ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

GET LAMP Teaser Trailer – And YouTube —

About a year ago (maybe it was longer, I forget) I was to speak at an event called OSCON about GET LAMP, the documentary about text adventures you may have heard I was working on. I took what I could of the roughly 10 interviews I’d done up to that point, mixed well, and produced a teaser trailer. I played it during my presentation to whatever the reaction was, and then left this thing to languish.

The funny thing is, it captures the sense of what I’m doing with this documentary even better than I expected, so I uploaded it to YouTube and will put it on the main site shortly.

I’m sure you’ll have your own opinions about the tone, approach and direction of the trailer, but bear in mind it was done in July of 2006, and also bear in mind that youtube’s version is really lacking in detail; considering the original footage is in high definition you can imagine the difference (and will, shortly, when I put it up on getlamp.com). Most striking to me is the second Steve Meretzky shot, where he just stands there looking at you; in the high-def you can see the camera rack focus, bringing him into focus and showing him in great detail. I have to be careful about that, making sure something doesn’t lose all meaning when knocked down to standard definition.

Music is Beth Sorrentino, “Beautiful Day”. Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-Noncommercial, which means this trailer is licensed similarly. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the water; that’s Long Island Sound. I’ll leave the rest of the questions up to you.


Categorised as: Uncategorized

Comments are disabled on this post


5 Comments

  1. Kizzle says:

    The video quality even looks amazing on Youtube.

  2. Herr Doktor Deth Vegetable says:

    That looks excellent, sir. The music you have chosen goes very well with the sort of melancholy tone of the piece.

  3. Bob H. says:

    This was a cool teaser! I loved that lamp shot on the boat! Can’t wait until it’s available.

  4. Quag7 says:

    I think the tone here is excellent. It’s very Sundance “DocDay” in the sense that it is about a very unusual subject, yet intriguing, I would think, even to an audience who hasn’t heard of or otherwise has little interest in the subject.

    It’s good; I look forward to the full documentary and this is a positive bit of publicity for it.

  5. Ryan says:

    Looks PHENOMENAL. The lighting and resolution is a big step up from BBS. I’m glad I joined the club so I could help you get the new camera.