After roughly 4 years of work (2006-2010), GET LAMP, a documentary about text adventures, is complete.

While I’ve been working on the documentary and its aftermath, this weblog has been dormant.  While some use their weblogs as day to day updates and some use them to write small “let’s talk about this” paragraphs, usually with advertisements hovering nearby, I have always primarily used this weblog to write longish essays about a subject, thoughts on said subject, and so on.  I got a great mandate last year from a Kickstarter campaign to do computer history, and as part of that, I focused on finishing this film.

And man, is it finished.

Two DVDs, with a main “GET LAMP” movie, featurettes on Infocom, Mammoth Cave, the Z-Machine, and dozens of other subjects. Over 4 hours, in total. There’s that MC Frontalot music video I did a few years ago, as well as commentary tracks, full subtitles, and a pile of easter eggs scattered around. There’s also a DVD-ROM section with many games and a few extra audio and video files.

Oh, and a coin.

Well, I guess not just a coin, as such things go. It’s a coin that’s individually numbered, gold and silver plated, and included with every copy. Text adventures did this, and it’s one of the most positive memories people had of the whole thing, so I decided to do it too.

So yes, I finished my second film. I now have a filmography, a set of films. There’s stylistic themes that run through both my films. Maybe I’ll make more.

I’ll spend the next few entries on a postmortem about various bits of my production.  Then we’ll see about the weblog entries I’ve always loved writing, when there wasn’t a movie to finish.

More soon.