The play(s) (are) the thing – Northside drama DVDs revisited

I burned the completed 13-minute “1981” segment of PDF Level 2 to DVD tonight (via the dip-a-toe-into-the-analog-pool method I described earlier in this blog entry), and had ample space left on the disc. Since I hate to waste disc space on that silly a scale, I thought I’d have a go at a transfer of the troublesome VHS tape of the Northside High drama department’s production of “Up The Down Staircase.” As it turns out, there’s even a helpful slate at the beginning of the tape nailing this down to the January 14, 1989 performance.

That’s just about the only thing helpful on the tape, though. Since it uses a very crude means of cutting back and forth between two cameras, this tape is simply a mess. Every time there’s a “camera cut,” there’s a huge jump in the tape – it looks like the tape is physically broken. On a lark, I decided to run this through a gadget that I don’t plug in too terribly often these days, a Sony XV-D300 Digital Video “Adaptor” (yes, it’s spelled that way on the unit itself – good job, Sony!). This is an effects gadget that originally came with a high-end Hi-8 camcorder that Sony marketed around 1990, but it has an incredibly useful undocumented feature: if you put it in “strobe” mode and then speed it up so that it’s taking every other frame, it does two things:

1. “Filmlooks” video – at the cost of lowered resolution; the XV-D300 is very useful, but since it lowers picture quality, it’s a “last-port-in-a-storm” piece of gear.

2. Stabilizes video – incredibly useful, and so not what the unit was designed to do, but it does it. It captures tracking, tape jumps, and even copy protection, and digitizes them. They’re not erased, but they become part of the picture, helping to diminish the effects somewhat.

Now, you’re probably no Gibbs, and I’m certainly no Abby, but I’ll try to translate this to non-geekspeak for you: in the days when these tapes were originally made, these “jumps” in the video would be copied – and intensified – onto the duplicate tape…hence, even if anyone else out there has a copy of UTDS, it won’t be of any help (in fact, it’s almost certainly in worse shape than the master).

With this device, the “jumps” are merely artifacts in the video; the audio underneath the jumps survives intact (not the case with the old tapes that I copied for everyone back in the day). In a few places, though, the original tape “jumps” badly enough that my equipment registers no signal at all – it momentarily goes to color bars for about a second, in fact. This only happens a few times, but…ouch.

I also noticed, to my horror, that whenever I put this thing together 20 years ago, the master was recorded at the 6-hour EP speed; I’m not sure if the same happened with the master tape of Fame, but it probably doesn’t help the stability of the tape in the case of UTDS. All I can really say in defense of me-20-years-ago is that obviously, I wasn’t doing video production for a living back then. You’re not gonna learn much if you don’t get out there, stick your foot in it, and mess up a bit – I just wish that this particular tape that has so many other people’s memories wrapped up in it wasn’t one of the “experiments”.

To detour for just a moment: why in the world was I jumping back and forth between cameras so much here, and not with Fame? After watching the whole thing all the way through in real time, the answer’s actually very simple: lighting. If you were there and remember the set at all, there was an upper walkway with three open windows and two “suggestion boxes,” all of which were used for various characters’ one-liners (including, I shudder to add, a disproportionate number of appearances by yours truly – I don’t know if I’ve placed a trauma block on my memories of high school or what, but I honestly don’t remember being that…erm…prominent in this play!). Mrs. McCray obviously had Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In on the brain, because that’s very much the format for how these were used. The problem, though, is that these “Laugh-In” sections were done with a single, harsh spotlight. There were two cameras – one kept at a wide angle (which, according to the credits, was being “babysat” by Billy Miller so that nobody would bother it), and a close-up camera operated by David Ewing. David actually does a fantastic job of finding the focus of each scene in close-up – if he could see it. The pitch blackness in the “Laugh-In” sections meant that he couldn’t see which window was about to be lit up, and had to pan quickly to find it and focus on it. In some respects, me-20-years-ago edited this exactly like me-6-months-ago edited the Classic Gaming Expo auction – cut to the fixed camera to cover the mobile camera’s movement. But with the method of editing – if you can even call it that – at my disposal in ’89 made a mess of the tape.

The thing is, there are actually plenty of things that can be done to fix some (but not all) of the gaps. This will seem like an incredibly geeky thing to mention here, but I’m an admirer of the guys in the UK who restore old Doctor Who episodes for DVD release. The damage they encounter in the original prints – and the means they used to repair said damage – makes my problems here look like a cake walk. I read their web site regularly to see what ingenious methods they’re using to patch holes in 40+ year old shows, and some of what I’ve read may very well come into play here (pun not intended, but owned up to nonetheless). How the bigger holes – i.e. the color bars – will be patched, I won’t know until I pull it all into the Avid and start trying to figure out how to fix it.

(Actually, as I type this, I’m noticing that in the last 25 minutes of the show, I started leaving David’s camera up as he pans around trying to find the next “Laugh-In” window – somewhere in there I must’ve gotten a clue. Maybe time travel is involved.)

What I’m doing tonight is merely attempting a workable “preservation transfer” to DVD-R to load into the Avid later; for the moment, my main production focus is finishing a documentary DVD that’s already been announced with an April 11th premiere date in Oklahoma City (gulp!!); I won’t start working on the NHS ’89 plays until about a week after that. If this doesn’t look horrible on the DVD-R, then the DVD-R is what gets loaded into the Avid, and the deteriorating master tape never has to touch another VCR again. I have a feeling I may spend about a month on UTDS alone. 😯

OK, the short version, if you didn’t want to read the geekspeak: relax, I’m on this.

But as your reward for making it this far, I’ve got what you really want: Stills! Screen grabs! Freeze frames! Screenies!

Prepare yourself.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
The stars of our show – Meredith Massey as the rookie teacher, and Chad Thomas as the principal. The walkie-talkie you can barely see in Chad’s hands (much more visible in other scenes) was a great spoof of Mr. Fenter – I’m amazed, in hindsight, that we got away with it. Actually, looking at it all these years later, and with no disrespect toward anyone else who was in it, Chad was one of the best things about this play. There are a couple of scenes with Joey where I could really believe that Chad wanted to take him apart.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Wide shot of the whole stage. Ladies and gentlemen…this was us.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Joey Ness, the other star of the show, as the most troubled student in the whole bunch. The hair, makeup and clothes weren’t much of a stretch from how Joey usually looked, though he was a much nicer guy than his character.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
These spotlight scenes didn’t make life easy for the cameras; you’re lucky if you can tell who’s there…

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
…and if you’re really unlucky, who’s there…is me!

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Stacey does her monologue thing.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Brian Hall in the spotlight.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Rob Heyman as the school psychologist (!!).

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Bryan Cheeks, angry young man, sounds off.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
William Claesen, slightly less angry young man.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Tyron Triplett. If anyone ever asks me what I remember most fondly about high school drama, it was doing improv comedy at the competitions around the state with Tyron, and doing the other competition stuff. We got the laughs, and boy, did we get into trouble a few times, pushing it a little too far. I always took that to mean we were doing it right. I have much more fond memories of the competition trips than I do of the plays we did. You got at least a little bit of one-on-one coaching from Mrs. McCray, and bless her heart, she was far more effective in that context than she was trying to control the chaos of the overblown epics we wound up putting on for the whole school! That was where you got her at her best as a teacher. Or maybe that was just me.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Stacey, Tyron, Luis Hernandez and Joey – class is now in session.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
This shot says two words to me: Cue! CUE!!!!

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
Curtain call. (Apparently I was letterboxing before letterboxing was cool.)

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
David Crook, after the show; I found a very small amount of “after show” video at the tail end of the tape.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
This is either Bigfoot’s last known photo, or Mr. Burgos hamming it up more than the entire drama department put together!

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
I guess my first order of business was to run out and make sure my camcorder hadn’t walked away. I believe the lady behind me is my then-sister-in-law.

Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989
That’s a face that just screams “If you post my picture on a blog – a word which hasn’t even been invented yet – on the internet – a word which also hasn’t been invented yet – 20 years from now, I will SO kick your ass.”

For an example of what kind of technical problems I’m fighting with on this tape, here’s a quick example, once at almost-normal speed and once in slo-mo. This is the “jump” from a typical camera cut on the tape. (I’ve noticed that Facebook seems to “freeze” animated GIF images in my blog posts; to see this in action you may have to visit the original blog post at this link to get the full effect.)
Up The Down Staircase - Northside High School Drama Department, January 1989

I’ll post another status report later in the week when I dump Fame to DVD-R; I probably won’t start the process of trying to make UTDS watchable until April.

Oh, and if anyone wonders whatever happened to my infamous red-and-white striped hat…
Evan, September 2008
…rest assured, it’s in safe hands. 😉

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