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Film Production: The Vicious Circle, or 'What Are We Trying to Do?' 1964 Calvin Productions
🕑 Added 2019-09-12 00:34:48 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
Parody of the industrial film making process. Expresses the frustration of an industrial film producer who must deal with the vagaries of his corporate client.
Originally a public domain film from the Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Company
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
The Calvin Company was a Kansas City, Missouri-based advertising, educational and industrial film production company that for nearly half a century was one of the largest and most successful film producers of its type in the United States...
Origins
Forrest ("F. O.") Calvin from Pleasanton, Kansas studied journalism and advertising at the University of Kansas in the late 1920s... After graduating from college, F. O. went to work for an advertising agency in Kansas City... The ad agency was occasionally using a 16 mm movie camera to make little advertising films for its clients.
...in 1931 F. O. and his wife Betty founded the Calvin Company, originally an advertising agency that specialized in 16 mm business movies...
...In 1936, they moved into their own studio and headquarters building in Kansas City. This facility also included a state-of-the-art 16 mm film processing laboratory that Calvin used for its own productions, as well as for providing processing services to smaller 16 mm producers with their own filmmaking capacity, such as universities. These services helped to spread and further the Calvin name throughout the non-theatrical film industry.
After a while, nationally known Fortune 500 companies began to take a chance on 16 mm and hired the Calvin Company to produce sales training and promotional movies for them. DuPont, Goodyear, Caterpillar Tractor Company, General Mills, Southwestern Bell, and Westinghouse had all joined Calvin's client list by the end of the 1930s...
World War II proved a gold mine for the Calvin Company, which prospered by making dozens of safety and training films for the Navy and Air Force, as well as numerous morale-boosting shorts sponsored by the likes of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Toward the end of the war, F. O. Calvin was a dollar-a-year-man for the Navy in Washington, D.C., advising on the running of a filmmaking system similar to the Calvin Company's...
Following World War II, there was a tremendous boom in production of industrial and educational films in the U.S.... it also brought many inexperienced new producers into the field. In 1947, sensing this as an industry problem, F. O. Calvin decided to have his company organize a three-day seminar called the Calvin Workshop, held on the company's sound stages in Kansas City where workable 16 mm filmmaking procedures would be explained and demonstrated. Anybody in the non-theatrical film industry in North America was invited to attend, and the event attracted over two hundred people. It was so successful that the Calvin Company decided to continue it, making it a celebrated annual event that was held every year until 1975. At its peak, the Calvin Workshop attracted some 450 producers and technicians from the U.S. and Canada each year...
During the 1970s, Calvin briefly attempted to catch a part of the videotape market, but the company was more suited to the 16 mm film format which it had originally pioneered forty years earlier, and the idea of shifting to video was soon abandoned. Satellite studios in Louisville, Pittsburgh and Detroit were sold. Finally, there was just the Calvin studios in Kansas City, where it had all begun, and around 1980 regular film production ceased. Only the Calvin film processing laboratory continued, losing more and more business and more and more money until finally it officially ceased operation on Halloween of 1982...
