Subj : Re: The Documentary...
To   : alt.bbs.synchronet
From : Sinister x
Date : Fri Aug 05 2005 02:55 am

From Newsgroup: alt.bbs.synchronet

> Remember, it's all about dial-up, not internet-based BBSes. So I have
> to take exception to it not covering something it was never meant to
> cover.

For the historical representation of the film, I definitely have to give you 
your due props. There were actually some things in talks I've had with 
Radman in the past where he dodged the subject of WHY ansi was taken out of 
acid packs (I was an artist for them back in 95/6 so you can obviously see 
where I'm coming from here) aside from him pawning it off as "hirez is the 
new". I thought it wasn't a well-thought plan considering once you go into 
the hires-only game you're instantly competing against every in-house 
production studio in America. (: It was also a treat for me to get to 
finally see who JED, the God of all ansimation was. (:

I think the major criticism that plenty of people who are still in the art 
scene have against this film comes in a two-fold process. One, is that the 
documentary is called "The BBS Documentary" and not the "Dial-up BBS 
Documentary" and like you said, doesn't portray anything about what's still 
around. I think to quibble over the title though is a bit of a stretch 
though. However, the comments by mass-d and Radman really didn't help in 
this category... especially the ones by mass-d about how ansi serves no 
functional purpose and nobody ever got paid for it. That, coupled in with 
the tiny blurb at the end about how some people still do ansi today and that 
was it, really didn't help. Of course, I understand that you can't do 
everything, and probably got turned down for a ton of interviews. I think at 
least one interview with someone who was still doing ansi (zerovision would 
have been a perfect candidate in my book since he lives in Atlanta, GA and 
is probably one of the best artists out there altogether, if you've never 
seen his stuff definitely look it up in some of the Sense packs) would have 
sufficed at least in my book. I can look past some of that though, as some 
parts of the rest of the documentary was a real treat for me, definitely 
props for the mention of Osuny.

> Now, all this aside, there are two things I've worked to do to make up
> for obvious deficiencies in the documentary's coverage.
>
> First of all, there's over 250 hours of interviews, of 205 people. With
> one exception, I have full rights to do with these interviews as I
> wish, so I will be making pretty much all of them available! I have
> made a deal with ARCHIVE.ORG to have a large sub-collection of all
> these interviews, with salient points covered in them and who and what.
> For example, there's two hours of Rob Swindell where I only used
> roughly 45-60 seconds of this footage. Same with Frank Vest. In their
> interviews, and in dozens of others, MANY subjects were covered, many
> of the same ones people are unhappy I didn't put in the documentary.
> ALL OF IT WILL BE AVAILABLE, under a Creative Commons Attribute
> ShareAlike license, meaning they can be used in almost any way people
> would want to, including as the basis of further documentaries. This
> will hopefully put to rest the idea that my documentary quashes
> additional BBS concepts that were covered. 250 hours. That's 10 solid
> days of BBS discussion.
>
> Second, I will be continuing my work with TEXTFILES.COM and the
> BBSDOCUMENTARY.COM sites to add more and more information, information
> which might not have been easy to portray cinematically (remember, the
> documentary is a movie, not a book) but which can have that
> all-important critical mass as a location to save this history.

Awesome I am going to be looking forward to it definitely. 


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