Tape Night.

Tonight at the Sidewalk Cinema (the best movie theater in my area and, not coincidentally, the only indie movie theater in my area), my pal Jeremy is having a Tape Night event. Jeremy and Sidewalk host Tape Night a few times a year. As you might guess from the name, it involves projecting a movie from an honest-to-goodness VHS tape on the big screen.

Now, VHS is not known for it’s visual clarity. In fact, it’s known for being generally low-res and muddy. But VHS movies look surprisingly good on the Sidewalk Cinema screen. And part of the fun is the retro nostalgia of watching a movie the way we watched so many movies back in the 20th century.

Another part of the fun is the actual movie featured at Tape Night is a surprise. But Jeremy usually drops a few hints. For tonight’s screening, the hints are that the featured movie was shot in Alabama and released in 1976. Given that there aren’t a lot of movies shot in Alabama, those are really big hints! I am pretty sure I know what the movie is, but I won’t spoil it for anyone who happens to be reading this.

I occasionally make a small contribution to Tape Night — when time allows, I put together a promo video for the event based on Jeremy’s hints. I love the grungy analog look of old videotapes, so I try to emulate that for the promo videos. I made a video for tonight’s event, and it is embedded below. Check out the video, and stop by Sidewalk tonight if you’re in the neighborhood! It’s a super fun event, and it’s also free!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It was twenty years ago today.

Image
Couldn’t let the day pass without a blog post noting that Stacey and I got married twenty (!) years ago. Stacey is the best. And I think it’s fair to say that, after twenty years, our relationship now has quantity as well as quality. Here’s a relatively recent photo of Stacey and I together in Iceland.
Read more

Dealing with interlaced video.

Image
Digitizing old video sources (stuff made in the 20th century) is a hassle for multiple reasons. Probably the biggest is that old video was stored in an interlaced format. This Wikipedia article digs into the details about interlaced video, but the short version is interlaced video is captured and stored as half-frames instead of full frames, and combining those half-frames for playback on modern displays (which are almost all progressive instead of interlaced ) can get messy. This is true for material that originated as video, and it’s also true of material that originated as motion picture film. The film-to-interlaced-video process often involved a hack known as three-two pulldown . That hack was necessary because of differences between motion picture film frame rates and video frame rates. Adding to the hassle of dealing with old video material is the fact that modern video editing software (stuff like Adobe Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve) just “fixes” the interlacing behind the...
Read more

Here comes Ted.

Image
You ever watch one of those movies where you go in skeptical for whatever reason, but the movie ends up winning you over? I try to go into a movie with an open mind, but we all have baggage as film watchers. It reminds me of that scene in The Empire Strikes Back , when Luke asks Yoda what’s in the creepy tree. “Only what you take with you,” Yoda answers. I remember starting the first Goosebumps movie and thinking, “Eh, I dunno, it’s based on a bunch of kids’ books I’ve never read, and Jack Black isn’t as funny as he was back in the old Tenacious D days.” But the more I saw of Goosebumps , the more I liked it. And then Black delivered an incredible line of dialogue (“Every story ever told can be broken down into three parts… The beginning. The middle. And the twist!”), and I was all-in on the movie. As much as I enjoy being won over by a movie, I gotta admit, it’s even more fun to watch someone else get won over by one of my movies. Which is not something I witness often. But it ...
Read more