From 1975 to 1994, Minneapolis fan Scott Imes was active in videotaping activities at midwestern science fiction conventions and Worldcons. This collection of materials forms the Scott Imes Video Archive.

In the mid 1970s, Scott was working for Blumberg Photo Sound, a major local Audio/Visual rental house. He took equipment out to rental customers and set it up, got it working, and eventually tore it down and took it back to the warehouse. I helped him set up several customers Friday morning of Minicon in 1975, and then helped him loot the warehouse of (well, borrow from his employers with permission) stuff we could use at Minicon and took it over there and helped set it up. That year his goal was to make sure the audience could actually hear what was said on all the panels.

However, by BYOBCon V in July, there was a definite plan afoot to do heavy video coverage of the Worldcon next year in Kansas City (MidAmeriCon, in 1976). Scott brought equipment to BYOBCon, and we did a first try at convention coverage there.

The next summer (1976), there was a big project in Minneapolis to prepare a lot of filler material to be used in breaks between live shows at MidAmeriCon. We did fake weather reports and commercials and news programs and such. This work was also intended to give people who would be working on the project at MidAmeriCon some practice, not all of them had much experience to start with.

Blumberg, still Scott’s employer, was the official AV rental provider for MidAmeriCon, so Scott got to bring a large truck full of equipment down to use. We had color cameras and VCRs (both reel-to-reel and 3/4″ UMATIC cartridges), B&W cameras and VCRs, some actual Portapaks (1/2″ portable reel-to-reel), lights, microphones, mixers, stands, tripods, miles of cables and hundreds of adapters. And so forth.

The plan was to run a cable from our control center in the convention space up to the hotel cable system head on the roof, and do live coverage of many events on the in-hotel cable system. However, this fell afoul of reality (my guess: cable too long, and maybe the inputs we had access to up there were not in good shape either); we couldn’t get a useful signal up there. Our fallback was to put a VCR up there, carry tapes up, and play them, so we had content going into the hotel system but not in real time. But even that had abysmal video quality; there was some mismatch or fault between our equipment and theirs that we never did resolve. That was frustrating.

Still, we recorded many hours of programming and other things at the convention.

After the convention, that material mostly languished for a long time. One of the problems with video at that time was that recording technology was far in advance of editing technology, especially at the level of equipment we had access to (broadcast studio equipment and timebase correctors and such would have improved things considerably). Also, even if we had the equipment, editing required making a copy, and each copy was noticeably less good than the original (a timebase corrector would have helped a lot, but even that wasn’t perfect).

However, Scott continued collecting new material at fannish events, including Gordy Dickson Day at Southdale in October of 1976, and Minicon 12 in the spring of 1977. He kept making new tapes, somewhat sporadically, at least until the Winnipeg Worldcon in 1994.

This collection of tapes was largely intact, and even somewhat indexed and organized, when Scott died in 2001. There had been some work making some copies (or edited copies) of some of them, and a few presentations at conventions, but mostly the materials just sat.

After Scott’s death, his partner Margie Lessinger transferred the tape collection to Jeff Schalles, who kept them safe for many years. Eventually the Worldcon tapes were transferred to Geri Sullivan, for work starting with the MidAmeriCon II Video Archeology project. Some midwest tapes were transferred to Corwin Brust, and then to Geri for some later video archeology.

MidAmeriCon Video Archeology

With Kansas City hosting MidAmeriCon II 40 years after the original MidAmeriCon (so in 2016), interest and technology had progressed enough to tackle digitizing Scott’s videos. Geri Sullivan got the convention and FANAC.org to fund digitization (which was work requiring experts; the tapes were old and had had plenty of time to absorb moisture), and I took on the project of restoring what I could and editing them and adding titles for presentation.

Many items were played at MidAmeriCon II, both at an automated video kiosk, and at program items in the fan room. Many of those have now been posted to the FANAC Fan History Channel on YouTube (as has other video that FANAC has been involved in rescuing).

Midwest Video Archeology

In 2021, Geri Sullivan started working on getting some of the non-Worldcon midwest tapes digitized.

With the passage of years the tapes are getting harder to digitize (or they may have been stored differently at some point along the way), so our window of opportunity seems to be closing.

Posts

—David Dyer-Bennet, 4-Feb-2022