So, for this Harry Potter thing that's gonna be happening in a month and a half, we're expecting and hoping that a whole lot of people will be checking out the feed, and by way of sheer numbers that'd be almost entirely folks who have never heard of us before.

And production for these sort of events is always kind of a heave-ho, especially on my end. Lots of stuff to plan for in the stream, lots of assets to make, lots of thinkin.'

Logistically, imagine the first moments of the stream for a second. We have three options.

Here's what I'm thinking. What we need is an hour of the best WAYDM stuff. Longer form than what we used for iJim's home page video, between thirty-second and three-minute clips of really good stuff. Then we sync that audio up to clips from the movies, maybe even trailers. (It's more about the audio, naturally, we just need some video component.)

The upside of this is, once it's done, we have a one-hour "example" video forevermore for introducing people to the show. But for this, that video would be placed under some onscreen graphics. Obviously a lower third saying "this is the preshow, greatest hits, blah blah" and a countdown timer, and also a "from "Return of the Jedi" or whatever under that indicating what movie this is from, to go along with whatever the clip is.

So if anyone is bored and likes... I dunno, helpin,' let's do this thing.

Here's how I think this would work best. What we really need is the separated audio. A whole bunch of audio clips, of choice moments, cut down to only be as long as the "good bit." (Not further sliced down, naturally, the whole, unedited chunk.) Those would get saved as high-quality MP3s - likely higher quality than the actual episode was, just to ensure we don't lose anything in the process - named as something like [MOVIE-TITLE]-[clip#].mp3, and uploaded to the FTP. Then you post in this thread saying what you've uploaded - whatever it is, one clip you like, five clips, one movie, five movies, whatever - mostly so other folks don't do the same work you've just done.

I'll download those as they come in, find and download clips that go with them in one way or another from YouTube, and toss it in the edit. Once we have a good hour, we're done. Ideally we'd collect a bit more than an hour, so I could narrow it down a bit if I want something else in the hour, pick whatever's my favorite from what we got.

I think it'd be coolest if we ended up only using one clip per movie, so we get a huge spread of different movies on there, and people go "goddamn, that's a lot of movies." That's not to say I only want one clip per movie, I'm just sayin' I'm probably only gonna use one. Again, pick whatever's my favorite.

This is not going to be anywhere near as big a pain in the ass as Project Halp was, I don't think. For one thing, we don't need to catalogue everything we've ever done, we just need between twenty and forty cool moments or conversation from the last 198 episodes, and there's way, way more than that to be found, so it won't be much of a search.

Plus, we still have all the research done from Project Halp. That list only goes up to episode 123, A Few Good Men, because we did it a while ago. But it's a hell of a place to start. Honestly, we could do this entire thing that way and it'd be totally fine, I just think it'd be cool to grab a few moments from more recent episodes if anyone remembers any or stumbles upon them.

All the Project Halp stuff is here and here.

Any moment of really great conversation, or comedy, or observation is what we want. The less crappy the sound is, the better. There's a lot of blown-out moments in older episodes, donchaknow.

Bottom line is, if you can think of a great moment from the show and the corresponding episode, clip it out and upload it, or at least post that info here so I can. (With timecode would be preferable, but any way to narrow down when it happened would be good.)

PM me for the ftp info, we have a guest zone on the FTP left over from the Road Trip. Alternatively, emailing clips to the show's email, or WeTransfer, or YouSendIt, or whatever, is fine too. (Addressed to the show's email.) Just make sure you mention what you've done in this thread, so someone else doesn't go to the trouble of doin' it again. No need to get too finnicky about the MP3 encoding stuff, just use whatever a "high" preset is in whatever software you're usin.'

So, thoughts? Anybody down to help me dig up some clips?

Surprise!

Check this out, then come back here.

Back?

Yeah. Yeeeeeeeeeah. We're doing this. Think LOTR, but bigger, in every dimension. Holden, iJim, Zarban, and Kyle Mattingly already have tickets to fly out and participate. We tried to get Vayda, but he hates our guts now or something. (Not really.) And if you forum people wanna fly out to Los Angeles, ain't nobody stoppin' ya.

Anyway, the plan is that we're gonna try to really get the word out there for this one, hence the fancy intro-video and web page and all that, so as to actually make that $10,000 number for the Against Malaria folks. Any and all help getting the word out, mentioning it on podcasts, corralling interviews for us to do about it, blog articles, etc., would be super helpful.

But as much as anything, if you've been meaning to throw a couple bucks in the Paypal account, now would be a really good time for that. We're not officially asking the whole world for money, we really are doing all the fundraise-y stuff for charity, not us at all. But internally, for the existing community folks, the situation is a little "oh god, this is gonna be pricey." We're still paying off trademarks and really need a few equipment replacements, and that sort of thing.

So, just for a month or so, and just from the folks on the forum who are already fans of the show and in the community... we're not just sayin, we're askin.' Don't go to heroic measures or anything, but if you can spare a few bucks, that'd be much appreciated.

We'll also end up needing more specific helpy-help on our internal teams for various stuff, like, actual "we're making an organized effort to get this thing out there, and could really use some more hands on deck" stuff, and if you wanna be involved in that when it comes up, lemme know and I'll include you in the conversations with that particular team once the time comes. (Stuff like publicity, outreach, etc.. Maybe even graphics work on the livestream and site during the event.)

Anyway. So.

Yeah, right? This is gonna be fun.