Nicholas Spies

Nicholas Spies was born on 26 Aug 1941, the second of four children, two boys and two girls. His father, Otto Robert Spies, a mathematical physicist, born in Moscow, Russia, was German and Russian and arrived in the US two weeks after the Crash of 1929. His mother, Annie Rosalie Mitchell (Spies), was born in Copper Cliff, Ontario, Canada, and was of Scotch-Irish, Welsh, and Dutch extraction. Nicholas grew up on a bucolic farm in south-eastern Pennsylvania and had an early liking of photography, art and music. After attending the Charlestown Playschool, a Montessori kindergarten, he enjoyed a grade school education in one-room schools in Lionville, PA, grades 1 through 6. Grades 7 through 11 were spent in public schools in Downingtown and West Chester, PA. In 9th grade, he was persuaded to play the Sousaphone, well enough to play a solo with the West Chester High School Concert Band a year later. During this period and later Nicholas became devoted to playing the piano. Both Sousaphone and piano teachers advised going to Julliard to become a professional musician. Nicholas took his last year of high school at The George School, George School, PA. At GS, he won a Gold Medal in Ceramics in the Scholastic Art Awards, was the captain and first board of the winning school chess team, and got top grades in physics (in the Physical Science Study Committee program developed in response to Sputnik). Concerned with career choices, Nicholas took a 2-day series of tests that indicated a proclivity for both 'science' and 'art', thus resolving nothing(!). Meanwhile, through his older brother Robert, who had worked on the "Blob" (as a sound man [without credit]) and the "4D Man" in nearby Chester Springs, PA, Nicholas worked briefly in the summer of 1958 on cell inking for the "4D Man" (to enable the eponymous lead to walk through walls via special effects). Although this work was futile (the ink wrinkled the cells!) it served as an introduction to film making and to Shorty Yeaworth (director of "The Blob", etc), which proved to be a key to his subsequent career decisions. Nicholas went to Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA as a Physics major but dropped out after one semester, being quite conflicted about 'what to do'. I finally found a definitive answer while working on several small projects with Shorty and Jean Yeaworth: I primarily wanted to be a film editor. I returned to Swarthmore and did quite well as a History of Fine Arts major-the closest thing to 'film' that Swarthmore offered at the time. In the summer of 1963 I worked at WQED-TV in Pittsburgh, PA as a production assistant and supervisor for negative cutting at Capital Film Labs, Washington, PA. After one more semester at Swarthmore, I left to take a job at WFIL-TV (now WPVI). This proved to be a wonderful apprenticeship as I spent about a year conforming film (about 50 half-hour and hour films) before being given the opportunity to edit. Editing a short film for the Florida Pavilion at the 1963-64 New York World's Fair on the sports car race at Sebring and 3 films about sport parachuting paved my way for editing all the time (and I still did conforming of my own and other people's shows...). When the opportunity arose, I applied for work again at WQED, and worked on a per-Appollo series for NASA developed by Mattias von Brauchitsch, with whom I had worked in 1963. I worked as a 2nd unit cameraman and editor (while Joe Pytka was the primary cameraman-editor) and the first two shows ("Universe on a Scratchpad, Parts 1 and 2") were featured at the US Pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The next major projects had to do with adult education and post-graduation options for non-college-bound high school students. These took the form of naturalistic documentaries (the form of documentary film that appealed to me), working with Rift Fournier. These were completed by the fall of 1967. I worked briefly with Fred Rogers of Mister Roger's Neighborhood (shooting a segment that appeared in his first national NET show, aired Jan 1968. I also shot and cut portions of a "NET Creative Person" show about Fred Rogers that served to introduce Fred to a national audience. After this I returned to Philadelphia to work again at WFIL-TV. Motivated primarily by the pleasure afforded by shooting and editing rather than any particular career goals, my subsequent work took me in many directions. I worked on writing proposals, shooting and editing numerous industrial films for Forney Miller Film Productions for several years. I met Bell-47 helicopter inventor Arthur Young and made three films for him about his metaphysical "Theory of Process". I shot and cut various commercial spots and the film "Philadelphia Celebrate", the official Bicentennial film for the City of Philadelphia. Perhaps most notably, I worked on the Jimmy Carter Presidential Spots in 1976, being hired after the Democratic Convention. In addition to cutting about one quarter of the spots, I developed a means and workflow for doing the final "conforming" not on film but on videotape for all of the spots (about 40 in all) made by Magus, Inc. The advantages of doing this were greater control, cleaner edits with no "bounce" at cuts (which often blights 16mm films), and speed. Spots that would take a week in a film lab (for timing, negative cutting, and prints) could be done in a couple of hours of (2") video editing. A PBS documentary "Fire and Ice" in 1976 (about a natural gas shortage) was conformed in a similar manner. I later wrote an article (published in Aug 1978) for the Journal of the SMPTE about these techniques. To my knowledge this was the first documented use of videotape to post film for TV. I returned to WQED for the period 1977-1992. At the time "Once Upon a Classic" (developed by Mattias von Brauchitsch) was based on re-cut British shows. WQED was given the chance to produce the first of several US-originated shows-"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". The common way for TV shows of this sort to be produced was to shoot "live" video for interiors and film for exteriors. This was certainly practical, but resulted in a mismatch between the "look" of interiors and exteriors. Executive Producer Jay Rayvid decided to change this convention by shooting everything on videotape, which meant 2" tape at the time. Moreover, the decision was made to shoot the show "film style", that is, with scenes blocked and shot with "one camera" setups (although some scenes were shot with multiple cameras, they were each taped separately for subsequent editing). This was an exciting chance to finally get to do (off-line) video editing. I had by this time several programmable calculator utilities allowing frame-accurate back-timing of edits. This proved to be invaluable for both editing and building music and effects tracks on a 24-track recorder for a film-style mix-down at Reeves Soundcaft in NYC. This not only won an award for the mix but also a Peabody Award and a nomination for a Technical Emmy for Videotape Editing (shared by me and on-line editor Bob Millslagle). Although I edited many other shows for WQED many using off-line video editing as a much faster alternative to film editing, and did more work for and about Fred Rogers, the work I have mentioned is perhaps my most notable in film/video. In addition, I taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA (computer programming for humanities majors, video production) and also cut original video productions (staged at WQED) by students of the CMU Drama Department. I co-authored a text on computer programming, "Forth: A Text and Reference", published by Prentice Hall in 1986, and after 1992 worked mainly in multimedia programming in the Philadelphia area.