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Update 29/11/2012
First Update!
This is just to cover a bundle of stuff that wasn't addressed totally in the original posting, so it's time for an F.A.Q.
So, how's it going?
Well, we've raised $176 over the past few weeks thanks to the generosity and kindness of select Glitch fans which is really heartening!
If you're into statistics, that puts us exactly 3.52% towards the funding goal.
Yeah, the goal you set was kind of high. What's up with that?
Well, optimism.
Not to get all gushy – again – but I believe in this project because I believe that Glitchis something that should be discussed in documentary form.
Everyone who's played Glitch will remember it after it's gone – this is just a way of collating some of those memories together in one place and sharing them like stories around a campfire.
Stories that may involve squeezing chickens, taking Essence of Purple and hallucinating, and streaking. But stories nonetheless.
That's nice, but why $5000?
Well, the goal was set at this level with the idea that Tiny Speck – based in San Francisco, a long way from where I'm writing this now – could be interviewed, which would require travel, equipment hire and insurance.
Like you most likely read in the previous brief, however, there's two models of how this works out, and the funding can be broken down.
It'd be good to know where the money's going, yeah.
Well, it's like this;
$100 - $200
This pays for on-site storage (in the form of external hard drives or such). The one thing I've learnt about film is that it involves bloody huge files, to use the technical phrases they taught us, and to get a lot of them together and backed up needs serious storage.
Currently we've raised enough for about 2tb – maybe 3tb at a pinch – in on-site storage, which should cover all the needs. So... Thanks for that, everyone who contributed so far!
$200 - $500
Past two hundred but up to five hundred is involved in finding ways to actually transmit the Bloody Huge Files™ to one location. There are a variety of free services that might be able to handle some of this, but it's envisaged that some sort of paid service will be involved.
At the same time, the two-to-five costs are going to be used on software upgrades and various fixes to the equipment that's available to bring them up to spec. The ability is there currently to edit whatever's sent, but it takes a long time to do anything without certain tweaks etc.
Equally, there have been a few offers from community members to help with editing, which should speed this up.
$500 - $1000
Anything above $500 will go towards licensing costs of any music and other media. It's not expected that these costs will be huge – especially if Tiny Speck give permission to use assets from Glitch in the documentary, which I really hope they will! - but there's all manner of bitty little things that creep up when you're making a film, and they all need to be solved before it can be released.
The five-to-thou tier also means more upgrades for software, etcetera. It also allows for a website to be set up to give out more information and updates about Glitch after the site shuts its doors.
Basically, anything up to $1000 gets ploughed into making sure the storage, equipment and software are up to scratch, because screaming She cannae take anymore, Captain! at the computer at 2a.m when the render crashes or the sound de-syncs or the footage needs re-encoding is not fun.
Oh, trust me on that last one, from experience.
$1000 Upwards
To be honest, maybe we're probably in pixie magical dream land here, but if this doeshappen anything above $1000 goes towards prospective travel and equipment hire costs.
For instance, it may prove easier to actually find a crew in San Francisco than to actually travel there myself, which is where these costs would come in.
This is based around the idea of an actual bricks-and-mortar business edifice, though, and given how Glitch's programming is distributed, this may not be the case – in which... um... case, this money would go towards interviewing the various brilliant people who created Glitch (if they want to be interviewed) wherever they may be and, again, finding ways of sending that footage back.
Surely setting the funding cap so high means that Indiegogo just guarantee a slightly bigger slice for themselves, though?
Well, maybe. But personally I'm okay with that, because they provide a great service and deserve to be compensated, whether it's 4% or 9%. It would just be silly to complain about paying the people who host your campaign and handle all the funding, now, wouldn't it?
So the $64,000 question – why are you doing this?
Because I think it should be done.
I'm not going to argue that it needs to be done on any level – there are more worthy causes out there than this documentary – but I think, deep in my heart of hearts, that this documentary should be made.
Not to start repeating parts of the brief, but there are a lot of people out there who will miss Glitch when it's gone. They'll all have their own favourite memories of the place, and I doubt they'll ever forget it. But these memories – if these people want to share them – should be put together and shown to others, so they can know whatGlitch meant to people.
Maybe this is just folly, but I think this documentary should happen because per-maybe-haps it'll be a little bit as unique as its subject.
Well, I can hope.
But are you some sort of Glitch super-fan or something?
I'm no fanatic. I haven't played as much Glitch as I'd like over the past couple of years, but when I did – and still do, time permitting – get the chance to play, I'm always amazed all over again at the kind of experience it is.
There are, I'm sure, people out there much more committed and much greater fans than I am – hell, I know there are because of the art, music and poetry that are being produced – but this is my way of celebrating it using methods I've been trained with.
Let's skip past the training part, though, before we get to “but what I do have are a very particular set of skills”, though. That wouldn't be pretty.
So what happens next?
Well, hopefully a few things happen;
(I) People keep contributing whatever they can, which is much appreciated;
(II) Tiny Speck maybe get in touch about interviews and assets
(III) In – *checks* - 50 days, the campaign ends, and the real work begins.
… Yeah. Why did you set the campaign end date over a month after Glitch closes up shop?
Um. Well. I didn't really think that through, but it may be for the best, because it gives people a chance to step back and think objectively about what Glitch meant to them, rather than during the inevitable grieving period that'll come immediately after the end.
Plus, not everyone will want to contribute in the run-up to the Holiday season, but maybe there's some New Year good will a-coming!
You really are an optimist, aren't you!
Yeah. But a realist, too; so I invite you to look at it this way. Currently there's enough funding to pay for on-site storage, so as long as there are ways to collate everything people contribute in one place, this documentary can go ahead.
Any additional funding up to the $1000 level will mean that the final product is just that much more polished and representative of the kind of enthusiasm people have forGlitch. Don't get me wrong; I'll work on this for as long as it takes, no matter the funding available, to get it to a state in which it can be released – but this is the real world, and, as we know, in the real world, money makes problems go away a lot faster and perhaps more gracefully than sweat.
I can give you an example of this, if you'd like a final anecdote.
When editing my last film, I discovered that – having had to borrow a different camera to the one I'd been using for the majority of filming – I had a whole bundle of files in what's called .mxf format.
The computer hated these files – or, more accurately, Final Cut Pro hated thes files – and as it was a public workstation, I couldn't download the updates or codecs necessary to translate the files for FCP's benefit.
I tried all sorts of things, culminating in turning an entire video lab of around eighteen computers into a kind of rendering farm, taking up an entire weekend, to try to get these *&£$% files into the right format, to no avail.
When I was that far away from giving up – which would have meant the film would have fallen apart – I found a piece of software for $25 that did the translating without fuss, muss or even bother. It did what I couldn't do in a weekend in about six hours.
So money isn't everything – not by a long shot – but sometimes it comes in handy.
Hope this clears a few things up, and all the best for the holiday season!
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