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| Morningfrost, (Wiki.) |
Louis Shalako
When I went back to school in 1992 to take the second year
of the radio, television and Journalism Arts program at Lambton College of Arts and Technology, there were computers in the newsroom.
There were about a dozen computers for up to thirty
students, although first year numbers dropped off quickly and there were only
about eight or ten students taking the second year. Both classes used the same
newsroom.
The journalism instructor and RTJ program head Geoff
Lane had what was referred to as a ‘386’ computer on his desk.
This was a source of great pride, and obviously the way of the future. Broadcasting
instructor John Murray was justifiably proud of his Amiga Commodore, complete with something
called the Video Toaster,
a dedicated hardware and software program. We had a television studio and a
radio booth in the bottom level of the college. This included the studio control room. We had a separate editing suite as well, with a bit of an annex and a bit of
storage, stuff jammed under the cupboards and rolling shelf units with more old
stuff tucked in here and there. We had professional Panasonic and Sony ENG
cameras and battery-belts, lights and microphones and the class could expect to
enter into a number of projects over the year. The studio used dolly mounted
cameras bought from a defunct television station, or old equipment donated from
corporate sources.
When I first attended the program in 1983, there were
no computers in the building at all.
In 1992 I was a mature student, and I was the only one in the
class who had his own computer. This was a cast-off IBM clone which had belonged
to my mother, a financial planner for a few years in the eighties and early
nineties.
Geoff brought us up, one at a time, during a work
session—very much hands-on, with the occasional short briefing from the
instructor, and showed us how it worked. We sat there at his knee.
The program was Aldus Pagemaker. He showed
me how to select font, page size, how to lay out the page, insert photos and graphics,
etc. He did all that in about twenty minutes. No one I know of got a crack at
that computer. Budgets and institutions being what they are, if someone
seriously damaged the thing, and that was pretty easy to do, there would have
been some kind of hell to pay.
It was easy to see the potential.
The old Compugraphic 880 in the
back room and the laying out of the paper on blue-ruled flats, then shooting it
with a graphic arts camera
onto photosensitive emulsion, was right there in the back rooms of the
department. That camera was a big box. Mounted on rails, the camera pointed at the
wall, where a perforated plate and a vacuum system held the paper in place
while you took the shot.
The comparison was stark enough.
That little box on the teacher’s desk did away with
all of that, just as the Video
Toaster did away with razor blades and acetate tape and reels and reels and
reels of celluloid film and iron oxide impregnated plastic tape.
One day I did a stupid thing, and took a story home on
a floppy disk to work on it at home. Imagine my dismay to open up the document,
start working on it, only to see a Pong virus, a little dot on the screen,
going back and forth and up and down…knocking out pixels on something I had
just written.
I wasn’t even on the internet and of course I had no
clue whatsoever about viruses.
The point of all of this is fairly simple.
We have come a very long way.
I have all of that right here on my desk. My video camera fits in the palm of my hand...it's not pro quality, but you have to admit they are impressive compared to the old brick cameras of twenty years ago, still relying on tape cartridges.
Twenty or
thirty years have passed since I entered a newsroom equipped with a couple of
dozen ironclads, Olivetti,
Underwood and Corona typewriters.
While it is true that everything they knew at the time
is obsolete, and all they could do was to give us the basics, the fact is that
none of that instruction was wasted.
The question is of course what you end up doing with
it.
I saw an old friend downtown the other day. It might
be more accurate to say that I avoided seeing an old friend that day.
That guy had spent four years in a good university
studying Literature. He could quote Tolkien at length.
He never did a damned thing with it.
As far as I know, he’s still living in the homeless shelter.
He’ll be in an early grave—alcoholism will do that to
you, to a point where it’s irreversible even if you quit, and some of them guys
do know that.
Whereas I, on the other hand, am just getting started.
Where he was indulging his basest desires, (all of
them), I was sublimating all of that dark and sexual energy (or a fair bit of
it) into something hopefully a little greater than the sum of its parts.
So let’s say life’s not so good.
If you really want to escape that life, the first
thing you have to escape is that environment, and that environment includes
your friends.
I have escaped my friends,
ladies and gentlemen.
The environment is the next thing to go.
Life is a series of choices, encompassing a million
shades of grey, and even a little black and white once in a while.
More than anything, it is what you make of it.
And
those losers weren’t going anywhere.
END
