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The
Back Story
The
mood was dark, that April. The worst Christmas season sales in
Commodore history had left the company with $350 million in
losses. Most of the staff was thinking "what next", at least with
increasing
levels of seriousness.
I had been away for a long
weekend, in Texas, out there interviewing for positions with Mizar and
Compaq, "just to see." Commodore Management had suggested that, if we
found new jobs, we should accept them. I brought my camcorder to Texas
with me...
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Upon
returning to Commodore that Tuesday (April 26 th
), I decided to bring along my camcorder; I had fully charged
batteries, and the K-Mart in West Goshen just happened to have 8mm
tapes in stock.
What happened next, on that Tuesday,
Wednesday, and Saturday, make up the video that I eventually called
"The Deathbed Vigil and other tales of digital angst." As I shot this,
it became
clear that there was a story here, maybe a bit more than just a home
movie. And with this, I would have some answer, at least a partial one,
for those who would inevitably ask "why?"
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The DVD
The
print of this video is from my original S-VHS master tape, restored
digitally as well as I could. The editing on that tape was done on an
Amiga 3000+ with a SuperGen 2000, GVP TBCplus, and Scala's MM400/EE100
software. I thought about doing an all-digital re-edit, and maybe will
some day, but this one preserves the best of what I could
do, on an Amiga, back in 1994. And shows some of what's possible today,
in desktop video publishing, eight years later, as the whole DVD was
authoring and published on a plain old desktop computer.
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And
then there's the additional content. The extra scenes come from a
digital transfer of the original Video8 tapes, stuff that
didn't fit in the original, due to both time (the 2-hour VHS limit was
firm) and content. The music video is just a re-edit of the
"Chicken-Lips Blues" shot, but with animation. Just for fun; the film
itself is so dark, I wanted to lighten up a bit here and there.
The new "Impact" video is also with that in mind; I wanted Amiga fans
themselves to help say how they felt the Amiga changed things: their
lives, the world, or anything in-between.
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Continuing
on, there's the Photo Album. This is a
series of about 200 still photos, from the early days of Commodore to
the present, most of which actually came from a photo album of mine.
There
are DevCons, parties, travel photos, etc. Back to the C128 days,
post-Commodore fun at Metabox, the annual "Haynie Summer Party", etc.
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