Fast, Cheap and Master Control. 1986

Shot on location at WGBY in Springfield, MA, this is an autobiographical piece tracing the solitary life of a technician signing-on and broadcasting from the depths of a local PBS station. -Yes, from a time and a place when TV stations actually signed-on! There wasn't a lot of daylight down there, just the "jagged white hum" and your humble narrator at the machine.

But a better title could have been: “Soft, Out of Focus and Master Control.” On top of that, it certainly wasn’t "fast"... Shot with Super 8 film in the mid 80s, the footage was then transferred to 1” video tape in the 90s, with ¾” burn-in dubs made of that. Then in 1998 the 3/4 tapes finally made their way up north to the Maine Film Television Workshops, where they were "digitized" and cut on an Avid system. In the end it’s all layering, luminance keys with Brian ENO. (Rated MATURE, because it's rather, um, mature.)