Video Flashbacks!

Back in the 90’s I owned several caricature operations at some tourist-centric shopping and entertainment venues around the country. I had operations at Underground Atlanta in Atlanta GA, Union Station in St. Louis, MO, and Mall of America here in Minnesota (the mall part, nit in what was then “Camp Snoopy” theme park). I was always trying to figure out ways to make the displays more dynamic and eye catching. One way I thought would be great was to add a video element to the display.

This was 1993, well before anybody with a laptop, a smartphone camera, and basic editing software, could put together an HD video in an afternoon and store in on a flash drive the size of your thumbnail. There wasn’t even flat screen TV monitors at the time. No, this was the age of video tape, VCRs, and CRT (tube) TVs. I knew a guy here in Burnsville who did video work, and he helped me film myself drawing and airbrushing several live caricature style samples. Then he created a sort of time lapse montage for each. Here’s one:

These did the job they needed to do, but they weren’t very good. First off, I had nothing to do with the music. The video guy put that royalty free stuff on these segments all on his own, and it’s gruesomely bad. I didn’t use any sound with these at the booths, so it didn’t matter. Second his choices as to which few seconds of live drawing or painting are shown in real time leave something to be desired. I think there is one moment where you see me adjusting my pencil and not doing a single line before it fades to the next part. Ah well. Here’s another sample:

He put these all together in one long segment and between each he had my logo and/or messages like “Takes only 5-10 minutes!”, and then filled a video cassette with them. I had cabinets built that had a window in them for a TV to be set inside, which cropped the screen so you just saw the paper part of the video and not the sides of the drawing board. I had a VCR that automatically rewound the tape at the end and then played it again. Worked pretty well for several years, except observers used to think they were watching the drawing we were working on at the time on the screen, until they figured out that it was a tape. That drove us crazy sometimes. It was Flintstones technology compared to today. Here’s one more:

If you are wondering why I do those little flourishes and shaking of my hand after every line or two, that’s just the way I draw live. It’s a way of keeping loose and sort of “revving the engine” while I think about my next lines. It’s also part of the “show”.

I have a others of Carol O’Connor, Martin Lawrence, Albert Einstein, Rodney Dangerfield, Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby (1993, remember?), Rhea Perlman and Mike Myers/Dana Carvey of “Wayne’s World” on my You Tube channel if you are interested in seeing more ancient live caricature drawing set to really bad music.