some old skool for ya

[Kevin Dearing]

How funny!

“…One of my first movies. I bagan making stop-motion shorts in ’84 with stuffed animals and a Quazar VHS camera…”

I did the same thing just 3 years later than you!

I was in college and had a shoot coming up the following morning so I had all of the gear at my apartment. I wasn’t all that familiar with the gear so I decided to create a project to help me get familiar with it. Turned out to be a stop frame animation with my roomate’s daughter’s toys.

Since that took a while and it was like 3 am when I was done, I figured that I should stay up all night so I didn’t blow my call time at the shoot. So I woke up my roomate and we did a spoof-mercial for a fictional product “OIC” (Out it comes) a super laxitive – “Works so fast you better be in the bathroom when you take it!” – kind of a play off of the Nyquil jokes… I had my professor do the voice over for it. Man that was fun. Too bad I didn’t know how to white balance the camera at that point.

So I have one of these trips down memory lane coming up myself – lots of stuff on VHS – I still have some of my college stuff on 3/4″ (I’ll prob have to rent a player to get that converted actually I’ll probably scrap that but hold onto the tape for nostalgic purposes – you know, to show the grand-kids). I’ve got scads of Hi-8 tapes all over the place that I want to burn to DVD.. I’ve also got a bunch of Beta SP tapes all over the place that I need to convert too.. Hopefully it won’t cost me too much to do that.. But the Beta SP stuff I’d like to hold on to…

Anyway, thanks for sharing – I’ll have a look at your stuff this weekend as I clean up my office a little!

–KTFA