Sunday, October 17, 2010

The only way it happened with because of Jackson Polk

If you had been in the Washington DC TV business in the early days or studied the history of it the name Jackson Polk should ring a huge bell.   He was the first remote cameraman, I have seen the camera and it looks like a space pack  Jackson also had founded Pyramid video in Potomac, which was the first independent production facility outside of the station's in the Washington market place.

I was blessed enough to cross paths with Jackson who by then was one of the premier analog editors, live directors and he knew when the satellites where over head in DC at  a place called Kalorama Studios,
Where Bill Clinton was asked Boxershorts or briefs and a host of films from Pelican Brief, Peggy Sue Got married and or course DC own live Wrestling Show. Yeah we had one. 
Meeting Jackson was like meeting a wizard of tv We all worked with someone named Bill Moore one of the greatest technical av engineers ever to grace this earth. This was a time when the first digital systems were coming into place.  We had one of the first non gov Avid systems and the rest was all tubes So it was interesting to be part of this and it was why I was there to learn how to communicate using moving images.

Frankly Kayaking Extreme could never had been made in the analog word the level of work what we did took about 2 hours for every 5 seconds, let alone Jackson Polk's talent.    So to get it done~  I had to go to work for Jackson as a grip and then worked up to camera man which was an honor to learn from him.
This when on for about 2 years and it was live lab of camera, video editing mixed in with my obsession for computers and this thing called the World Wide Web.  We filmed making our web page about this video. 
Kayaking Extreme started preproduction in late 04 and I got the nod for Jackson Polk to bring the footage I had in the can from our two excellent cameramen and some footage Eric Jackson and I shot and headed to editing.

Jackson Polk was the proud owners of a Mac Quatra 1 gig of ram and 3 gigs eternal and 12 external and something called  of hard drive and what seemed like all the time in the world. He was a pioneer in TVit seemed fitting to be sitting in front of that computer waiting for it to render, which somethings took and hours for just 10 seconds of output, with him.

I want to say what I learned from a master like Jackson Polk can never be taught in a class because he is just a man of class and those guys are pretty hard to come by and they is nothing you seem moving of mine that is not totally influenced on the principles and knowledge I gleamed working for the great Jackson Polk.

Thanks Jackson.


Shot em slow and steady and have an exit and end point and dont make the editors job hard.

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