Mystery Tapes

 My friends went to an estate sale and happened upon a nice stack of mystery tapes to go through. By their description of the room they were found in, whoever the owner was seemed to be an artist and held an interest in the macabre.

I love going through old tapes and documenting the finds, especially when it's actual video camera footage. I'll post updates as I view these. Judging from what I've seen so far I'm hoping they've stumbled upon a treasure trove!

The first tape seems to be sort of test footage. They made a logo reading "Talent Cave" and spend several minutes testing different lighting as well as the video effects included in their particular camera, such as mirror imaging and inverting colors. Some searches online haven't really yielded anything about what Talent Cave might have been, so it's hard to say if this was ever shown to anyone at this point.

After that we jump to a lengthy shot of a miniature castle and town set up in someone's back yard. The only audio is the occasional breathing of the camera operator as well as the chirping of crickets. Again they seem to be toying around with lighting options and camera effects. We do see as they're thumbing through the camera options a time stamp of 3/13/1999 pops up. So if that's accurate we have a time period at least.

Next we have some test footage of a sort of Xenomorph looking plant monster and a Dragon. It seems the artist had an interest in puppetry! The mouths of both creatures move and the Dragon seems to have full movement in it's head and arms as well.

Finally we have a message from the dark lord

The message being, check out my cool skull lamp!

These tapes have been a fun ride so far. I'll post more interesting things as I come across them.