The first car I ever owned, in 1978, was an International Scout II.\u00a0 It had 4WD and looked like a large brown shoe. One of my many and increasingly stumped mechanics called it “the Combine”.\u00a0 It was as the driver of this small truck that I had my introduction to the field.<\/p>\n
Phil, my boyfriend of 8 months, was shooting second camera for Dan Reeve’s “Smothering Dreams”.\u00a0 The scene was to re-enact Dan’s harrowing survival of an ambush in Vietnam where he had served in the Marine Corps. \u00a0 The shoot took place over a June weekend in a cattail swamp near Ithaca.\u00a0 I drove the 1″ video recording equipment around in my Scout.\u00a0 Dan had asked everyone on the shoot to prepare by reading Michael Herr’s\u00a0 “Dispatches”, (1977). \u00a0 Reporting from under fire, Herr writes:\u00a0 \u2019Quakin\u2019 and shakin,\u2019 they called it, great balls of fire. Contact. Then it was you and the ground: kiss it, eat it, fuck it, plough it with your whole body, get as close to it as you can without being in it or of it, guess who\u2019s flying around an inch above your head? Pucker and submit, it\u2019s the ground. Contact.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n The days were hot, the hours long, the gear finicky, and the story heartbreaking.\u00a0 The perfect ingredients for a career.<\/p>\n Shortly before I graduated from Cornell with a BA in theoretical math (I still think it should have been a BS), Phil and I went to the annual athletic awards dinner for my polo team.\u00a0 Attending the dinner was Terry Mallet, the Athletics Director.\u00a0 We convinced Terry that a video on The History of Cornell Athletics would be a very useful fund-raising tool, and in 1982, we finished a 30 minute show called, “Here We Are Again”.\u00a0 (the title is taken from a line from a fight song).\u00a0 Dick Schaap, Cornell ’62 provided the voiceover.\u00a0 The video was edited on 2″ videotape, and then transferred to 16 mm film and shown theatrically.<\/p>\n My undergraduate math degree, I was told, qualified me to become either an actuary or a math teacher.\u00a0 At about that time, IBM released the original PC.\u00a0 This was 1982.\u00a0 It ran on DOS 1.0.\u00a0 Like most recent college graduates, I was able get paid to show people how to use this brand new operating system.\u00a0 By the time DOS 3.0 was released, complete with an important innovation, the c:\/ prompt!!, I had decided that I liked working with videotape better.\u00a0 The \u00be\u201d videocassette was in wide use, a huge improvement over threading up the 1″ tape machines \u2013 a skill I never did acquire.\u00a0 We still edited on 1″.\u00a0 With Doug Dunning.\u00a0 We worked with Doug as our video engineer in the 1″ room for years.\u00a0 He would let me run the character generator myself, the brand new Chyron.\u00a0 Later on I grabbed the controls of the first DVE, and used every digital video effect it had, whether the shot needed it or not.\u00a0 The worst of these can be seen on \u201cHow to Play Lacrosse\u201d, in Japanese, a show we produced for Grumman in 1986. \u00a0 One machine led to another, one show led to another, one video format led to another, and we created many, many programs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My Introduction to the Field The first car I ever owned, in 1978, was an International Scout II.\u00a0 It had 4WD and looked like a large brown shoe. One of my many and increasingly stumped mechanics called it “the Combine”.\u00a0 It was as the driver of this small truck that I had my introduction to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-65","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/65","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/65\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68,"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/65\/revisions\/68"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.electronranch.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Our First Project<\/h3>\n
The Business<\/h3>\n