brain dump from the big boss

There are several of us in the group that put in many, many hours of our time to move this project forward, but nobody has worked as hard as Shreena (icklekitty) in her role as project manager at making sure we move forward at a reasonable pace. As part of our ongoing blogs from various members of the group, she's taken the time to write down her thoughts on the project and how it's developed.

We realize that you're all impatient to see our finished project, and hope that these insights help you to understand where we're at and why it seems to be taking so DAMN LONG. We know the wait will be worth it. Really :)

running a tight ship with a loose team...

I thought I'd run you through a general overview of how the whole project works from an operations perspective.

One of the first things I did when brought into TOIOU was to create a project timeline. The guys already involved had a huge list of who had volunteered to do various things - edit, colour correct, make artwork, burn DVDs. As the stats previously posted here show, thousands of people came forward, and my first instinct was to create some sort of structure to the process. What order do things need to be done in? How long do these things take? Out of this came goals and deadlines.

Given the amount of people involved, and a feeling that we really wanted to make the best DVD possible, and - let's face it - we'd never done anything like this before, we found people out of the volunteers who had experience and who could lead the rest of the teams. People who knew all the audio jargon, people who knew what the best video formats are, and, most importantly, people who were serious about doing this. As audio work had already begun for Vegas, it felt logical to mirror this with the Gift audio, and from that the video editors would have a model to follow. A side effect of this is that we found ourselves with release quality audio content very early on that eventually became the audio release that came out last month. The audio guys haven't left us by the way - they're still tweaking and optimising the audio for DVD with a view to making a 5.1 mix.

By this stage, dozens of data tapes, cartridges, hard drives, and CDs had been sent to Torgo to start work on the Vegas DVD. This was also dozens of different files in different formats that had to be normalised before work could begin. Cue lots of rendering, muxing, and exasperated twittering! At the same time, we were presented with the problem of making sure all the Gift editors had the footage, and how to make sure this could all be spliced together. kililmoms offered to provide the footage on a HDD that could be shipped around - from DC to Philly, to Quebec, to Adelaide, to Poland, and eventually to London. On its travels, it was discovered that demuxing the files for use on a PC changed the timecodes that would make using EDL files (a way of storing the edits in a tiny file rather than having to store the actual full edit) possible. Since half the editing team where on PC and half on Mac, this was a problem. Luckily, killmoms had also granted us access to a private FTP server, so we were able to transfer full edits around, even if it did slow us down a little. At least we could all see what each editor was doing.

Of course, not everything can work to plan the first time. The glitches noted above and a few inevitable life issues - people losing their jobs, having babies, and messing up their backs - did mean that the project timeline and editing deadline had to change slightly, but it was generally felt that it was more important to maintain the quality of the DVD than rush to finish it by an arbitrary date. We're still able to proudly state though that we're sticking to our original release date of "soon" :)

Something that came as a plesant surprise was the discovery that the fan-shot Vegas footage produced angles and shots that were above and beyond what the mysterious 'Gift' tapers had produced. Their fancy high-res cameras were wobbly and had too much zoom; yours were steady, clear, and more manageable when it came to mixing video, despite some recordings not being in HD. As a result, the 'Gift' is being reviewed by everyone who can, and there's a constant revision process until it's deemed perfect. Slight audio changes have had to be made for the sake of capturing better shots, and the audio editors are on hand to offer advice with a view to creating a final master for the DVD.

Once editing began, all the other activites and participants were brought into the fold. Colour correctors were consulted and motion graphics artists were brought on board, with the DVD author around to make sure that all the composite pieces would fit together smoothly. A couple of weeks ago we were finally able to involve the guy who volunteered to manage distribution of physical copies (Teknolust), and he and Clive now have the unenvious task of sorting through all the forms that have been filled in so far. At the same time I started getting a lot of emails and messages (primarily through Myspace and nin.com, I think) from people that really wanted to be a part of this, but didn't know how to edit, work photoshop, or make dvds. Troyhasfallen got in touch with an idea of doing local year-zero-style street team, and it soon took off. A flyer in a library book, a scrawl on the inside of a toilet door, posting stuff to your blog/facebook/myspace - even people who didn't think they could do anything to be included found a way to help. Editors who didn't get to edit the Gift DVD came forward to discuss DVD extras and other things, and that's going quite well overall (actually, I'm a bit worried that we might have too much!). A couple of people said they were more interested in events, so I let them into an idea I had back in January, and they're poised for the DVD to come out so they can do somethng about it.

We've had tons of support and contribution from people working on other 'Gift' projects such as JessicaSarahS, RR (who made the Santiago DVD) and chris_lopo, and it's something that's definitely reciprocated. And most importantly, you've kept the momentum of the project going just by talking about it - I do twitter searches and scan the forums, and it's nice to know that there's still so much discourse going on about the projects that have sprung out of the Lights in the Sky tour - it shows that we all still care so much about giving something back. And we want it done right.

icklekitty (Shreena).