Roll The Credits…Literally
On December 12, 2012
- TV History
Roll The Credits…Literally
Here’s the way the closing credits were done in the old days. White text on black scroll was fixed to a large wheel. Some were hand cranked and others had a variable speed electric motor. This shot from Radio Canada has a Marconi Mark II ready to shoot when the credits roll.
Yup
So that’s where/why we get “roll the credits.
At FAU when I was there1974-1976 they were designed for a TV station (ch 14) but for some reason that never happened. But they had a beautiful master control and they ran it on time. The had a few b&w telecines with slide tray and I remember using that for credits or cards made upstairs we shot with a camera. Ill see what I can dig up if pictures.
Je ne me rapelle pas ce machiniste mais il ressemble un peut a un caméramen nommé Majella…Ro….
The Bretton Woods accord (post WWII to around 1970) made it difficult for companies selling expensive things abroad to repatriate their proceeds. Typically to get around this, they’d buy goods in that country, and ship the goods home. One of the reasons why Ampex handled Marconi cameras. Canada exported lots of gold to England, so they got to do some shopping there.
In the early days of WFLD, we had a tricky paper headline crawl. Lots of issues, first the camera had to be switched to negative because it was black type on white paper (and it always seemed hard to key). Then we had a problem getting rid of pin cushion that made the type arc across the bottom of the screen instead of running straight.
This opens a whole discussion of graphics before the CG. Pull cards, the classy studios that had three ring binders mounted so you could do drop in cards, flip cards and the network news shows that had overhead projectors with multilayer cells.
I remember pulling or flipping cards.
Many studios retained one black and white camera for titles.
1970s era; the ABC soap operas in NY used an 8″ wide linen-backed belt that was made with a phototype typesetting machine. WPIX had a big, backlit drum. Not sure how the type was set for that, but it could have easily used phototype.
one of my first jobs was to roll the menu board drum with credits. “Lieban! Slower dammit!””
It must have been tricky to light.
I remember several times that in the frantic period leading up to a live show, the director would check the credits, having the stage manager roll the crawl. Then the stage manager would dutifully reverse the crawl back to the first credit, say the title. BUT would forget to throw the switch to “fwd.” At the end of the show the credits would roll—backwards—the whole roll detaching itself from the top roller. Ahhh, live tv. Ainy’t it great?
Radio-Canada was, and conceivably still is, the French name for the CBC.
Been there, done that.
Being part of the Common Wealth, I can understand why the Canadian government would want to ‘keep it in the family’.
Odd the Canadians bought a British camera based on an American one, thoughts anyone?