The Galloway Sisters sing

My mom (center), sisters Evelyn (left) and Annie (right) prepare for an upcoming gospel radio show in the early 90's. We lost Evelyn several years ago. My aunt Annie, at 90, has just been placed in a hospice facility in the upstate of SC. We visited her at the hospital and she was not doing well. She is a funny and lovable lady who made every summer vacation a special one.

Fiona squirrel alert - 2 year old Fiona at our home.

Laruth Video Productions

In my previous post, I covered the events leading up to my chosen profession (Beauties and the Beast).

Lately, I've been going through some 400 master tapes of productions done by us over the years, writing some to DVD while tossing others into the scrap heap of history.

Seeing these titles has brought back many memories-some good, some bad and some downright ugly.

The years 1990 through 1999 were a beautiful haze of different small town auditoriums, high school gymnasiums, local fine arts centers and college arenas. Wherever you could host a

beauty pageant, we were there. I believe we covered every town in the state of South Carolina, as well as a few in North Carolina,Georgia, Virginia and DC. Not all were pageants, although a good 90% were of the pageant variety. We also shot musical theater, opera and the occasional dirt track racing event.

We were very fortunate to work with some of the best directors of local and regional events in the state. For example; Talmage Fauntleroy of the University of South Carolina Opera Company.

We were hired to shoot the USC Dance Company's spring gala at the Koger Center in Columbia. Mr Fauntleroy was a friend of the professor of dance for the USC Dance Company and just happened to view our tape in her office. Next thing we know, we're being booked for an entire season of opera at USC. I knew absolutely nothing about opera (except for Queen's "A Night at the Opera").
I learned fast.
Lot's of action, lots and lots of singing and plenty of movement on the stage. We had no time to attend rehearsals, so we became very proficient at blocking shots on the spot.

Two things that I took away from those two years of doing opera for Mr Fauntleroy - he was a stickler for details, and he loved to direct. The stage lighting was always superb (thanks to a guy named Barry Sparks), and the talent was always, always amazing. And though I could not understand one word of what was being sung on that stage, with every performance I came away enlightened. Talmage Fauntleroy passed away the next year, way too young, so our opera days were over.

Another amazing director was my good friend Kimberly J. Miller. I met her in the early nineties when she and our other friend Martha Suber approached us to put together a music video for the
Newberry School District.
Written by Martha, the song "I'm Too Cool" featured students from local areas schools singing and dancing to a message that preached "I'm too cool to use drugs". The video used a rural setting to get the message out to kids who weren't used to seeing the 'urban' landscape. We featured kids on logging trucks, jumping up from behind a cow, in a small rural downtown area, on the front porch of an antebellum home, in a cow pasture, etc. We spent a couple of months shooting (have you ever tried to coordinate the schedules of 30 kids, 6 adults and the weather?) After the shooting was complete, we sat down to a two month edit. We had a screening for all the kids and their parents, complete with numerous bloopers and the town loved it! Not only did they love it, but it was entered into an awards category for the Telly Awards and came out a winner! Yay!

We also had the good fortune to work with Kim and Martha again for a show that they conceived and performed at the Smithsonian in Washington - "A History of Women in the Blues", which opened to

rave reviews in DC and also played in Richmond, VA. Not only good writers and directors, but Kim and Martha are also pretty damned amazing performers as well!

We did our share of weddings, mostly for good friends and family. I loved shooting weddings-so predictable and easy. Not that we didn't work hard. In those days, I had to wear a battery belt, which weighed in at 18 lbs. I also had to wear a 1/2 inch recorder slung over my shoulder and the camera rested squarely on the other shoulder. So I carried an extra 23 lbs., more often on 90 degree days, for hours on end.

But weddings were always fun events to shoot, and I became quite good at editing them. My takeaway for weddings? Please the mother of the bride and the battle is won!

Another revenue stream for us was dance recitals. Not small ones, but for the larger dance companies in the state. It was not unusual for these companies to have well over 200 dance students

per recital. I didn't fully appreciate the fun until my granddaughter Fiona participated in one several years later. At one recital in North Carolina, we took along my dear friend Pamela Adams to operate

one of our cameras. After we packed up, we gave Pam her salary and jumped in the van for the long trip home. Seeing a tattoo parlor, Pam asked me to pull over and proceeded to spend her evening's

pay on her first tattoo. I was honored to have been a part of that. (While watching a cop get a tattoo across his chest, Pam asked "does it hurt?" The cop replied "lady, my nipples are so hard right now that

I could cut diamonds with them"...ouch!)

We shot a pageant at Myrtle Beach one year and asked Pam to come along and operate a camera. The pageant began at 9am, broke for lunch until 4pm, and then went until 9pm. Long days! Because we

were at the beach, Pam and I hardly slept - filling our nights with clubs, drinking, and running amok. At times during the pageant, I would find myself dozing during those small intervals between

contestants. Using our wireless headsets, Pam would always wake me with a crude, yet funny joke (Hey Reid-why is Helen Keller's leg yellow? 'Cause her dog was blind too"). Kept me going for days!

Along the way I've shot military funerals, political commercials, rap video and a host of graduation exercises-from kindergarten to high school. Not a bad biz-if you like variety!

 

Beauties and the beast

How in the world did I get into this business? 

Lugging cameras and tripods and lights through the doors, up the stairs to the balcony. More cameras on the floor and backstage.

Running what seems to be miles of cable. Setting up television monitors for live feeds. Placing mikes in all places onstage, offstage, on the talent, on the podium

And while doing all this setup, knowing that in a few hours  (or days) I would repeat the process in reverse. Breaking down cameras, pulling up miles of cable, hauling

everything back down the stairs, off the floor, and right back to the van. Then the real work begins. We have to take all this raw footage and edit it into an acceptable product, one that all the contestants, parents of contestants, and pageant directors will deem worthy of presenting to their families, demo reels or potential sponsors. No pressure at all!

The story starts in a very unassuming place-electronics class at Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, SC. But allow me to digress a bit more.\

It really all started when, as a very young chap, I and my siblings received tickets to be on "Monty's Rascals", a local kids show that was being produced by WFBC TV (now WYFF TV) in Greenville, SC.

Probably around 1963 or 64. We, along with about 25 other kids, sat in the bleachers while Mr Monty came around and asked each of us our name, what we wanted to be when we grew up, etc. Aside from the joy of appearing on TV, we also received a McDonald's hamburger or a pack of Tootsie Rolls, and we got to meet Mr Monty and Mr Doohickey!  Moe the Myna Bird was there and the cartoons played in between the studio segments. 

This world fascinated me. All the gigantic cables snaking across the floor feeding the huge cameras, the lights, hot and bright, shone down like the sun. Mr Monty, all dressed up and friendly to all the kids. We would be on Monty's Rascals at least two, if not three times. (It didn't hurt that Mr Monty's secretary lived directly behind us, scoring tickets for us like a kid's show pimpette). This led to my interest in the world of broadcast.

Fast forward about twelve years, Greenville Tech is having a class in radio broadcasting, which will be taught by the then-legendary local radio talk show host Jim Burnside. Burnside was a fascinating man. He had an uncanny ability for timing, very important in his line of work. Even his discussions in class seemed to have a timing and pitch that, in hindsight, were beautiful and professional, He introduced us to many interesting aspects of the broadcast biz, but what I remember most are: 'w' is pronounced 'double u' and not 'dubya'; the inflection on the word insurance is on the 'sur' and not the 'in; and to appreciate

the legendary broadcast of the Hindenberg Disaster (Oh the humanity). While I did very well in the class, and many of my peers went on to have careers in radio, I didn't have the voice (unlike my two uncles, both successful radio personalities in their own right). So my parents thought it best that I should probably pursue a career in my chosen field-electronics. 

To my dad, in the early and mid seventies, electronics meant either repairing radios and televisions for a local shop, or pulling size 14 wire through a new residence and connecting it to the switch. Computers were a defense department thing, and occupied an entire room. Videotape, while already invented, was still years away from practical consumer use, and the internet was just being dreamed up by some tech-geek. (Geek was not even in everyday usage then). So here I am, just after high school  graduation, sitting in a motor controls classroom at Greenville Tech, pondering my future. As a guitarist in a rock band at that

time, I thought that my future would be touring and recording. After all, hadn't our band 'Hooker' just played at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium, in front of thousands (maybe hundreds) of screaming, adoring fans? Hadn't I just bought a brand new Vox guitar, the one made famous by the early Beatles? Rock on man! Rock on!

I had also met a girl. A girl from the mountains of North Carolina. She would change my life completely. 

Laura and I dated and got married within the course of just a few months. We somehow clicked and were married in September 1976 (and, as of this writing, are still married). Married now, I had to find a job and school would just have to wait.

Circumstances led us to move from Greenville to Greenwood, SC in July of 1978. It was in Greenwood, in 1979, that I continued my studies in electronics at Piedmont Tech, except this time my major would be electronics engineering. While in geometry class one day (a subject in which I would do very poorly), I overheard a classmate tell a friend that the college TV studio was looking for work studies for that semester. Before my classmate could finish his sentence, I was down at the media center, application in hand, waiting on the supervisor to say 'you're hired'. And hired I was!

Piedmont Tech had a genius of a media department head by the name of Dan Koenig. He was able to wrangle for the media department the very first color television camera for any college in the state. And I was going to use that camera. To solicit support for the school, Dr Koenig would allow me to take said camera to various industries in the area and shoot training and demo pieces for companies like Monsanto and Parke Davis. We also produced classroom shows for the school, all shot live to tape in the small studio housed in the media center. For a bonus, Dr, Dan hired a former producer at WIS TV in Columbia, who was a shark at editing. Cynthia Brazzell took me by the hand and made an editor out of me! Back then, editing on 1 inch videotape would require a sharp razor, 1 inch adhesive tape, a sharpie and lots of imagination. Cynthia taught me to close my eyes and edit with sound, how jump cuts affected the mood of a piece, and that special effects were never, ever to be the star! Let the story unfold naturally.

The education that I received from the people that occupied these positions at Piedmont Tech would be invaluable to me. But first, we have a career hiccup. My father in law would buy his first McDonald's franchise and my life would again drastically change. 

I went into the McDonald's thing thinking "hmmm...this fast food thing could really pay off big time!" Alas, that was not to be. After giving this opportunity almost seven years of my life, as well as missing kid's birthday's, valuable sleep time, and what some folks would call 'a life', I decided to seek another opportunity. 

By this time, due to the McDonald's thing, Laura myself and our two kids had moved from Greenwood to Greenville, only to be moved to Newberry, SC in the course of just a few months. I managed the store in Newberry until I almost literally dropped from overwork and exhaustion. I was later to find out that I had already had a heart attack while working at MickeyD's, although my doctor at the time said that I was just exhausted and needed a vacation.

I needed a change...and fast!

One day in late 1989, a guy walks into the store and I overhear him telling another customer that he was a producer of hunting and fishing videos. Curious, I introduced myself and we started a conversation about production in general. He was looking for an editor, I was looking for a change, I turned in my notice and off I went.

Editing a turkey or deer hunt is a fascinating thing. The host/hunter tells the camera what he's going to shoot, where he's going to shoot it from, what ammo he will use, and what brand of rifle he will use to take out his prey.

On tape, he looks like Daniel Boone. In reality, he, like all hunters, has waited for days, shivering in a tree stand to get a glimpse of a deer or turkey. Then, with any luck, he'll bag the animal. After the kill, he'll take his kill in his lap and tell you how he could smell the game and knew exactly where he would find it. After this, he tapes the opening, telling where the animal will cross his scope, what size to expect, etc. etc. In other words, if we kill something, we'll shoot an opening to a show. On this job, I shot and edited deer hunts, turkey hunts, fishing tournaments, and edited bear hunts and wild boar hunts. I also shot and edited weddings.

After a year, the company I was working for decided to close.  What to do now? Why don't you start your own production biz?

So we did. 

Laruth Video Productions opened in 1990. Our first job was a piece for the Newberry and Presbyterian College Bronze Derby, a local college rivalry game that drew the interest of ABC Sports. Aired during the halftime of a smaller conference game that ABC was airing, I felt immense pride in seeing my work hit the network. Although it wasn't the super bowl, we had made some headway in establishing a demo reel, something that can

make or break you in this biz. Later that year, when the jobs were not rolling in like I expected, I attended a beauty pageant that my niece was participating in. There was a guy there with a single video camera taping the event. He was also selling copies of the tape for $30.00. What? Single camera for $30.00? Robbery! I could use three cameras, add editing and graphics, sell the tape for $25.00 and make the kids happier than just getting a dub of his shaky footage! So I purchased two more cameras and Laura began booking pageants. Sure enough, it was a successful formula and we ended up having to turn jobs down. Seems that word spread in the pageant world that there was a new production company that produced professional videos for a reasonable price. So we got busy. After a couple of years of hearing Kenny G while contestants did their "T" on stage, I grew bored. Bored bored bored! "If we're going to do this", I told the wife, "then we need to do something like the Miss South Carolina Pageant. No more Kenny G music!"

Laura, being a Jaycee, and after a bit of networking, got us booked to do a Miss SC preliminary in Pickens, SC. Russ Gantt, the director, was nervous as this was his first show and hadn't heard of us. On faith, he gave us a shot and we did not disappoint! Great show, great taping and editing, everything worked out perfectly! We started booking these preliminaries for almost every weekend. Soon, we came to the attention of the Miss SC board, who hired us

to shoot a local pageant that they would attend and observe. Again, perfect show, perfect shoot and edit, great product! Next thing I know, I'm getting a call from the board asking us to shoot the Miss SC Pageant. This was 1994, just a year and a half after telling the wife that I would not be satisfied until I could produce the tapes for this pageant.

We would spend the next six years as the "Official videographer for the Miss South Carolina Pageant".