The First of Many

12/21/24

Today, I submitted my last assignment of the semester. Now, I have winter break to work on putting videos on VHS.

During the summer, I got interested in old Adult Swim broadcasts being archived on YouTube and Internet Archive. I ended up recording these old broadcasts onto blank VHS tapes,to play as one long six hour broadcast on my TV for background noise. I then got the idea to put YouTube videos onto a VHS tape, to make a physical backup of some of my favorite videos, but mostly as an excuse to make a YouTube VHS tape, a little novelty.

When I started, I noticed that the jump between these videos seemed abrupt and disjointed, so I had the idea to create little Adult Swim style bumps to go in between and easily transition between all different types of videos. I downloaded the font and came up with a neat little name for my fake network, and Digital Guillotine was born. I made a four hour proof of concept tape during the summer right before moving back into the dorms for fall semester, but after recording it to tape, I could see several places I could improve. Now that I'm home again for winter break, I've put together about an hour worth of what will be the first official Digital Guillotine tape.

My main goal with this website is to document not only my work with Digital Guillotine, but also any other compilation tapes I might make in the future. I also intend to create tutorials for making your own VHS tapes, from editing and recording to making your own box art and stickers. Hopefully in the coming days I'll update my website more, and add more interesting commentary. If you're reading this before any other blog posts have been added, then thank you for checking out my silly little website.