"Where Did the Graduates of Ridgemont Go Next?"

Another one from the pre-digital vaults...

From my Vimeo description:

I wrote, edited, and performed the corny voiceover for this magazine piece, as part of one of my high school tv production courses.  The manager of a local video store let me come into the store with a garbage bag, which I proceeded to fill up with tapes to use as source clips in this video.  He only insisted that I give him a copy when it was finished.  

The video limitations are due to generational loss, as the well as the effects of copy protection, and the fact that everything is sourced from VHS.  Again, this was edited analog style, deck to deck, with 3/4" video.  No DVDS and no digital editing for several more years.

The Real Fun City - '69

My aunt and uncle recently located some old 8mm home movies and had them transferred to video.  In that cache was a reel apparently shot by my late father in John Lindsay's New York, or "Fun City," as it would come to be known thanks to a much-ridiculed Lindsay soundbite, sometime in mid to late 1969.  Dad would have been 21 then.  Theater displays for Easy Rider (released in July '69) and Popi (May '69) and a news ticker reporting on "Kennedy's auto accident" give us a pretty concrete idea of when this was photographed (likely July).  I can't tell exactly where all this was shot, but there are some distinct Harlem locations such as the Apollo (James Brown!) and a block of apartments that reminds me of similar shots in Ashby's The Landlord (a film shot primarily in Park Slope, Brooklyn).

There's a humorous streak that I can detect in this reel, which jibes with my dad's personality, as I remember him.  And, I sense an appreciation of day-to-day life and interesting faces that I think was passed down to my brother and me, manifested in our shared passion for the photographic arts and the impulse to document things through those mediums.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this film is the way the camera captures the faces of the people--many times the subjects engage with the camera, whether to smile or duck away (as in the case of a Hasidic man).  In other words, it's as if the act of filming and being filmed is a pretty big deal, even to hardened, seen-it-all New Yorkers.  It may be that people weren't so accustomed to being filmed or taped, as video cameras were years away and I'm guessing even 8mm cameras were not so commonplace.  I'm assuming the cost of shooting even on Super 8 would have been fairly costly due to the expense of blank film and then the processing and development of the film.  In any event, my dad managed to pack quite a bit into his 6+ minutes seen here.  A few seconds were lost, unfortunately, to some ugly video noise that occurred during the film-to-video transfer.

The Armies of the Night

My obsession with trailers and The Warriors started young.  This, like the earlier videos from my recently-unearthed archive, was edited in my high school television studio with now-antiquated 3/4" video decks, sourced from the original Paramount laserdisc of the film and a VHS dub of the basic cable edit (for the edited "Did we lose these fucking clowns or what?" line).  I have no excuse for the rather inadequate voice over.

RCA Selectavision CED front cover

CED back cover

"A Universe of...Heavy Metal."

Was going through my "archives" and found this old  Heavy Metal trailer that I edited in high school to celebrate the film's then-upcoming, inaugural release on home video.  This was edited the old-fashioned way with two 3/4" video decks.  The video is sourced from a cable television broadcast sometime in the '90s.  Keep in mind this is very pre-Final Cut and pre-HD so quality is far from pristine.  Music is by the great Elmer Bernstein and the narration is by voice-over artist John Leader. The audio comes from my 12" promotional copy of the 1981 Heavy Metal radio special, dubbed "The Ultimate Illustrated Radio Special."