{"id":1100,"date":"2014-01-11T19:39:42","date_gmt":"2014-01-11T19:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigheadamusements.com\/wordpress\/?p=1100"},"modified":"2020-07-10T01:40:12","modified_gmt":"2020-07-10T01:40:12","slug":"a-short-short-film-the-magic-beta-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigheadamusements.com\/wordpress\/?p=1100","title":{"rendered":"A Short-Short Film: “The Magic Beta Case”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The production of this short-short film was purely spontaneous: I wanted some extra tie-in between my reviews of\u00a0the 2013 doc\u00a0Rewind This!<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0 about VHS collecting and the history of home video, and my watching a Betamax tape of the 1987 film No Man’s Land<\/strong><\/a> – not the critically acclaimed 2001 Bosnian war film, but the 1987 Charlie Sheen-D.B. Sweeney suspense flick about Porsche stealers.<\/p>\n

The idea also stemmed from me preferring to make a demo video done in the antiquated style of a lo-fi 1980s promo video than a few stills to demonstrate how a standard VHS tape case could be adapted for Betamax tapes.<\/p>\n

The final product – which you should’ve seen before reading this blog – is a tongue-in-cheek poke at the banality of most industrial videos of that time, and the general need to make a product seem exciting even though The Magic Beta Case<\/strong> is really about a piece of cardboard.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d shot footage a few days earlier but hated it, so I tried a different lighting & display scheme, shooting footage with Panasonic\u2019s WV-6000 S1 \u2013 a 1985 industrial camera with a high quality Newvicon video tube.<\/p>\n

Sticking to the\u00a0Rewind This!<\/strong> theme of consumer grade videotape and its cultural relevance in an era where physical media is supposedly going the way of the Dodo, I chose to record the footage straight to VHS, after which it was dumped to the hard drive after a pass-thru Sony\u2019s GV-D1000.<\/p>\n

Besides dissolves, no special effects or colour correction was done in Adobe Premiere because I thought it would be interesting to show what a final edit sourced from first generation VHS SP (standard play) masters would look like. The wisest industrial filmmakers in the early 80s used at least higher-res 3\/4″ U-matic in those pre-S-VHS times, but there were several who used VHS because it was cheaper, and the recorders were less monstrous than the U-matic machines.<\/p>\n

What I find interesting is the realm of compatibility among the cameras and recorders: a pro-line \/ prosumer \/ industrial camera would work fine with either format, so manufacturers like Sony and Panasonic and JVC certainly knew by making their cameras compatible with other manufacturer’s recorders, it enabled a broader customer base. Many cameras not only had \u2018compatibility switches\u2019 that enabled the cameras of one manufacturer to work with the recorder of another, in terms of being to make use of the start \/ stop \/ pause features at the very least, but cable adapters (the Sony 10-pin versus their 14pin), or multiple plugs on the camera for different recorder and power connections.<\/p>\n

Panasonic\u2019s S1 is a really nice camera \u2013 the 10.5 – 126mm TV zoom lens is a beauty and captures nice details \u2013 but being a Newvicon camera, you\u2019ll notice some slight green issues when there\u2019s a clean white object in my short-short (like the cardboard insert). I assume when new, and when the tubes were properly aligned, green issues were less prominent, but maybe the Newvicon’s flaws were accepted because these tubes were apparently capable of capturing more detail in low light situations than Saticon tube cameras.<\/p>\n

In fact, if you look at the James Ferman interview segments in David Gregory\u2019s excellent doc on Britain\u2019s Video Nasties era, Ban the Sadist Videos!<\/strong><\/a> (reissued by Severin Films), you\u2019ll see a green hue running down the side of his face. My bet\u2019s that\u2019s a Newvicon tube camera (and maybe one with a misaligned tube).<\/p>\n

Moving to further making-of stuff.<\/p>\n

The credits that bookend the film were done in-camera, which is a fancy way of saying they come from the camera\u2019s own built-in character generator which superimposes text over whatever background the lens is trained.<\/p>\n

The Canon VC-50 Pro I used for BSV 1172<\/strong> has a pop-out QWERTY keyboard and can hold up to 8 or 9 pages of text, whereas the S1 \u2013 a bigger and more pricey pro machine \u2013 allows for two lines of text running<\/em> no more than 10 characters, in one side, and in one<\/em> blocky font. Often the consumer cameras had better character generators (offering different colours and sizes), as did separate add-on generators; even the pro-line Panasonic\u2019s WV-3240 has a bit more variety \u2013 but just a bit.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t get into the tedious minutia, but the way you use these primordial CG features is to count the letters of your intended words, and if they\u2019ll fit, position them accordingly. To select the letters, you use buttons on the camera that control the cable-connected VCR. The S1’s buttons allow you to advance \/ recede, move forward, save, and delete text in that one allowed page.\u00a0(In the Sylvania camera I used for the soon-to-be-completed short Liquid Puppetry<\/strong>, you can at least move the cursor backwards<\/em>.) You\u2019ll also notice that when the text pops up, the background grows a little dim, which is Panasonic\u2019s forced aesthetic.<\/p>\n

My intentions to record the narration straight to VHS were foiled because the Panasonic VCR had a compressor which cranked up the background noise so severely when there was no voice. Manual volume level knobs only seemed to appear on higher-end recorders, like\u00a0Panasonic\u2019s S-VHS unit. After wasting more than an hour, I opted to recorded the mono narration with a Zoom, editing the takes in Sound Forge before matching sections to specific visuals.<\/p>\n

Hopefully the cheesy period stock music – a sort of \/ maybe \/ half-assed soundalike version of Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You<\/a>” – gives the narration track a little ‘grit.’<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve uploaded The Magic Beta Case<\/strong> to the usual sites where you can watch it in 720p:<\/p>\n

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On Vimeo:<\/p>\n