This posting is entirely technical, doesn’t have an illustration to go with it, really (but I’ll stick one in anyway) and is of very little use to most people buying the documentary. But I did want to get it down somewhere, especially while the machine keeps getting tied up with this very process and I can’t do other editing.
GET LAMP is a series of episodes, bonus features, and additional material in a DVD-ROM section. In the parlance of DVD making, these are called “assets”, and you add menus and the rest from these “assets”, like “make a menu which has this asset for a background and when people click or select this part of the image, it goes and plays this asset and then heads back to this menu”. At some point in DVD-making history, it was a lot more complicated, but everything’s been simplified/dumbed down over the years, so it’s actually rather easy. It even handles the layer breaks in a sane fashion, but the less we say about the layer breaks the better.
The big deal is making sure all the assets are as good quality as you can make them, be they audio or video, or still image or whatever. And then comes the combining of everything into a cohesive whole. The biggest deal is that I shot in hi-def and I’m rendering to a widescreen standard def, and this confuses Sony Vegas if you don’t make sure a few things are in place (setting the project to be the same as the hi-def footage, even though setting the whole project to widescreen dv will render faster, it’ll add annoying bars on the sides). But once it’s rendered, it looks pretty good.
…well, until it all gets checked, and checked again. So that’s what’s going on, rendering out every possible asset when not working on the Infocom episode, which is nearly done. I’ll probably have over a few hundred assets in play with this DVD, not counting the DVD-ROM section (but that thing’s set, and doesn’t need any massaging or anything).
Besides the video assets, you actually can attach as many soundtracks as you want to the video, either the soundtrack we’d all expect, or commentary tracks, or tracks with just the music, or whatever you want – another item in my “why don’t more independent productions do this” list, which is long and cranky, and also includes “lack of subtitles/captions” and “using an amray case”.
When I did bonus features on the previous documentary, I just chose clips I decided not to use in the movie and rendered them. This was about as simple as it got. With GET LAMP, some of the bonus features are, in fact, 5-10 minute short films, with music, editing and lots of places to double-check quality. This is part of what adds time and another layer of checking them out for flaws.
After all this, I assemble the DVDs. One of the complicating aspects (and I hope this was expected) is that starting certain episodes different ways results in them being slightly different. This means more rendered material, but more importantly, more assembling of lists of assets where it’s easy to get something wrong.
It is boring as anything. There’s very little room left for creativity – it’s just getting it right.
That’s why I’m happy the Infocom episode is coming along at the same time.
As I’m wrapping things up, there’s one major piece left: the Infocom episode.
For some people, they’d probably expect an Infocom episode to be what GET LAMP would have been in total: a documentary about this fascinating and famous company. Certainly I took no small amount of amusement when Infocom alumni would reference me to each other, saying I was doing “an Infocom documentary”. After all, what else would it be about?
I have an additional featurette about the cave that Adventure is based on and the community that exists in Caving, so of course it would be logical to also have a lot of focus on Infocom itself, stuff that would bloat a documentary about all aspects of Interactive Fiction but would be perfect for someone who just wants to soak in the history of Infocom.
Obviously, I need to get back to editing, but I wanted to take a moment to mention how much fun this part is. The rest was some parts fun and some parts exhausting, but this is just pure fun. The subject is fun, the resource materials, thanks to a wide set of Infocom people, are great. I’ve got over 100 photographs, video snippets, scans, and of course interviews from all things Infocom. I do not want for stories, for things to add, for stuff to cover. It’s snapping together quickly, and I also wanted to mention a funny thing.
I had 10 minutes from the beginning in some range of beta. I always like to render out stuff, so you don’t have the distracting timeline to change/deform the passage of time in a clip. I rendered it out, then watched it the next morning.
It was too fast. It went through too much stuff, too quickly. This hasn’t happened once before – I’ve always had sequences where I go back and try to optimize. I was shoving too much in too little time – I need to expand it out!
It’s all going great. I’ll keep updating, but they’ll be short before this goes out the door. I’m really trying for this in the next two weeks or less.
So a few people, over the past months, have asked or commented about the guy in the inner artwork spread:
Some of it’s about the hair, or that he’s strongly built (unusual for a computer geek) and so on. Others, of course, have just assumed he’s “a guy” and nothing else.
When I was working with Lukas Ketner to do the artwork that became the inner spread, I gave him a ton of suggestions, requests, and reference photos. Some he used and some he didn’t, and over a short period of time we had a very nice artwork indeed. One of the reference photos was “the guy”:
This is in fact Marc Pacilli, my cousin.
It is rather a painful thing for my family, even over twenty years later – Marc was killed from a fall while on a scouting trip, in 1988. He was, especially with the passage of time, very young – still in his teens.
Marc was the one who really introduced me to adventure games. I found an adventure game on the mainframe terminals at work when I visited my father at IBM’s research center, but the IBM PC in my aunt and uncle’s home had Microsoft Adventure, and it was there we got to experience this game properly – not in a solitary fashion in some cold research facility, but surrounding the computer in the den, trying to figure out what Woods and Crowther had planned, sketching out maps, going crazy trying to know where we were in mazes.
Marc solved a lot of it, including the endgame. Marc was, and this is not some warm nostalgic hindsight, goddamn smart. Marc could have been anything he wanted to – an athlete, a computer guy, a musician. He was good at stuff, and was one of the most balanced people I’ve ever known. Had he been running some company in later years, I’m sure he would have been able to go out and kick everyone’s ass in the company’s basketball court or during a pickup game of football in the park, and then go back and nail what was slowing up the code builds. He was just that kind of guy. It’s why the artwork shows a muscular guy working at a computer – that was Marc.
So when working on the artwork design, I knew that there would be a guy working at a computer – and that guy could be anybody. So why not Marc?
I’m sorry that when you search for his name, you don’t get any hits – if he’d been around in the 90s, you can be sure we’d both have been in contact talking about httpd and getting it working and designing web pages and the whole deal. You’d have had hundreds of hits for his name, I just know this. But this weblog entry will be one of the only ones, and that sucks. The whole thing sucks, actually – but it wasn’t incompetence or evil or disease or any of a hundred things that took him from our family and the world. It was just plain stupid chance, a freak accident, an unwanted set of circumstances. I remember the hole it left, a terrible blankness, that never got filled, by any of us who knew him.
In a few weeks, hundreds of people will have Marc’s image in their homes and work – it will eventually be thousands, all over the world. An image of Marc sorting out a problem, or maybe discovering a link, with a whole range of possibilities and ideas and dreams around him.
It’s maybe not much at all, but it will have to do.
It also stands as my least favorite editing job, ever, for myriad reasons. The result of the editing job, I really really like. But the job itself? Egad.
First, the subject is obscure and ethereal, while also being of general interest and something people have opinions on – the worst of both worlds. Then, there was the process of piecing together many hours, dozens of them, to come up with the best statements that fit together – but it was all essentially about one subject. And then there was the part where I wanted it to be intensely interesting, even if you didn’t work with puzzles all the time. And finally, it had to flow as smooth as it could without dragging.
So it’s a short branch, under 18 minutes. It’s also packed with all sorts of opinions, people, and scans of design documents. And of course I put a few puzzles in.
I’m happy when I can take a subject I didn’t think anyone would cover and turn it into something giving that subject respect – hence once of my favorite pieces of work, the Fidonet Episode of the BBS Documentary, which tells a 15-year arc of a story about a computer network and somehow generally ties it together enough that’s actually coherent and in some cases entertaining. So that’s definitely the case here.
I err in the side of short length because there’s not a specific story arc that’s being brought out in talking about puzzles – just a lot of different (well-spoken) opinions and ideas and a way for you to see how deeply these folks have thought about this specific angle of interactive fiction/text adventures. I’d rather have people wish there was more than have them wish there was less. As the raw interviews will generally be released, you can listen to some very smart folks say some very smart things for hours and hours if you wish – I just don’t know if you need that to be on an edited DVD.
What’s left now is the finish editing the Modern Cycle and the Infocom Featurette, and then we’re in the polish stage. Hooray!
As you might expect, I’m constantly refining all aspects of GET LAMP as I go. I made a lot of choices over the past few years, and took the filming in lots of directions; some of them paid off and others didn’t.
One of them paid off, but I’m making a big decision with it anyway.
As part of the filming, I did a few interviews related to gamebooks, those interactive books where you can make a choice about where to take the story next. I am not calling them by their colloquial name on purpose. I got a nice round of people, too, creators and writers and collectors and more. The episode that would focus on them is in okay shape, worked on here and there.
But I’ve decided it’s not going to go on the DVD. Instead, after the GET LAMP DVD goes off to the printers, I’m going to finish editing it, and release it for free.
Let’s be clear – nobody is doing anything to me, nobody is making me make this choice. I just looked at the whole gestalt of the production and the DVD and find that the gamebooks episode is both an odd duck and a problematic use of the space of the DVDs. It’s a cool story, and I’m very glad I filmed everyone, and obviously I’m going to release it, but absolutely nothing else on the DVD relates to it. Everything else is about computers and interactive fiction and text adventures. It just doesn’t belong there.
That’s one of the advantages of the modern era – even with something cleaved this late in the game, there’s a place for it. It’ll be online, in high definition, and accessible to everyone. The story will be told, and the people will have not wasted their time, or, conversely, I am not really forced into putting it in even though I feel it doesn’t fit on the disc anymore. So really, everyone wins on this.
Of course, if you were buying the DVD specifically and only for the Gamebooks episode (and I think that would be strange), let me know, I can issue a refund. But I promise you, the remaining items are stronger and thematic for it.
So, enjoy the free documentary, when it comes out. It’s another subject that should have gotten a documentary long ago, and I’m happy I’ll be able to tell its story.
I recorded 120 hours of interview footage from 85 interviews conducted over a few years. From those hours, I cut things down to about 30-40 hours of clips. From those 30-40 hours of clips, I ended up with 4-5 in the rough mix of things, and now it’s getting to be an amount smaller than that. People who made or are interested in text adventures have a few shared traits, one of which is they are brilliantly well-spoken.
Therefore, my cut-aside and ultimately left-aside clips are sometimes really cool on their own. Where I can, I’ve made them bonus features, especially when I’ve edited a large sequence only to find it doesn’t fit anywhere in the branches.
Ultimately, of course, the full interviews will be uploaded, but that’s a lot for people to go through, although I think a lot of the interviews are fascinating on their own.
So here we are, getting towards the end of May. People are being polite but the questions are increasing. Here we go with details:
First of all, I have passed 800 pre-orders. That’s pretty amazing. Many bought it as part of the VEZZASPELL period, when you were getting a discount but had no idea what was coming out at the end. A lot of those folks are probably unsurprised that deadlines have slipped. Similarly, people who are buying after the deadline slipped are also showing nice faith. This is all very much appreciated.
As I’ve mentioned here and there, the documentary starts in one direction, then lets you go in multiple other directions. I want each direction to be full and complete, and not just a thin bunch of footage for you to then jump back and see other stuff, forgetting it. That does take a bit of time. All told, my estimate is that it’ll be roughly 2 hours of footage in that set.
There’s three featurettes, ranging from 12 minutes to an hour. One is basically done and going through the Brutal Render, the other two are piecemeal.
There are about 30 bonus features I don’t count as featurettes (although some might leak into that territory). They range from 2 minutes to 15. They’re now in the Brutal Render.
The DVD-ROM portion was finished a while ago.
So basically, a lot is done and a lot is not as done as I like. How this is all going to fit on 2 DVDs is going to be a fun challenge in itself.
I’ve told myself I will not be editing past the second week in June. Crunch time ahoy.
So, apparently during rush hour in New York, the two blocks leading to the Holland Tunnel can become a traffic jam so horrific, with cars so terrible at basic driving skills, that a person on their way to an airport can find it takes an hour and a half to get through them. Two blocks.
Green is where I needed to be by 4pm, red is where I still was at 5:30pm.
So after getting to the airport, being told I couldn’t get on the flight, and contacting the CCC folks, I was asked to research the possibility of getting them to convert my flight. I stood at the counter for over 40 minutes, watching five people at the Amsterdam KLM/AirFrance/Delta argue, in front of me, how to get rid of me. It was quite something. Ultimately, I was told with a straight face that it would cost $3750 to get another flight. I was told if I talked to a manager, it might be $250. I talked to a manager. She said no. So that was that.
People trusted me to go and had paid my way, and I felt it wrong to disappoint them. So I bent one of my rules and transferred the PAX East mix to a friend attending SIGINT, and the show went on, without me.
Before and after the showing, I made a presentation via Skype. At one point I shouted out to a few people who said they’d traveled hours just to see the film, and I guess they were recording my whole Q&A and Intro, as they put up the part mentioning them:
I’ll have to wait for the reviews, so I don’t know how well it went yet, but in a nice touch, they left the skype line running so I could hear audience reaction. Once you’ve finished a film cut, hearing audience reaction is critical. So thanks for that.
I’ll be attending other showings in person, of course. And I will never drive to the airport through NYC again.
The slipcover for GET LAMP is complete. I just got a sample in the mail, and it looks fantastic. I put the packaging in the slipcover, looked it over – it’s a nice piece of work. I’ll be fine living with it for years hence, as I’ve had to do with the BBS Documentary’s packaging.
I’ll take some good photos of it after I get back from the European premiere of GET LAMP, being held at SIGINT. They’ll replace the ones on the pre-order page.
One small (in terms of importance) problem happened during the making of the slipcover, which I wanted to mention both in the context of how I liked putting puzzles in this documentary, and how you have to always expect unusual reasons that prevent you from doing stuff, once actual physical processes are in place.
So I had to put something into the packaging that rewarded effort, and wouldn’t be discovered for a while, and be pretty out there. So here’s what I originally planned:
The slipcover is basically a loop, glued at the bottom, with a flap to close one side. If you’ve seen the BBS Documentary’s packaging, it’s very similar.
In my design, I put writing along the glued flap. The only way to see it would be to destroy the packaging.
Along the flap, was the following riddle, in both Telugu and English:
In a pretty lake / Is a wet bird / Wears gold on her nose / And drinks with her tail
I won’t spoil the riddle here.
So this little conceit got all the way through the production process until it was time to be finally printed. At that point, some gnome deep in the printer’s bowels came back and vetoed the printing on the glued flap. Years of experience had taught that extending the printed surface onto the flap and printing on it would cause the package to fall apart sooner rather than later – even the relatively small text would contribute to that.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to listen to the guy in the back office who touches the hardware. If the issue is moral or tradition, push it. If it’s mechanical or safety, listen. Find another way to express what you want. So that’s what’s happened here.
So now I have all the pieces except the DVDs themselves. And that part’s being worked on, I assure you.
And when your package of GET LAMP continues to hold together for years to come, thank that guy in the printer’s office.
