Multimedia: Middle Ages Re-creators

josh — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 03:34:53 +0000

The time has come. After letting them languish for over a year in the dank recesses of various external hard-drives, my old journalism school multimedia team (including Michael Zhao, producer of “eDump“) has decided to dust off the video files from our inaugural project—Knights in Shining Armor–for all the world to see.

The project was a profile of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a global group of Middle Ages Re-creators with upwards of 30,000 members scattered in 19 “kingdoms” ranging from California to Japan. The group was founded in 1966 in Berkeley, CA during a theme party hosted by writer Diana Paxson (co-author with Marion Zimmer-Bradley of the Avalon series of fantasy novels). Paxson still lives in Berkeley, in a Gothic house guarded by gargoyles on El Camino Real, just down the street from where another of the multimedia team members, Zachary Slobig, used to live.

This post contains two videos from the original project, both shot during a minor war staged between two factions within the Kingdom of the West (northern and central California plus Alaska and northern Nevada) in Gilroy, CA in the spring of 2006. There’s also a radio piece I did for North Gate Radio, the journalism school’s radio magazine program, on the SCA’s legendary fighter practice in the parking lot of Berkeley’s Rockridge BART station.

The team: Michael Zhao, Zachary Slobig, James Buck, yours truly.

“Thunder Clap,” War in Gilroy.

YouTube link.

“What is the SCA?”

YouTube link

Radio spot from North Gate Radio’s spring 2007 “greatest hits” show:

Ch-infamous » middle ages

Multimedia: Middle Ages Re-creators