Children’s Video Production NYC

 

Unicorn Tales

Unicorn Tales was an ultra low budget  1970’s children’s musical comedy series on NBC.  It garnered a total of 18 Emmy Awards as well as the prestigious Action For Children’s Television Award along with a host of favorable critics reviews.

The show was produced by Bill Milling, writer, producer, director here at the American Movie Company.  He was just out of NYU film school and hired his classmates to work on the project.  

The video production was all done on a shoestring n NYC in Central Park and a variety of free locations such as The Brooklyn Children’s Museum.

Nick DeNoia, a dancer/choreographer created and directed the show.

Back in the day, 16mm film was the only viable medium for such a low budget project and the raw stock, developing and print costs as well as sound stock and the older, slower flat bed, linear editing systems made up a large portion of the $30,000 episode production expense.

The show was non union and virtually all the child performers had this as their very first performance on camera.

The following clip (very bad quality as it was downloaded from an old VHS copy) is from the Magnificent Major an early episode of Unicorn Tales.  The show a  was co-written by David Wolf and Bill Milling with heavy influences from Fahrenheit 451.