How I became the face of "the Magic of Perspective" video in 1996, Phoenix, Arizona


If you were in high school in the late '90s or early 2000s, you may have seen a video called "the Magic of Perspective", which explained the basics of drawing using the principles of perspective. That was long before YouTube, and your high school teacher would have just rolled a TV with a VCR player into the room, and you would have sat back and enjoyed a break, maybe enjoying a quick nap. The video was about fifteen minutes long, maybe twenty, but no longer. And the star of the show was me, one of the teachers at the new Art Institute of Phoenix.

It was produced outside of the Art Institute, and I really have no recollection why it was made. But AIPX liked the idea of free publicity, so they volunteered the drawing teacher, who promptly refused to get in front of a camera. I had been learning public speaking, being a new teacher, and when he suggested that I get in front of the camera I thought I'd give it a try. He prompted me, and we even cheated a bit because the drawing that I did on large sheets of paper had faint pencil lines that I could follow.

Sadly, I don't have a digital copy of that video, and my last copy was on a VCR tape, and it's long since gone. Still, it's a pleasant memory to think that I had my fifteen minutes of local fame in Phoenix. There were even some AIPX students who recognized me, and were impressed. If they only knew that I was just repeating words that were being prompted to me off-camera! By the way, that teacher was my first mentor when I was starting out, but I have no memory of him after that, so he must have moved on soon afterwards. I remember talking to him while I was doing my first set of grades, and said something like "if I can make it through this, I'll never do it again!" - mostly because getting up in front of a group was terrible, it made me sick to my stomach. Public speakers call those "butterflies", and I learned that you can't ever make them go away, you just get them to fly in formation.

I'm not very good at math, but it just occurred to me that if you were in high school back then, you'd now be older than I was when I started teaching. I was thirty-eight, which sounds so young now, but to my students I was oooooold (and many of them would let me know!).

So I'm throwing this out there - if you remember "the Magic of Perspective" please let me know.

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