Welcome to Big Head Amusements… Plus!

In the next week, I’ll be posting a podcast interview with writer-director-editor Schnüdlbug, who details the genesis and creation of his 3D short film Roach, as well as its limited release on VHS. I’ll also have the first review of a once popular camcorder from 1992, but let’s get into what Big Head Amusements Plus is all about, and where I’d like to take it over the long term.

The idea to create an informative and ongoing blog and media channel on reviewing vintage video gear from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s has been gestating for a number of years, although this channel’s concept isn’t ‘Look at this neat old thing from 20-40 years ago,’ nor 10 minute, fast-cut montages.

My mandate is to review common and unique video gear from the consumer, prosumer, and broadcast realms from a practical stance, which includes how to use it within a contemporary digital workflow and ultimately integrate the blended analogue and digital results in a creative work – be it experimental, narrative, or purely for fun.

Rough ideas for this channel began soon after the lockdown in 2020, when I signed up for Daniela Saioni’s online solopreneur class and support group, Coffee Break MBA.

Full disclosure: I am an affiliate for Daniela, who is a personal friend of mine, and I’m also an original Coffee Breaker. If you register for her programs through my link, I receive a commission which is a way of supporting this blog + media channel.

The subscription group that originated on Facebook was ostensibly for anyone keen on using their unique working and creative experiences to craft a variety of online ventures and survive the pandemic with a minimal financial hit, and rework their respective ventures into a new side gig, if not a new gig altogether, and extricate themselves from their former in-person or remote-controlled day job.

The subscription group that originated on Facebook was ostensibly for anyone keen on using their unique working and creative experiences to craft a variety of online ventures and survive the pandemic with a minimal financial hit, and rework their respective ventures into a new side gig, if not a new gig altogether, and extricate themselves from their former in-person or remote-controlled day job.

With the cost of living, housing crisis, and job market still in what one can call politely ‘a state of flux,’ from a personal stance, the CBMBA group and this channel are a means to focus on a genuinely positive creative and brain-massaging pathway – or put slightly differently, yanking oneself out of a deep trough-like rut.

The Gear That Started It All

For some context on my interest and use of vintage video gear, I have to flip back to when I was looking for a way to capture the innards and daily workings of what remains a rare bird: a classic bricks & mortar video sales & rental shop.

The subject was Toronto’s Bay Street Video, the city’s – and arguably the country’s – largest video store, and between 2012 and 2017, after my shifts had ended, with the help of now Product Manager Mark Hanson (no relation), I filmed and edited the experimental documentary “BSV: Your Friendly Neighbourhood Video Store.” The footage came from several 1980s tube cameras, but the main device was a Canon VC-50 Pro, a rebadged Panasonic Saticon tube camera from the mid-1980s, with some extra bells & whistles.

The early posts and photos detailing the making of the short are still on this website [see comments for links], but come January, I’ll have further info on the doc and its availability as a digital download, and on tape formats that’ll include VHS, and yes, Betamax.

Most of the video gear I’ve gathered in the past decade+ flows between consumer grade, prosumer level, and top-tier professional broadcast. These once firmly delineated borders began to blur when value-added features and higher build quality were somewhat shared between each of the three product tiers.

As users, collectors, and artists can attest, there’s great pleasure in using something deemed obsolete or old, and giving it a new purpose – something I found pretty consistent with artists I interviewed in my sporadic podcast series ArtScopTO.

Whether it was learning an old craft and using arcane paints, seeking out handcrafted paper, antique still cameras, or fixating on mermaids and applying bold B&W brush strokes, or embracing chunky gear with knobs & patching cables into a workflow that to most people would sound peculiar – these artists enjoy the highs from moving their ideas through unique discovery and creation processes that could be arduous, eccentric, adventurous, and deeply rewarding.

Let me spotlight a personal example of a process that is non-linear, and rewarding: take audio from a podcast interview, EQ it to loud harsh levels, then send the corrupted audio into a video colorizer, overblasting the colour levels with a standalone video processor from the mid-80s, then send the hot signal into a CRT vectorscope from the 80s, and film the twisted forms that gyrate to the shifting hot colours with a Hi8 camcorder from the 2000s, and finally digitize the footage, layer the tweaked images in Adobe Premiere as distinct tracks, and render the footage with the edited and cleaned up audio source.

The final result was posted on my Instagram and Vimeo channels to promote my conversation with the composing team of Amin Bhatia and Ari Posner, and their scores for the CBC TV-Netflix series Anne with an E.

The teaser video was very fun to craft, but in terms of being thematically or metaphorically tied to the subjects touched upon within the podcast’s discussion as well as the visual elements in this recent adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s period Anne of Green Gables novels, the connection, was… nil.

Perhaps because I was the kid in grade school who operated the Bell & Howell 16mm projector for class screenings, I’ve always been fascinated by the way sounds look, such as the wavy lines on a strip of 16mm film that make up the optical audio track which a sensor in a projector reads, and translates into voice, sound effects, and music.

One day in junior high school, my science teacher, Ernie Walker, brought in an oscilloscope which he had rescued from the trash, and in spite of dents, it worked fine. When he spoke into a connected microphone, we saw a bright green wavy line that rippled and bulged in sync with his voice – an amazing sight that I never forgot.

Artists’ fascination with audio-triggered squiggles goes back decades – “The Color of Sound,” Robert Long’s lengthy and detailed article in the March 1971 issue of High Fidelity Magazine traces composers who crafted works designed to be performed with something called a color organ – whereas at our beloved National Film Board of Canada, Norman McLaren produced a series of shorts that still fascinate: his 1951 3D gem “Around is Around” used oscilloscope waves, and in the 1949 short “Begone Dull Care,” McLaren and Evelyn Lambart’s hand-drawn lines and colours evoke the cascading notes and rhythms of Oscar Peterson’s music.

And although still part of a mandatory repair kit to test electronic signals, voltages, and audio, to me, the oscilloscope – especially a CRT oscilloscope – is the greatest toy ever invented for adults. When you speak, the lines move; when you sing, the lines move, when you play music or send deliciously horrific noise into an oscilloscope, the lines really move. And when it’s an X-Y display, sound explodes; to quote a term frequently used by an ex co-worker to describe florid jazz solos, when things really move, you’ve achieved serious “wigglitude.”

Other reasons for this Blog + Media Channel, which I’ve branded, with extra simplicity, as BHA+, is that for many newcomers to vintage video gear there’s an unfamiliarity with:

1 — How some of these things work – Not technically, but in a practical, user-oriented sense.

2 — How to make them function with or without the now very obsolete necessary components and add-ons.

3 — What are some of the stylistic and practical benefits to using older video gear.

With respect to the last point, vintage VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, Video8, Hi8, minidv and big brother HDV camcorders are used by some videographers for concert, music videos, weddings, and video art instead of exclusively using camcorders or phones with pristine 4K resolutions; a #hi8 hashtag search on Instagram shows many examples of the format being embraced by creatives and the curious from several generations.

Even dinophones from 10+ years ago have better optics, auto-focus, auto-stabilization, colour, gain control, and battery life than from the camcorders1990s and 2000s, but standard definition and tape-based camcorders do offer a look and experience and obvious novelty that are unique; and using them may also project a giant flipped bird at cellphone brands whose makers spend a fortune telling the masses Old is Bad, and Getting New is a Must.

VCRs and camcorders do two simple things: they record and play back. The only thing required is power, and tape-based media (although there are some clever digital alternatives).

Camcorders have a simplicity that differs from cellphones: there are no operating systems, no EULAs, no firmware updates, no disruptive missed calls, no unsupported apps, no data limits, and no contracts with the outrageously monopolistic telcos that dominate the Canadian cellphone industry.

Ahem: Please allow for a slight digression.

In Canada, we have a grotesque monopoly, and pay among the highest cellphone fees in the world. (Please see the CBC’s 2023 breakdown of Canada’s circumstances in “Why are Canadians’ cellphone bills higher than other countries?”) The Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission, our federal regulator, tends to bend over and allow the giants to penetrate and dominate the national landscape, because at this stage they’re not only Too Big to Fail, but Too Big to Fight and Control.

For a country that was once regarded as the most wired nation for telecommunications, even in densely populated urban centres, the lack of competition has ensured the telcos will continue to have a captive consumer base, and there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about it – and they know this.

Ahem: Please note the end of this digression.

So…

When considering acquiring or having just nabbed some video gear, some of the questions you might have include:

How do you connect a camera to a computer for digital capture that fulfills either basic or professional grade needs? How do you power a camcorder when its proprietary battery has dried up and there are no identical substitutes? And what proprietary connector allows you to output video from a particular camcorder model from a particular brand that had a tendency to create new connectors, and to seemingly drive us crazy?

Why do the belts that power tape loading and playback / record mechanisms go bad? What is interlaced video, and how can you make SD footage look as best as possible on a budget? What was the ‘Great Rotten Capacitor Debacle of the 1990s’? And can some of those affected, doomed, and dying cameras and VCRs have any value as unique analogue glitch-making gear before they go dark and become doorstops?

These are a few of the questions I aim to answer both in blogs and video featurettes.

Another reason for this channel is to inform users and the curious as best as possible about their devices, because the knowledge base that once flowed between prior generations is disappearing.

This problem isn’t restricted to video gear. In a 2022 post on their YouTube channel, Skylabs Audio weighs the pros, cons, and misconceptions of recapping vintage audio gear, even if it still works. See around 9:05 mins. into the video for their take on when and why recapping is worth considering:

Unless you used certain cameras, formats, and recorders during their prime, or have a knack for trouble-shooting, repairing, and restoring, what one learns often comes from hands-on use, as well as info gleaned from online sources like YouTube, or service manuals that have been archived at archive.org, Manualslib, and the odd educational institution whose media division still retains helpful How-to’s and important documentation.

When my lousy, rotten, beautiful looking, badly designed JVC S-VHS sour lemon of a VCR (model HR SC1000U) was giving me trouble, the more technically challenged version of 1990s Me could drive to Accutech at Van Horne Plaza, and get it working (for a while); or I could take my Pioneer CLD-3090 laserdisc player (apparently designed and built on a Monday or Friday) to Argo Electronics on the Danforth and get it running again for less than $100. These shops disappeared 30+ years ago because as the gear got smaller and cheaper to buy, it was also made cheaply; and instead of being easy to repair, it was easier to toss, and buy a newer-better-cheaper model on Boxing Day.

The shift to digital also nearly killed analogue audio formats, and like LPs during the meteoric rise of CDs, many people stored away, sold, or outright dumped their collections, as filmmaker Alan Zweig documented in his 2000 film Vinyl.

See 43:57 mins. into the doc where journalist Geoff Pevere pours his once-prized platters into a dumpster. It is a moment that brings neither joy nor freedom – only heartbreak:

There is also a correlation between original LP pressings that avoided such tragic fates and are now held in high regard (and value) and the electronics of the 70s and 80s which were junked or scrapped, and of which far less working examples are easily available, especially post-pandemic, after more affluent lockdowners kept themselves sane by using mounting disposable income to nab vintage toys.

With vintage video gear, be it consumer, prosumer, and especially professional broadcast, working examples have also become tougher to find (especially for reasonable prices), as basements, sheds, lockers, and costly storage facilities used by companies are increasingly purged, and their contents sold for scrap metal, or junked.

The movement of re-homing and repairing these abandoned, orphaned, forgotten electronic gems has to gain more momentum to manifest serious changes, and it’s a topic I’ll frequently revisit, because some of the audio and video gear I’ve collected and was gifted was waiting to be crushed and shredded and / or curbed, and most of them work just fine, or require minor to modest repairs.

My chief contact for vintage gear has been Hamza Mughal, who specializes in saving and re-homing gear for clients, collectors, and archivists, and he’s also associated with the newly minted Canadian Museum of Broadcast Technology, which seeks to preserve professional broadcast gear for archiving legacy formats, as well as educating current and future generations of once top-of-the-line broadcast gear that used to cost more than a car, if not more than half the cost of a house.

In future posts I’ll showcase some of the audio and video gear that was saved from destruction and I now use quite regularly, and illustrates the nonsensical policy by many e-cyclers who will not sell functional, repairable, or parts machines that contain zero personal information to anyone.

In the home video business, Disney created a false sense of scarcity by regularly taking films out of circulation to manufacture an unnecessarily high demand for classic titles that should otherwise remain perpetually in print; the nomenclature was later upgraded from putting titles on moratorium (‘On Hold’ for a once conventional 5-8 years) to the now deservedly shuttered ‘Disney Vault’ – which was a cartoonish embellishment of ‘On Hold,’ but for an indefinite time period.

The increasing scarcity of vintage gear – of which e-cyclers share significant blame in Ontario – not only drives up prices of existing gear, but ensures the priceless knowledge to repair isn’t broadly passed on to new generations; how can anyone learn if there’s a highly limited supply of gear to get hands-on experience?

And the paucity of regional or local repair hubs makes it harder to get gear repaired without brutal shipping fees, and a waiting time of many months.

So… My long-form, aspirational mandate for BHA+ will encompass the following:

1 — Reviewing Vintage Video Gear: this includes tube and CCD cameras, mixers, special effects generators, time base correctors, character generators, video & audio processors, and some of the accessories designed to make one’s adventures in home video a little more robust.

Coverage will also address the common quandaries of the connectors, cables, and power supplies one needs, as many manufacturers had their own proprietary designs which included plugs, adapters, and batteries that no other brands used, and were sometimes abandoned by the original brand as well.

2 — How-to’s on Integrating Vintage Gear and Analogue Footage into a Creative Workflow: I’ll test and compare methods of digitizing, rendering, and archiving, and using analogue-crafted elements for video art. Workflows include a blend of analogue and digital, such as Firewire, component, and SDI to Final Cut Pro and Premiere and DaVinci Resolve.

3 — Using What One Learned in Assorted Short-Form Projects: narrative and non-narrative, experimental, music videos, etc.

4 — Glitch Videomaking: the community of video artists is substantial, and because my budget for buying some of the custom-built Eurorack modules or hacked vintage gear is virtually nil, and because I have no skill in creating or modifying circuits, my palette involves weird workflows with devices, with a special fixation on cameras and VCRs suffering from rotting capacitors. It’s glitch-making on a budget, so to speak, with raw rotten footage bounced between hard drives, videotape, analogue processors, and eventual layering in software like Adobe Premiere.

My Vimeo has a sampling of some of the vintage gear used for glitch effects in short works and tests for workflows.

Many offerings via BHA+ will be free, such as the written & audio versions of the blogs, teaser trailers of test footage, and podcast interviews. In a few weeks, once the channel’s Patreon is fully set up, for paying members there will be a few bonuses, such as the complete test footage showing day & nighttime filming, both interlaced and non-interlaced for SD footage. Other possible bonuses being considered are offering layers or video tracks of glitch videos using both functional gear and gear slowly rotting to death from bad capacitors; and for CRT enthusiasts, interlaced versions of the test videos and glitch footage.

I’m developing the channel in gradual stages to ensure it becomes a major endeavour for myself, and a helpful resource for filmmakers interested in using vintage video gear in their work.

Financial contributions will also help cover more detailed camera tests; taking time off from the day gig to research and create; renting a co-working space so there’s more flexibility to craft blogs, podcasts, and edit videos on-the-go; and eventually hiring an assistant to help haul & set up heftier gear and accessories (especially big ENG cameras) at diverse locations.

Coming Tuesday December 3rd is the aforementioned podcast interview with writer-director-editor-composer Schnüdlbug, where we discuss the making of his short film Roach, which he released both digitally and on VHS – the latter containing both the 3D and flat versions of his post-apocalyptic sci-fi tale. Part of our roughly hour-long conversation includes gathering the components for a VHS release – sourcing and acquiring the tape stock, getting the 3D glasses, and custom packaging.

Prior to posting the audio and visual versions of the podcast, may I suggest checking out @schnoodlevideo, his Instgram feed for sample work, which also includes podcast interviews with musicians & composers as well Roach, which can be viewed for free.

And like my recent podcast interview with Spookey Ruben, there’s both an audio-only podcast version of this Blog via Libsyn and other fine streaming services, and a Visual Version on BHA’s YouTube channel featuring what else – audio-triggered images adapted from a vintage B&K 1470 oscilloscope and a JVC GR-60U VHS-C camcorder with rotting capacitors :

Thanks for reading,

Mark R. Hasan
Publisher, BHA+ / Big Head Amusements