A Documentary Film Guy

[Jason Scott]

Hello, everyone.

I've been following this board for about a month now (and a lot of other sites as well). I spent 4 years (2001-2005) shooting a documentary about Dial-up Bulletin Boards; it ended up being 250 hours of interview footage edited down (over 8 months) to eight episodes, for a total of 5.5 hours over 3 DVDs.

I shot the thing on a Canon XL-1 hooked to a PC running Vegas Video 4.0 (later 5.0) and about 4 terabytes of USB2 disk drives.

I've started pre-production on my next film (a documentary about text adventures) and I made several decisions, the most pressing being that I would go with an HD or HDV camera. I was very close to buying a Sony Z1U until I saw stuff about the HVX, and well, there we go.

So my intention is to buy one later this month, and a round of sound hardware, and the rest, but I wanted to drop a note here that I was doing this, because I know I will be shooting well over 100 hours and editing it for my film, so I'm going to have to go through a lot of stuff and bang out a lot of workflows to make my setup work.

For the kind of work I'm doing, P2s are a non-starter; I can't have a total of 18 minutes at any given time, and for the amount of money that two 8gb P2 cards would cost, I'm just going to buy a sexy small laptop with a video import from the HVX going, and then just a bunch of external drives living the vida loca with me on the road.

So put me down as one of the guys putting this thing through its paces/hurdles in the coming year or two, as I shoot this (and likely a few other) documentaries with it.

Barry, I would be interested if there was any way for you to test the HVX -> Laptop -> Drive workflow. I know it's supposed to work in theory, but I'd like to know someone got it to go.

Anyway, thanks for having this group, everyone. I enjoy it all.

[mikkowilson]

Welcome to DVXuser! :beer:

We look forward to your reports :)

- Mikko

[AshG]

The only real issue is going to be data security. I think you are going to have to get some Raid5 externals or something. In a doc you just cant afford to lose any footage from a HDD crash.


ash =o)

[Jarred Land]

yes, welcome Jason.

me and Barry are working on an alterior capture/record article right now.

[Jason Scott]

Regarding data security:

I actually find anything but the most top-end RAID solutions iffy at best. I end up using just drive mirroring, running software that does the Windows equivalent of an "rsync" (the program I use is called "Synchronize It!") and I always have all data in at least three locations, plus tape and other long-term storage as needed. We'll see how well that stands up against torrents of HD data.

During the production of the BBS Documentary I lost 14 drives and didn't lose any data, so I'm pretty meticulous about that stuff. I could see a situation where the drive dies during the capture phase, but that's about the same as a tape jamming up and dying, so I'm fine with this (rare) eventuality. I intend to be recording the sound on a second location as well, so I could always switch to the voiceover method for that shot-scene if needed.

Excellent to hear you're working on it, Jarred. At the current prices, P2 makes no sense to a documentary guy doing dozens and dozens of hours.

[ullanta]

Hmmm... on a side note...

Bulletin boards? Text adventures? In the 2000's? Are there people still doing this stuff to film, or are you filming nostalgic discussions?

Please, don't take this as anything nasty, I'm really intrigued. I last used a BB in the 80's, and text adventures on a Sperry 7000 in 1989. Or maybe a VAX in 1990 (you know, I guess - around the time when it was popular for players to be able to add their own modifications on-the-fly to maps in multiplayer games).

Is there now a culture of BBers who are nostalgic about old equipment, or who feel it safer for their illicit activities than the net?

Tell us a bit more if you can!

-Barry

[Jason Scott]

I didn't want to come off as enclosing my workflow questions into an ad for my product. :) But I'll say this much.

Yes, there are still BBSes out there, and there are most definitely text adventures (more text adventures than there have ever been, actually). My gearing is towards interviews and historical footage, of course.

My little niche/place is that I do nice little films about subjects that nobody seemed to have been doing in a documentary form, so people naturally go "woah" on hearing the subject, wondering why I suddenly chose it.

The website of the bulletin board documentary is http://www.bbsdocumentary.com and the future text adventure website is http://www.getlamp.com.

I have sold thousands of copies of the 3-DVD set. So people definitely want to know about them.

[ullanta]

Thanks for the info. "Get Lamp" is a great title!

-Barry

[JerseyMike]

Thanks for making the BBS doc! I saw the trailers and now I can't wait to see it (I was a sysop back in the day). That's great that you're doing a text adventure movie now. ZORK!! Would you consider covering some of the text adventures that had simple graphics like Mystery House??? Damn that game was fun!
OPEN DOOR
CLIMB STAIRS
TAKE INVENTORY
KICK DOOR
?? command unknown
SHUT UP
?? command unknown

screw this... PR#6 (Apple reboot command)

ok sorry for getting off topic, I was just so thrilled to hear about this BBS film and now the text adventure film!

Oh and I just noticed you run textfiles.com. I was the guy who wrote you saying I had all the early Computist articles in mint condition. Small world!

[pmark23]

What a great idea for a documentary! I was a text-adventure addict back in the early 80's (Apple ][).

In high-school (mid '80's) I wrote my own parsing engine which could accept complete sentences (and also paragraphs), rather than just two word commands.

It also had a make-your-own-adventure utility, which ended up being very popular among my classmates. I heard that this eventually became part of the ICON software distribution (Canadian educational computer system), so if you were in high-school during the mid-late eighties, took computer science, and used the ICON, chances are you've seen my program. :)

Man, that brings back memories. I'm looking forward to your doc!

[stidle]

i can't wait to get this bbs documentary...it's funny -- a friend and i were ruminating on the days of "elite" bbses back in 1994-96 (when i was involved primarily) and i literally uttered these words: "that would be a great documentary subject. i hope no one's done that."

well, you beat me to it...but the product looks great.

am i correct in saying that you were once "radman" of acid ansi? i spent some time lurking in #ACiD in my day ;).
-matt

[Tainted]

I first heard about your BBS doc on Slashdot many, many months ago. I bet that little post helped sell a lot of DVDs!!! :)

BTW, I commend you on your efforts to open source some of your raw footage. I'm not sure you're still doing that over on the Archive, but if you are that totally f'ing rocks! I love seeing guerilla-style bucking the system with self-distribution and open sourcing, etc.

Lastly, you'll find it nice to know that I see kids, new young modern kids, playing text-based games at the SF Public Library all of the time. So much so, it's become a problem over the years. The kids figured out how to play them over the old-scool 3270 screens, or whatever terminals those are, that the card catalog is on. It's like some old geek taught a kid how to do it, and then that kid taught others, until you had kids hogging up the card catalog searches, LOL! There's a time limit on the web stations, but none on the terminals, and the terminals have Net access. CLASSIC!

Anyway, major props to you and your efforts, I for one, loved the whole BBS era, and at times miss it. (In fact, near the end of the BBS glory days and pre the 1994 web-blowup beginnings, I actually ran a small corporate-based BBS on Mac hardware using some software that was awesome but now the name somehow escapes me.)

-- Taint

[joemondello]

I have sold thousands of copies of the 3-DVD set. So people definitely want to know about them.

Did you sell those just through your website? Or do you do other marketing and distribution?

[Jason Scott]

stidle: Bear in mind that my documentary covers elite BBSes as one of about 100 major subjects or so, across the five and a half hours. I worked on this documentary specifically because nobody else seemed to be going for it. As it was, it took years and hundreds of interviews and I still get the occasional complaint I left something out (often by people who haven't seen the documentary yet). There have been a bunch of "hacker" documentaries, since that's the easy sexy subject, and people have no problems with it not telling the "real" story all that much, since it has lots of techno music and a nice set of weirdly-lit shadows. But I was going for something more, there.

Tainted: I am in fact continuing to upload the raw interviews. With 200+ hours of footage, and the process of going through each interview hour by hand (to make sure nothing libelous or troubling goes up), it just takes a while and obviously other stuff takes priority. But my intention is that yes, 200 hours of footage will go up (over a dozen hours are already up).

Joemondello: I was mentioned on several high-profile websites (Slashdot, Boingboing, Wired) and this got attention. I sell through my own website and through Amazon (Amazon takes 55 percent of my cover price and that's why it costs more there). I've probably sold 300 through Amazon. The rest are all through BBSDOCUMENTARY.COM, in person at a couple conventions I attended, and so on.