ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

BBS Documentary Update —

It’s getting towards the end of the month, isn’t it? Oh dear. Well, it’s not for lack of my working on this project; I am currently clocking something in the range of 10-14 hours a day on it, while keeping a day job. You can imagine what I look like right now.

BAUD got my final once-over and is being rendered to go away for final inspection. Basically, I went through it twice, once for sound, and once for visuals. Nothing was allowed to pass for “next time” because there is no “next time”. It is what it is, and I’m happy with it.

BAUD is the first in the series, so it was very important to me to have it cover its bases well. It goes into the forces that predate the BBS, the story of its beginning, and the story of the people who came after the pioneers and turned BBSes from a cool experiment into an event to be reckoned with. It is where Ward and Randy come forward and get the bow they richly deserve, and where a lot of people who were around for the two beginnings get to give a sense of what it was like.

I say “two beginnings” because the way I frame it, and the way that it felt in researching the story, is that there were two separate but very important sets of “first-timers”: the people who were building kits and making modems work with these kits and who started the BBS, and the kids who begin their childhoods with the purchase of an 8-bit home computer and who turned the BBS into a place to be at, not just a thing to test. So they’re both in this episode. Along the way, we cover a lot of ground, and stop pretty soon in “the big story”. That’s what the other episodes are for, after all.

Each of these episodes has to get this vicious once-over before I consider them done. Some are in much better shape than others. For the record, ARTSCENE has 12 tracks of audio and 8 tracks of video. You can imagine what editing something like that is when trying to tweak sound quality or get scrolling just right. My eyes cross just thinking about it. Most of the episodes are just a small round away from being done.

The subtitle people have been just absolutely astounding. Christian Wirth has jumped in and has transcribed over 4 hours of footage and counting. And the Spanish translation team is working at full bore; every day they send me a translated copy of one or more of the bonus footage clips, with the episodes coming shortly. It’s great to get help there.

This is probably the last time I’ll mention this for a while, but it really is going quickly and well…. just on a shift of a month and a half from where I was expecting it all to be. Otherwise, this is a smooth time. I’ve decided that everyone who pre-orders will get some sort of gift, some trinket to distinguish that they believed in me and bought ahead of time, before everyone knew what the project was. I haven’t decided what that will be yet; I’ll take suggestions.


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