One of the works that came out of TAT Productions in the 1960s was an educational filmstrip. “Filmstrips” were a popular and common educational resource in the days of ditto machines and library paste. They presented a sequence of images that were explained by the teacher to convey an important topic in the class.
The project was for a history assignment. I don’t remember the exact topic, but I remember being pleased that I had access to a special-purpose camera. The camera club, sponsored by our chemistry teacher, Mr Van Wyk, had equipment available to its members, including a “half-frame” camera. This enabled and inspired us (Terry and Thor, the principals of TAT Productions), to make our own filmstrip. Terry did the heavy lifting, gathering the visual sources that we would include in our filmstrip, and I provided the technical effort of operating the photographic copy stand and the lighting. We had a broad range of materials and worked to present them in a coherent explanatory sequence. I arranged the camera position, lighting, and exposure, to capture each item in its best representation. We both worked on the script to accompany the filmstrip presentation.
When we developed the film and spooled it up to load into the filmstrip projector, we discovered a “production error”. Most of the images had been taken in “portrait” aspect, taller than wide, but the filmstrip projector was designed for frames in “landscape” mode. This resulted in the class having to turn their heads to make sense of it. We soon figured out that someone could turn and hold the projector on its side while advancing the film. And some poor student had to do this whenever our history teacher inflicted our production on his subsequent classes.
TAT productions went on to undertake more projects, forgettable to most, but unforgettable to us, including “The Commercial”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “Images”, all featuring fellow students and our teachers, conveying truly important messages to our classmates of those times.
Today of course, the classroom projector would automatically rotate the pictures to match their aspect. I suspect that somewhere, in the same spirit that created TAT Productions, there is a modern-day collaboration between students making TikTok videos for their history class assignment. They will probably also encounter “production problems”, but it won’t be something as simple as getting the aspect ratio wrong!
