Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Just in time for Halloween 2004, this was a spot I produced for a haunted house attraction co-sponsored by the station. The voice I used on this one will be familiar to anyone who’s checked out any of the other Halloween or haunted house spots I’ve done over the past ten years (and I still can’t talk for about 24 hours after doing that voice). The background was 2D animation trying to act like 3D – I took some graphical background elements of brick walls, etc. and put 3D twists on them. It ends up looking a little like a computer game from ten years ago.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
Just in time for Halloween 2004, this was a spot I produced for a haunted house attraction co-sponsored by the station. The voice I used on this one will be familiar to anyone who’s checked out any of the other Halloween or haunted house spots I’ve done over the past ten years (and I still can’t talk for about 24 hours after doing that voice). The background was 2D animation trying to act like 3D – I took some graphical background elements of brick walls, etc. and put 3D twists on them. It ends up looking a little like a computer game from ten years ago.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
