New & Unique Tijuana

By the time Warner Brothers called New & Unique Videos searching for HD stock footage of Tijuana for the "Joey Show," they had developed calluses on their dialing fingers, and still had not found what they were looking for. New & Unique Videos, a stock-footage house with plenty of clips, both contemporary and archival, had recently started collecting HD footage. They had Standard Definition 4x3 shots of Tijuana but nothing on HD. Mark Schulze, owner of both New & Unique Videos and Crystal Pyramid Productions, a video production house, suggested that the "Joey Show" hired him to go and collect the footage on the Sony Cine Alta F900, which Schulze was using that week to shoot aerial HD footage ofo San Diego. Schulze's suggestion would allow the "Joey Show" to have the exact clips they wanted, own all the footage outright, and do what they wanted with it, worldwide and in perpetuity. Not surprisingly, they said yes.

Schulze took the Cine Alta into Tijuana and shot scenes of downtown, the Mexican flag, and some of the seedier sections of town at dusk and night featuring flea-bag hotels where Joey and his nephew would supposedly be staying after getting drunk at a Tijuana bar. Later, in the comfort of his editing bay, while replaying some of the footage of the dark alleys, Schulze noticed a "bonus:" he had captured a drug deal going down.

The "Joey Show" producers were pleased that their episode was now in the can. Schulze was pleased, as he got the shots for both the "Joey Show" and New & Unique Videos' stock footage library. And he got out of Mexico with camera--and self--still intact.