TV production: Jurassic Era

(Imagine this post being told in the voice of Abe Simpson).

Back when I was a wee TV lad, in Grand Junction, Colorado (the 189th market out of 210), we didn't have a budget for computer animation. At that time (1983) it cost about $100K a running second, and was only created by behemoths like Abel & Associates on huge mainframes.

We had some dowel rods, a styrofoam ball, yellow rubber gloves, a yellow silk sheet, a hula hoop and a news director who wanted a spinning globe for the news open. Our crappy Grass Valley switcher was able to key out not only the cloth, but my pasty flesh as well as I spun the globe I'd lovingly painted as accurately as I could.

Oh, and we used to do fake squeezoom effects without a DVE by zooming in on a monitor in front of a black curtain, because the commercial clients had seen it on the Denver stations and wanted it for their spots.

And I wore an onion on my belt buckle, which was the style at the time...