Over the Weekend- Julia Zureikat

https://archive.org/details/BflOggGX1963

     The video that I chose to watch from the Prelinger Archives was entitled  “#Bfl O {ggGX = STwWcfl x 2s4 (Calvin Workshop).” This title made absolutely no sense to me and was the exact reason I chose to watch it. I was curious as to what this video could possible be about because it was listed under the “Communication: typewriters” category.
     The film is broken up into a series of short clips that reveal the steps in the filmmaking process. The video opens up with monkeys on typewriters. The narrator uses monkeys instead of people to emphasize that we are animals, and therefore susceptible to human error. This is also the reason that the title is gibberish; it was typed by a monkey.
     The animals are making a movie and are shown typing scripts, filming scenes, printing film, and finally, editing their color motion picture. Watching this showed me how difficult making a movie used to be because the old fashion filmmaking equipment contained no technological crutches. For example, the monkeys had to be very careful in typing the scripts because they were using a typewriter and could not simply "backspace" if a typo occurred. The clip is intended to be comical, as the actors are monkeys and the narrator uses a very sarcastic tone.
     This film is useful to students of our modern information infrastructure because it shows how tedious making a color motion picture used to be. Before highly developed cameras and editing tools, everything was manual and time-consuming. For example, the film equipment is very old fashion in the movie. When filming a scene, the monkeys had to swing along a string line attached to a reel to get the camera rolling. In addition, the film was literally printed into a mess of transparent strands, which made editing quite exhausting. This was portrayed by a monkey tangled up in film, trying to find the right clip.
     In our world today, we do not realize how advanced our movie equipment is. Cutting and editing scenes can all be done on a computer instead of having to print and choose clips by hand. What I find interesting is that this film was created in 1963, which is not that long ago at all. However, the leaps in technology are drastic and have improved significantly. It is important to realize how print culture, the control revolution and other monumental eras created significant improvements and aids for activities such as motion picture making.

Julia Zureikat