Artifacts | Slides
Here's a little show of about 100 old station-break slides from the '60s. And in the "Scroll of Fame" there are names of some of the people who, over the decades, labored long and hard in WBTV's graphics department. They done good. See if you remember some of these slides.
Play the Slide Show »
As a kid, it was always a mystery to me
how TV stations put those still pictures on the air.
Did they put photos and artwork on easels and "shine" a
studio camera on them? What an awful waste, tying up
an expensive camera for something as insignificant as
a station break. It was only later, after I was initiated
into the broadcasting fraternity (hired) that I
learned what a film chain was, and that all those "stills" were
actually slides, created by a staff of X-Acto-nicked,
T-square-toting men and women in the art departments
of the local stations and
the networks.
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| "Catch Dick Taylor's weather on
the Late Report, tonight at 11:00 here on
WBTV." |
The order would come down from
the Promotion Department to create a station ID slide
for a local or network show, a community event, or
just another variation of the station's call sign and
channel. A graphic artist would spend many minutes, perhaps
an hour or two, depending on the complexity of the job,
selecting or creating a suitable background, cutting
and pasting onto it an original sketch or photo of
the show's cast, along with the typeset title and station
id, mounting and aligning the finished art on a camera
stand, and photographing it on positive film.
Once the roll of film was developed,
the artist would snip out the desired frame from the
strip of film, carefully place it between two squares
of glass, and finally seal the edges of the "sandwich" with
thin strips of sticky tape, to secure the frame inside
the glass.
That little glass sandwich would be numbered,
catalogued, filed, scheduled, and then loaded onto a
film chain dozens of times over a period of weeks or
months. And each time the projectionist had to inspect
and clean off any fingerprints, lint or grime. And the
videomen, like Harvey Hood, Lee Jenkins, or Cliff Whitney,
would, each and every time, have to adjust the
brightness, color and contrast of the darn thing before
it went out over the air. Sometimes a slide would literally
wear out, or more likely break, so it would have to be
mended or done over.
The artists would create hundreds of these
little slides per year. And simultaneously, slides would
pour in by the hundreds from the networks, the syndicators
and movie distributors, and these would also have to
be numbered, catalogued, filed and scheduled as well.
And all this slide work was only
a small part of the artists' jobs. They were also responsible
for designing and producing logos; letterheads; company
publications; signs; exhibits; billboard art; newspaper
layouts; show titles; credit crawls; sets; and anything
else of a graphical nature that might pop into the heads
of management.
What these guys and girls would have given for a desktop
computer and a copy of Photoshop. Nowadays, we'd guess,
such visual artistry never sees the light of day, is
never touched by human hands, but is just strategically-arranged
clumps of pixels stored on humongous hard drives, with
all the properties set and forgotten, and is good
to go when the master computer says so. The days of
projection slides, like buggy whips, are long gone.
