Old 1990 Demo Reel

It’s 1990, and the economy has gone south for a while… I have been making a living in the business for about six years at this point. I had the pleasure of working with Gary Anderson and Elizabeth Longfellow who were not only my mentors, but also became dear friends. Cineworks as it was named then was a small video production “boutique” that produced a volume of work for agencies, companies, and the State of New Hampshire. Eventually Cineworks produced it’s own titles from hundreds of reels of stock footage shot all over New Hampshire and Maine that are still being used to this day.

This piece was a demo reel that I cut together of footage that I shot while at Cineworks and was used as a mailer to businesses before people were afraid to open small packages that were sent to them anonymously. Most of it was shot with a Sony BVP3 (a plumbicon 3 tube camera) onto oxide Betacam tape. This was a very large, very heavy camera that seemed very portable in the day because it was one of the first broadcast camcorders. The now very dated graphics were created with A Chyron VP2+, and a paintbox housing a brand new Targa board running a paint program called Tips… It looks pretty ancient but at the time it was cutting edge.

This was cut on an A/B roll cmx style Betacam editor. I culled through all of the original Betacam footage and recorded it onto VHS tapes with a window burn of the time code running on the bottom of the screen. Each VHS tape, which I called my “Bin Tapes” contained material that was similar in theme. I would then cut an offline tape together on a VHS editor that I had at the time so that I wouldn’t tie up the expensive online system. When I got to the point where I had what I wanted on the offline tape, I would then type all of the time code and reel numbers into the online system and begin the online process….How times have changed!…Enjoy!

-paul