late-night huckster, right? But it's really possible, thanks to the magic of digital technology and the openness of public access television. My movie-from-stills was beamed to more than a million homes in Southern California last year.

Even if you don't want to go the final step to get your stuff on the enchanted box, you can simply output your video to a DVD to give away or sell, or put the video on the Web. I'll cover the TV handoff in the second half of this article. In this part, we'll learn how to make the movie.

The Need To Make a TV Show

But first, I should address the aesthetic question: why showcase your art on the boob tube, the lowest common denominator of American culture?

I hate TV. It has so much potential, but most of it is nothing more than blank food tubes selling bits of plastic crap and fried cheese to other blank food tubes. I usually finish my TV-watching day by yelling at the screen, "STOP LYING TO ME!" Then I hit "Off" on the remote and toss it across the room.

However, I spent the last five years making films and writing books. Eventually, I felt like taking a break from the pressure of making something great; I just wanted to make something cool. I wanted to make something that would take about a day, starring my cats and my wife (the lovely and talented Debra Jean Dean). Something I could make "in house," literally. And I didn't care if it made money, but I didn't want it to lose much money.

Interviewing Fuzzbucket McFluffernutter, one of the stars of my TV show.

As a musician, I found something else intriguing about TV. I've noticed that most of the information is actually contained in the audio, not the video. I spend a lot of time working on the computer with the TV on as background noise, and if I pay attention, I can follow 70% of whatever's being told without looking at the screen. So I decided to base my show largely on the power of the audio.

I decided to name my show Stink Fight — Radio on TV. (Stink Fight is my blog. And why not name my show after my blog? I cross-promote everything I do, and besides, it's a memorable name.)

I also decided to make my show mostly still photos, since I didn't own a video camera at the time I started to do this. I could have gone out and purchased one (for about 300 bucks), but remember, my mission statement included not spending money.

The trailer for the show will give you a good feel for the techniques we'll be discussing today. My friend London May (who loves the show) described it as "looking at someone's scrapbook while listening to someone else's phone conversation."

There are also some ten-minute (the longest YouTube allows) chunks of actual shows on my YouTube channel, Kittyfeet69. While you're there, check out my feature film DIY or DIE, which I've mentioned here before.

Turning Stills into a TV Show

I start by collecting my images into a folder. I copy it, because I'm going to be making a lot of changes to the files, some will render the images unrecognizable, and I may want to use the unaltered photos for something else later.

I name the copied folder something descriptive like "SFTV - EPISODE ONE -UNPROCESSED IMAGES." Then I make a new empty folder called "SFTV - EPISODE ONE - PROCESSED IMAGES."

I set up a batch automation in Photoshop to fix the levels of the photos — usually brightening them a bit — and make them NTSC safe.

NTSC Safe or Sorry

"NTSC safe" is a slightly reduced color range (a.k.a. "color set" or "color space") that looks good on TV sets. Non-NTSC-safe video looks really blown out and crunchy on TV. There is a lot of non-NTSC-safe video on cable access channels, and I didn't want my art to be among that junk.

It's not just a matter of looking good. Non-NTSC-safe video, particularly if it's non-NTSC-safe whites or yellows, can leak into the audio channel of the broadcast. Many times on cable access channels, they'll throw up a mostly white title card and you'll actually hear 60Hz hum the entire time the card is onscreen.

(If you're in a country that uses PAL, and your show will never be shown on NTSC sets, you can skip making your images NTSC safe. PAL has a wider range of colors and can display your images correctly without this step.)

I just set up a batch process script in Photoshop and run the NTSC Colors filter on all of my images.

Accessing the NTSC-safe filter in Photoshop.

I do assorted creative manipulations on some of the photos — filters, invert to negative, etc. But not many. Most of the photos I just crop artistically, then re-crop to DV size using the Photoshop crop tool, set to 720 x 480 pixels.

I do all my cropping and manipulations before I color correct for NTSC. Color correcting should be done last, because otherwise, some of your manipulations may take your images out of NTSC-safe color space.