Digipak Production Sample Arrives

There are 4000 digipaks sitting in a warehouse right now, waiting for slipcases and two DVDs. I asked the duplication house to send some samples along I can bring to PAX.

They’ve arrived.

This is the tray that will hold the two DVDs. There will be a slipcase that goes around this, just like a slipcase did for the BBS documentary.

Aesthetically, there’s a bunch of stuff going on here, and there will be more related to the slipcase. (Also called a slipcover, but I like slipcase as a term.) The outside artwork and image is very sad and forlorn, almost monochrome, while the inside artwork is bright, vibrant, and huge.

More as it comes.

GET LAMP Shipping Delayed; PAX Premiere On as Scheduled

I had been hoping not to write something like this, but I hope the reasons for writing it make sense.

Basically, things are taking a lot longer on a lot of fronts and GET LAMP will not be released on DVD within March. I’m now shooting for April, early May. I’d love to be surprised and have it earlier in April, but I don’t think it wise to commit to that.  While many pre-orderers are fans and a bunch bought the BBS Documentary and might remember that delay, I also understand people saying they’re not comfortable with this, and would prefer a refund and to order GET LAMP when it’s out, and if so, please mail me and I’ll make the proper arrangements with you to get your money back.

Make no mistake: this project is real. 4000 DVD digipaks which I’ve paid for are sitting in a warehouse, and 4000 slipcases are about to be printed with my final approval. The proof coins are now being made and will be sent to me shortly, at which point the coins are going to be sent to me as well. (I wonder how much 4000 coins weigh, anyway….)

There’s multiple reasons for the delay. I’ll explain them but first, let me say the PAX premiere is going to happen, have no worry there. I’ll see you there, and I can tell you with pride that on schedule for the panel after the movie is Steve Meretzky, Dave Lebling, Brian Moriarty, Andrew Plotkin, and Nick Montfort. Plus a surprise guest or two. So that’s on, don’t worry about that.

One major delay has been rendering the material from the HD master files, and using video noise reduction. This adds hours to the process, which basically ties up the machine. That’s why things got so far into this year.

Another has been that I’ve been very careful about proofs of EVERYTHING, so I’ve made the various places send me verified PDFs and hard-copy proofs in the mail. This somewhat-more-expensive process has already paid off, fixing a problem with colors on the slipcase. I’ll be doing the same with the DVDs (printing proofs and then testing and approving them). This adds iterations to what’s completed.

Next is the opportunity to record additional commentary tracks with some of the people associated with the content and movie – arranging schedules and preparing track lengths so people can add commentary is taking some time. I have a field of betatesters watching footage, and they keep finding minor but important bugs, like a mis-defined acronym or a transition that’s broken. They make it better but then we end up with that rendering again.

Finally, I’ve just been making absolutely sure everything is as high quality as it can be. I’ve watched stuff a dozen times, have been making changes, clearing up lines of narrative, adding in additional informative shots, and so on. The DVDs have 25 extras of footage and counting, the ROM section is huge, and so on. It’s just a big project.

So there we are. I’ll be taking pre-orders at PAX and at a booth to discuss the movie/production and answer questions, and I hope that you’ll see the causes for the delay. Thanks for understanding.

In which a coin is revealed

The first coin company I called, who seemed good enough online, was staffed by a salesperson who acted as if I was reading her the weather in Moonbeam, Ontario; uninterested and not overly prone to at least answering questions. I worked overnight to create some sketches of the coin, and then didn’t hear from them the next day. Or the day after that. I don’t work with places that run this way, so I looked up another coin company. The person who answered the phone at this new place was personable, helpful, answered all sorts of crazy pictures and asked for more information about the project itself, to understand the coin’s context in all of it.

I mailed along my rough sketch, and a few days later, their art department mailed me the following proof:

I’ve approved this artwork, and this is what the coin will look like.

People who’ve seen this and asked if they can buy the coin separately (I would like to think to have a second coin, but maybe they just want a coin?) have been told that yes, I am open to that.

It’s all getting closer!

Subtitle Files Will be on the DVD-ROM

The whole GET LAMP movie has subtitles, as well as all the bonus features and episodes on it. It’s actually pretty simple to do, and after my team of transcribers has completed the work, it’s almost a realtime process to say “this goes here at this time, this goes there at that time”. I do it using a program called Subtitle Workshop. It really is the greatest thing.

I just wanted to let people know that I will be including the .sub files generated for my software in the DVD-ROM section of GET LAMP, so that others who want to translate or use the subtitles for their own purposes can do so. I would include translations on the DVD but it’s quite an involved process to work in translation, so I’m going to just stick with making it easy for folks to do their own translation/modification work and share them. If people do translations and want to send them to me, I’ll make sure the site has them. The timings should work with any ripped DVD stuff, and of course any high-resolution versions that come out in the future.

When I pop in an independent documentary and there’s no subtitles, I’m immediately suspicious about the creators’ dedication and interest in their work. Subtitles are easy as pie, and they make life so much easier for the deaf, for people who are having trouble catching everything going by, or even (as I’ve heard) parents who want to watch a film but have to keep the volume down low so as not to bother/wake the kids. And come on, Subtitle Workshop is world-class software and absolutely free. No excuses!

The GET LAMP Coin

You’re probably wondering why so many postings are coming in at this time, after periods where no posts came for months. Mostly, it’s because as I near the end of production, all the little loose ends I’ve had are being wrapped up as fast as I can, and the machine is mostly being used to render out final versions of various extras. There’s still some editing and other work to do, but I can breathe now. More critically, I am able to work on the other stuff required of the DVD set: the packaging, the artwork, and the coin.

The coin?

If you ever played the old Infocom games at the time, and by “played” I mean “bought the package”, they always included all sorts of tie-ins.  Marketing at Infocom called them “feelies”, that is, an additional layer of interaction with the game letting you feel that you’d not just bought a game but an experience. Infocom had tons of feelies over the years, be they peril-sensitive sunglasses, a glowing rock, a swizzle stick, or a business card. In interviews with people, among the best memories they have are of the feelies, some keeping the items long after everyone else was lost. I found people who, for 20 years have kept the little glowing rock from Wishbringer. It wakes something up in the player, something special.

So naturally I knew that GET LAMP needed something like this. This was planned years ago.

The original plan was to include Invisiclues, the invisible-ink printed text that a stroke of a special pen would reveal. The idea was to put spoilers related to the movie in this booklet and have a fun little way of revealing them. After research (and some very kind people found places I could contact to even have this done), the numbers were just staggering: I needed to buy 10,000 sheets of paper, they’d be a significant amount apiece (something like $.50) and the little discussed fact is, after a while, the revealed clues will fade away. The marker will get old and you can’t just buy replacements, and we’re talking a single folded sheet, not a booklet. And so on. Just not enough value for the money, basically.

So then I decided, how about something styling, something that will be memorable, something that will last. And so I decided on having a coin done.

I’m working on the artwork and am submitting it to the vendor tomorrow. This will set a few things in motion, and we can all hope it won’t be too difficult to pull off. I’ve worked with DVD duplication before, but never coin creation. It should be exciting, and I’ll talk about it, whether it goes well, or goes off the rails.

There is a notable precedent for coins in packages related to interactive fiction, by the way. The Zorkmid.

Some people sigh in happiness when they hear the word Zorkmid. Some have no idea of what I’m talking about.

Here is what a Zorkmid looked like:

(This zorkmid and photograph of same is from http://lostlevel.wordpress.com/)

THIS IS NOT WHAT IS COMING WITH THE PACKAGE. Just in case someone skims this and misreads. THE GET LAMP COIN WILL BE TWO-TONE METAL, AND A DIFFERENT DESIGN.

The Zorkmid came with a specific repackaging of Zork, called The Zork Trilogy. It was one of the most popular “feelies” of all, and it is highly sought after. It’s so sought after, there’s a project that’s been around for 10 years called The Zorkmid Project.

Reading the Zorkmid project page always drives me nuts, because it’s classic Big Company Driving Minor Projects Into The Ground. The conditions put on the project leader are, in a word, stupid. I’m sure the person approving it and providing the conditions is not stupid, it’s just him having to follow what someone on the legal staff says, and people on the legal staff are required to come up with work that completely protects the company. Sounds almost… reasonable. Except there is no way Activision is ever going to make Zorkmids. Come on, they’re never, ever, ever going to, and if they do, it’s 2010, and they’re going to be big stupid dumb Zorkmids, completely unlike the original Zorkmids. That someone would even be so touched and entranced by a wrap-in from nearly 15 years previously (at the time; now it’s 23 and counting) should be a place for joy, not a place to suddenly halt the Zorkmid market in its tracks. At most, probably 500 people were going to want Zorkmids, maybe a few apiece, but good ol’ Activision, Keepers Of The Flame, couldn’t be bothered to let this person put the project together without making it sound like one wrong step would blacken the sky with lawyers.

Where was I? Oh yes, Coin.

So I’m working on this coin, and if you ordered a copy of GET LAMP you are getting a coin, and if you order one now, you get a coin, and I am ordering enough coins to cover the entire run of 4,000 copies of GET LAMP. It is not likely there will be a second run of the coins. The coins will also be individually numbered – collect them all!

So congratulations, people who already pre-ordered… your package is going to have a little more than you expected.

I’m very happy to include something a little extra into this. It eats into profit, of course, but it’s not about profit – it’s about giving people something special when they order using the old school way of physical media, and something which I hope to see in photos and on people’s shelves for some time to come.

Locking in Extras

I’m in the process of locking in extras. This means that I’m doing final edits and renders on what I think are the final versions of all the extra bits of footage on the DVDs. This actually constitutes hours of content, so it’s pretty significant. I don’t have the exact numbers yet, but it’s in the dozens of extras ranging from under a minute to up to 15, and with all sorts of subjects thrown in there.

Some are sequences I liked but which just didn’t let the movie breathe, while others are planned sequences meant to cover something I always knew would never make it in. For example, I have a 10 minute meditation on the Z machine that Infocom implemented. Trust me; if you don’t know much about interactive fiction and the creation of it, this sequence would murder you. If you are, you will enjoy watching Andrew “Zarf” Plotkin, creator of the Blorb format, happily trounce over the history of the creation of the Z machine, backed up by… the co-creator of the Z machine, Marc Blank.

I’ve used markers to ensure the items can be re-rendered over and over if need be. It will be going to a small group of people who will inspect the final work and let me know if something needs repair. This will take some time, but it’s worth it. And so begins the big run towards filling the DVDs with final pieces.

Original Artwork Arrives

When you pay an artist to do artwork, at least, a full-on professional, you often buy the rights to artwork but not the original artwork itself. It’s cheaper, and if you run through a lot of contractual artwork and don’t feel like building a gallery, then you don’t really need it. In my case, this painting obviously has special meaning to me, so I bought it from Lukas.

He shipped it to me and it arrived today:

It’s even more beautiful in person. It’s different than the final artwork in a few ways (mostly missing details added in Photoshop) and to me that makes it even more unique. I intend to be one of Lukas’ more insistent and positive references, should he ever need a reference. (Who needs references when you have a portfolio like he does?)

The original is not for sale, in case anyone’s wondering. Not anymore.

I’ll be researching doing a poster soon. The big issue is finding out the minimums and what the costs would be. If it’s crazy or if there’s not enough pre-orders, then I won’t do it, so let me know if you’re interested….

Disc Artwork

For the disc artwork, I wanted something relatively simple.  So I purchased reprint rights from Lukas Ketner for the sketches of his artwork. (I don’t believe that purchasing the rights to the final artwork automatically means process artwork, and anyway Lukas’ price for reprint rights was very generous.)

Here are the two images, as they appear on the template:

Simple, evocative and easy to put together. I love it.

This represents the last bit of my side for the packaging. Now there will be an iteration or two while working with the duper for making sure everything looks good.

Packaging Done

I finished the designs of the packaging. Here’s the inside fanfold:

And the outside slipcover:

This is going out to the printer and we’ll be doing the proofs and all that fun now. Once it’s all approved, they will make 4,000 copies of it.

First-Through Renders

I’ve been rendering out 1.0 versions of the movie pieces to disk.

This takes a while – one 20 minute sequence takes about two hours, and that ratio seems to hold up with a few other sections. The machine can be used for other things while this goes on, so it’s not a complete paperweight, but editing on the same machine is pushing it a bit. Doubling the editing machine’s ram from 2GB to 4GB made a huge difference – crashes were happening previously and the machine kept running out of memory. All that’s gone.

After I know all the assets list (the amount of ‘items’ on the DVD) I’ll list it here, in general terms, just so you know. There’s a DVD-ROM section with games, photos, speeches and other material – that’s a different deal. This is just all the different stuff you can watch. It looks like it’ll be upwards of 4 hours of “stuff”.

Still trying to have stuff ready for PAX, but it’s coming down to the wire, and again, quality wins. I have many hundreds of orders, and obviously they get this stuff first – it’s going to be quite a few days of mailing for me.