Where Art Plays Its Part: Volume VII: Videographer Hy Mayerson

Pairing songs on film with pictures and scenery pushing along as the minutes go by is something Hy Mayerson has been doing ever since close friend and renowned musician Jim Croce passed away in the autumn of 1973.

“When he died in an airplane crash, I had no film of him playing in my house,” Mayerson said. “I wanted to be sure that never happened again.”

Croce played locally, having been born in Philadelphia.

Today, Mayerson does videos combined with the singing of Croce’s son A.J.

“Birchrunville was really a music hub,” Mayerson said about the nearby town, with his affection for music from decades ago apparent. “Lots of great music played there.”

Folk singer-songwriters John Prine and Stevie Goodman, well-famed in the 1970s, have played at Mayerson’s house, but as he is a seasoned attorney, his law office where music and videos often come to life, sits along Schuylkill Road in Spring City.

His unplanned dive into becoming a videographer related to his law work, too.

“I represented an engineer who invented the first patent to edit videotape,” Mayerson said. “The lawyer who got him the patent stole it from him, so I sued the lawyer for malpractice and won. As a wedding present, he filmed my wedding with a Super 8 Sound movie camera and gave me that camera.”

Since then, Mayerson has owned Beta, VHS and Hi8 cameras and a digital one run by tape. He has two Handycams—one is large, while the other is fist-sized and captures high definition video.

Mayerson, known on YouTube as RedKruzer, in honor of his cherry-hued 1969 two-seater Jaguar he purchased brand new that year, finds songs he feels a deep connection to, by artists across different genres of music. The next step for him is then employing his camera to paint to life the glimpses of images he sees as matching the lyrics and sounds, fitting to his character and perspective.

Years ago, as a rare asset in their time, his videos ran on PCTV. Not wanting to mix his law identity with his videographer identity, Mayerson used RedKruzer as a pseudonym to play the creations on television, so it only made sense to keep the name once he began uploading his selections to YouTube in 2006.

The spacious main upper room of his law office serves as an unlikely yet acoustics-perfect setting known as the ImaginAIRium, which has sister sites at two friends’ homes in Woodstock, New York and Waterford, Ireland.

“It’s one of two things,” Mayerson explained about the ImaginAIRium. “It’s a physical space and a virtual space, between your ears.”

Mayerson started the ImaginAIRium as a way to bring creatively-minded stage performers into one space, including musicians, poets and anyone who has something expressive and deep to voice about life and today’s world.

But for his own purposes, roaming afar is sometimes needed to bring back the videos that make homes in the ImaginAIRium.

“Normally, perhaps 95 percent of the time, I use only my own photos or video,” Mayerson said about his pieced together works. “The interesting thing about photos today is that one can do a Ken Burns’ move with the photo, and it appears to move across the landscape of the photo. A good example of that are the three Occupy Wall Street videos I recently did.”

On Nov. 2, Mayerson journeyed to New York City with his grandson to experience Occupy Wall Street in person, and in the process, he used several sets of footage he took that day to incorporate into videos juxtaposed with songs emotionally specific to the movement.

“It wasn’t just kids and young people there,” he said, with the trip as a pilgrimage to find out what the group’s real message came across as—a plea for the most basic of rights in a great country. “It was elders, too.”

“Historically, as a lawyer, I have stood up for people’s rights,” Mayerson added. His efforts led to forklifts finally having safety belts to save lives instead of needlessly resulting in 200 deaths per year.

“They took about 10 hours each to edit,” Mayerson said about the Occupy Wall Street videos which are sometimes startlingly evocative as some of his most recent YouTube uploads.

Mayerson has traveled throughout the country and overseas in filming his videos, but experiencing the glimmers in life through them and what improvising brings out in him during the creative process is what inspires him most wholesomely, often right in the heart of Chester County.