You Mean There Were Art Departments? Yes!
On March 23, 2013
- TV History
You Mean There Were Art Departments?
Yes! Once upon a time, local stations and networks had real artists on staff. Before electronic and computer graphics came along, art departments made flip cards for promos, made title and closing credit cards, illustrated ticker crawls like the one in this photo and more. This picture is from 1960 and shows a CBC Marconi Mark II camera shooting a side to side crawl on what may be a Grey Ticker Table. Anyone know more about the machine?
We also used a remote control Kodak Carousel projector on the B&W film chain to hold baseball team name supers (which were inserted at Master Control and not at the truck.)
We had a 2″ tape crawl machine. It was always a pain to use because you had to reverse polarity on the camera to try to key it. We also usually had pincushioning that made it look like it was arcing across the bottom of the screen. Of course, we also used hot press cards (Jack Glasser the king of the hot press) and cafe boards.
The only art now is how to cram 13 commercials into one program break.
I remember when camera ops wore sport-coats…
The floor director reminds me of Dick Clark.
Not me but I bet the people are Canadian and probably smoked.