essay from 1996 for a high school newsletter

Video ergo work

February 16, 1996

 

I could write about the wonderful experiences and myriad of learning throughout the PACE and art programs at MHS, but prompted by a short report on work in the Wall Street Journal (Glenn Burkins, “American schools don’t always make the grade.”  2/13/96, p. A1, col. 5) that says “high school graduates often leave school without the basic skills required for even low-level jobs in the modern workplace” and voices a wrong conclusion that “American schools must return to basics”, it is worth noting that concepts, skills and knowledge provided by the guidance and instruction of Mike Witsch in the video component of PACE were instrumental in making me employable.

When I arrived at MHS in the fall of 1980 I already knew a lot about black and white photography by working on my own after having had a strong foundation in classes in fifth and sixth grades in the Mamaroneck public schools.  Mike Witsch encouraged me to continue with photography.  At that time, the MHS Info set included rear view projection over the shoulder of one of the announcers to place an apropos, or complete non sequitur, graphic relating to the announcement(s) being read. Mike taught methods of high contrast or line copy film/slide production to provide material for this system.  In my last job this knowledge was useful for producing figures for scientific publication with mixed continuous tone and line copy.  [Since then computers have replaced much of the darkroom and manual design.]

My freshman year at MHS was the last year of reel-to-reel video editing.  Oddly, since we have to do occasional video editing at work now and do not have an editing system, the reel-to-reel experience has turned out to be of real service.  Also, although this does not directly presage job success-- and one of the students I spent the weekend with was instrumental in getting me fired from a summer job two years later-- that year Mike generously brought a group of us to the Concord hotel in the Catskills for a video, film and photography competition.

The next three years of video experience included planning and realizing my own productions and working with or for other students on their productions.  Creating or finding content, managing people or managing with people, scheduling and applying technical minutiae are common skills necessary for business survival.  As much as I preferred to work on my own, video is, like theater or dance, typically a group effort.  My senior year I found that I mostly worked on specific parts of projects for other people, for instance, typically on very short notice, providing the computer graphics or editing raw footage into a final product.  Sounds very similar to much of my current work.

I was very involved in, even if just as an observer, the creation of the new television studio in the space formerly occupied by Martie Barylick’s dance studio.  Given the need at my job to route RGB, SVHS and composite video signals from different sources to multiple or convergent destinations within a laboratory and to do it on a shoestring budget, this knowledge from over ten years previous became essential. 

Just one more specific example from many that could be used to illustrate experiences in PACE video which directly led to skills or knowledge useful on the job.  A Chyron video graphics generator was purchased for the new television studio.  It was programmed by dumping to it text files created with a standard word processor on an Apple IIe computer.  I figured that this simple graphics generator could be used for two additional purposed for which it was not designed, 1.) spaces or doors to spaces created by transparent boxes (including the possibility of inserting graphics over an announcer’s shoulder such as in professional newscasts) and 2.) animations of graphics.  Using modules written in Basic, which I later found out I used as rudimentary object oriented programming, I set out to do these projects and found that other people wanted to use the routines for the latter animations.  Mike took me to the video program at NYU where he was teaching to expose me to a more powerful Chyron graphics generator.  Putting a creative twist on a lower and less expensive form of technology back in Mamaroneck was both more flexible and more rewarding than pressing a button that yielded an expected and more inflexible result.  Later, when I encountered Postscript I recognized the structure from the Chyron and now it has led directly to my being an instant novice at HTML (if you have WWW access, you can find my job description at http://leper1.ca.aecom.yu.edu/~aif).  And in addition to the specifics of the computer system or languages, general knowledge learned via the television program, such as color mixing and contrast generation or analog versus digital image creation or modification, has been very useful.

I worry that students, parents and educators do not recognize the importance and usefulness (as well as the potential fun) of a video program in high school.  Perhaps the recent ubiquitous access to cheap and high quality home video equipment and fancy computers have taken some of the allure out of video or computer science at school.  I rue that now so much video and computer equipment is black box-- operations are performed on a chip or interactions are mediated by layers of operating systems and preprogrammed software-- so that students are less able to pick up basic concepts and more able to knock out facile “professional” appearing images.  I tell people that all the skills I learned to do my job I learned before being graduated from high school.  All I did in college was learn to read.