Industrial Films: "How Much?" ~ 1963 Calvin Workshop (Patreon)

more at http://quickfound.net/

Short industrial film making fun of the difficulty in estimating the cost of producing an industrial film.

Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress 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).

http://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...

In 1931 F. O. and his wife Betty founded the Calvin Company, originally an advertising agency that specialized in 16 mm business movies. They started out in a one-room office in the Business Men Assurance Building, across the street from Union Station in Kansas City... their earliest clients were area-based businesses and organizations such as Kansas Flour Mills, the Security Benefit Association of Topeka, Kansas, the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, Western Auto, and Kansas City Southern Railways.

...After a few years, the Calvin Company had done some decent business and amassed a regular staff of twenty persons... DuPont, Goodyear, Caterpillar Tractor Company, General Mills, Southwestern Bell, and Westinghouse had all joined Calvin's client list by the end of the 1930s. These were accounts that would last for decades. Calvin also branched out into the educational film field, producing pioneering classroom films that were distributed through companies such as McGraw-Hill, Encyclopædia Britannica, and the U.S. Office of Education to public schools throughout the country. The Calvin Company also became known as an innovative and creative force in the non-theatrical movie industry. They pioneered many efficient 16 mm filmmaking and processing methods, and in 1938 they claimed to have produced the first business film in full sound and full color...

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...

Following World War II, there was a tremendous boom in production of industrial and educational films in the U.S., and the Calvin Company was in line to be the leading producer in the field. There was also now a plethora of affordable new 16 mm film equipment on the market, and while this signaled that the Calvin Company's initial goal of popularizing 16 mm had been achieved, 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...

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...