From bedrooms to billions: The amiga years! - official film trailer

[Codetapper]

And just to clarify, by "raw footage" I meant just taking the existing video that was filmed and simply saving as MP4 (or even just the sound as an MP3) and being done with it. No editing required, let's see what the original questions were and everything Richard had to say! I'm sure there's loads of others that would love to hear the whole thing...

Good luck ReadOnlyCat in asking about it!

[RichAplin]

Well... ok, you got me there - I admit vanity-googling myself every now and then :-)

Yeah I do have fond memories of those years, I guess what I meant is that I don't mind people saying some of my games aren't super-fun to play because I honestly never thought many of them were super fun to play myself - although you definitely lose perspective when writing something (playing a game a million times over when building/fixing it really sucks the fun out).

I didn't write many original (non-conversion) titles, and I think it's fair to say that the majority of really playable 80's/90's home computer games were original ones*; something about being able to play to the strengths of the machine technically and "be done when it's done" - rather than "done in time to duplicate & ship for xmas" makes a big difference. You really do lose perspective on what's fun or not fun at the time though; there's a whole skill in being able to see your game through fresh eyes near the end - which is when so many ultra-critical yet technically trivial gameplay tweaks need to get made.

So yeah, I think I got most of my jollies out of doing technical things (e.g. there's some bits of "Line Of Fire" which I remember really enjoying coding but it was always doomed as a conversion) so I'm very sympathetic to the "not fun to play" comments.

I dearly wish I'd managed to directly run the arcade PCB's gameplay code on Amiga Final Fight for example (which I did look at for a good while, but it was just too risky a path to sink any more time into) because it'd have been great to just leave that exactly as it was - not that I personally was a huge fan of the arcade board - it'd have ultimately saved me a lot of work and left people less to be unhappy about...

Nowadays with IDA and MAME as tools to aid the process it's probably just about manageable but it's fair to say the Amiga spent maybe 85% of the cpu/bus/ram managing+drawing graphics pixels compared to the CPS board 68k spending at a guess maybe 10%.

So... many people hatin' on FF as a game but I remember being most satisfied getting stuff like the realtime sprite loading+decompression working (it used cooperative multitasking for loading+decompression and was constantly moving everything around in memory to defrag it incrementally; as stuff was deallocated the 'holes' bubbled to the top of memory - everything happening in small chunks to not affect the frame rate).
If I recall correclty, when you play that game on a 1MB machine you actually get slightly different sequences of enemies because it decided on the fly whether to reuse an existing baddie in RAM or if there was enough memory reclaimable - and time for disk loading - to pull in the one it was intending to give you to fight... Oh and Codetapper reminded me it if you have 1MB RAM it generated a 128KByte lookup table to make the X-flipping of the sprites that much faster.

...oh and I had to complete the ST version at the same time - that got about as much love as the ST chipset deserved; glorified Spectrum that it was... :-P

So yeah, FF was a technical win, playability fail.

Heh,
Rich.

*Except maybe Amstrad CPC Shinobi... that actually turned out pretty well all around..

Originally Posted by Codetapper

And just to clarify, by "raw footage" I meant just taking the existing video that was filmed and simply saving as MP4

Heh, the camera guy today said he shot ~50GB of video this morning (on a fancy canon SLR, not sure what res he was shooting, maybe 4k). I actually should've got a copy before he left but I guess I'm not that vain :-)

[wanderer]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

And just to clarify, by "raw footage" I meant just taking the existing video that was filmed and simply saving as MP4 (or even just the sound as an MP3) and being done with it. No editing required, let's see what the original questions were and everything Richard had to say! I'm sure there's loads of others that would love to hear the whole thing...

Good luck ReadOnlyCat in asking about it!

Not as simple as it sounds. There are bad takes in there, awkward and possibly uncomfortable moments (usually on the interviewee's part), audio/video/lighting technical issues that film-makers want to forget (let alone publish to the world) and several other things that justify why that material was cut in the first place. So, the "no editing required and just upload the files" notion is unrealistic at best. A lot of work will be required since what we're essentially asking here is a massive, "expanded director's cut". Nobody really wants (or should want) the "raw files".

[wanderer]

FROM BEDROOMS TO BILLIONS: THE AMIGA YEARS! "Early Games" Clip

[ Show youtube player ]

Quite nice!

[lifeschool]

Amiga Years Upgrade Kickstarter Launched!
https://t.co/yVCgzga3T3

From the very end of the Kickstarter, Ant and Nic have been talking about being 'so close' to the 3.5hour tier level, that they wanted to cover the short fall in a small kickstarter. This would cover the extra cost of a second disc and packaging, and the royalty archive images and further editing required to provide an extra 90mins of video. With the 2.5 hour movie still due for early next year, upgrading would mean you get 4 hours total combined running time.

To wet your appetites, Gracious Films have created a brand new Kickstarter video; featuring never seen before interviews.
[ Show youtube player ]

The makers have also leaked an example clip from the main movie itself, and you can see this here:
[ Show youtube player ]

If you backed the original 2.5 hour movie, you will still get that as digital download or physical disc as you wished. For an extra £10 donated through this new Kickstarter, you can add the bonus disc, or the same content as downloadable files.

Either way, check this out. Signed Postcards are also available as extra perks.
https://t.co/yVCgzga3T3

[lifeschool]

Magnetic Fields - Signing their Bundles


Lastest backers newsletter contains exclusive link to an hours worth of bonus material, including Chris Hulsback on Turrican 2.

[lifeschool]

We made the first stretch goal today! So we've now collectively managed to get a 2.5 hour movie and a 2.0 hour extras package. Just a few more K and we'll get a 5 hour package in total.

Bonus Disc Kickstarter:
1,030 backers
£20,364 pledged of £15,000 goal
17 days to go

(note: its 17 days to go, perhaps if we make 25k by 14 days, they'll be forced to add 3.0 3.5 4.0 hours?)
(note 2: just want to make it clear I'm not connected with this project except as a fan who wants lots of footage)

[Vot]

Originally Posted by lifeschool

We made the first stretch goal today! So we've now collectively managed to get a 2.5 hour movie and a 2.0 hour extras package. Just a few more K and we'll get a 5 hour package in total.

Bonus Disc Kickstarter:
1,030 backers
£20,364 pledged of £15,000 goal
17 days to go

(note: its 17 days to go, perhaps if we make 25k by 14 days, they'll be forced to add 3.0 3.5 4.0 hours?)
(note 2: just want to make it clear I'm not connected with this project except as a fan who wants lots of footage)

You guys tried to get Netflix to publish your movie? They seem to have a number of documentaries on the old atari et game, synth machines etc. so they do offer documentaries in the genre.

[Adrian Browne]

Backed for the extra disc.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Good luck ReadOnlyCat in asking about it!

Thanks.

I did write to Anthony and Nicola via KickStarter a few days after writing this post, they replied very quickly in a very encouraging way and after asking for their permission to quote their answer they just gave me license to do so today.

Here is what I sent them:

Hi Nicola and Anthony,

I hope you are going fine and that the filming of The Amiga Years is going nicely.

I am a backer of this project and I would like to submit you a suggestion about it.

It is clear that of all the interviews you guys have and will be conducting during the production of the documentary, only a fraction of the corresponding footage will find its way in the final documentary: in order to collect appropriate footage you must conduct extensive interviews and retain from these the materials only the few minutes with the biggest impact and/or more meaningful in relation to the theme of the documentary or chapter.

As an example, Richard Aplin indicated that his interview with you - which took place recently - took more than two hours with possibly one hour of recorded interview (I'm guessing for this last number) and obviously the entire interview will not be included in the end result since this would leave very little time for the rest of the content.

The situation is likely very similar with other interviewees, I suspect that RJ Mical, Carl Sassenrath, etc. all had a lot of things to say for every question you must have asked and that the total amount of collected footage probably will represent five times more (at least) than what will be present in the documentary.

As I said previously, this is perfectly understandable in order to produce a reasonably "short" focused documentary, but nevertheless, this "extra" unused footage still has enormous value for a very large fraction of the Amiga community. I know for example Richard Aplin has a very rich experience of coding Amiga games (in very peculiar conditions) and that I would enjoy watching every minute of his recorded interview. RJ Mical and Carl Sassenrath also have a very extensive knowledge of Amiga history in general and not just pertaining to gaming and I am sure that their interviews as well are interesting from start to finish and not just the segments which will end up in The Amiga Years.

I could continue on and on and I am sure you got my point: the raw footage of these interviews itself would be of huge interest to many people (me the first) and I am convinced that if you made it available un-edited or minimally edited (with the consent of the interviewees obviously) for an additional fee to backers who wish to correspondingly increase their pledge you would have a lot of takers for such an offer.

I certainly hope that you will consider this option and figure out a way to make this invaluable content available to those of your backers who are willing to pay to access it.

Thank you for reading until this point, and please keep up the good work!

And here are the parts of their reply which I think highlight best their position:

Originally Posted by Nicola & Anthony Caulfield

we have considered this in the past. There's pros and cons to releasing so much footage however as fans ourselves we would be the type of backer you describe, people who enjoy sharing knowledge and discussing a subject dear to our hearts.

Originally Posted by Nicola & Anthony Caulfield

We do keep thinking of it and I promise to raise this again with Nic at our next meeting.

As you can see, this is a very encouraging answer.

Obviously, this does not guarantee at all that this will happen since many factors might prevent it:

• They might not obtain the legal authorizations to do it.
• They might not have the time.
• It might require more work/money than we think.
• There might be other obstacles which we are not privy of.

But in any case, they seem receptive to suggestions which I think is a very positive thing.

As for me, I will keep a cool head about it and be content to receive the originally promised content, if anything more ends up being made available (at a price obviously) to "raw footage hardcore backers", that will be a nice bonus.

[lifeschool]

^ I too have been asking them about this, and their latest idea is perhaps to run a series on TV, using 100% unused footage, and also to establish some kind of archive in the long term. At the moment they are still swamped with interviews, which is all Good in my book. I'd like to see a site like the Emmy TV interviews, with James Garner et al. That is a fun site to investigate.

I dont work for those guys, but here is a republish of their latest newsletter:

[lifeschool]

Final Push!

Ant Wrote:
"STRETCH GOAL UPDATE!
Now we have hit £30k and secured the wonderful booklet for all the physical backers we have listened to what many of you have said and incorporated that into our thinking here for further stretch goals, which is more content and English subtitles. Subtitles are incredibly expensive but if we hit the £40k mark we can at least increase the extra content and get english subs created to cover all the material.

Please note if we hit these new stretch goals we will have to deliver this extra content (on top of the 2.5 hours already secured) as a digital download as there is not enough room on the discs. However we felt that we have so much material that we thought you would rather us create it and get it to you than not do anything. Therefore please look at the updated stretch goal info below."



POSTCARD SPECIAL OFFER!
Several of you have written suggesting a Postcard Special Offer, to encourage you to pledge for full sets and help get us to the higher targets. Just to recap, these developer postcards are unique, rare, signed by Amiga Legends and never, ever to be repeated. Therefore as we are really pushing to get those stretch goals we are pleased to announce the offer listed below the postcards picture.
[link to postcards image]

Basically if you want all the 13 sets of signed Postcards (see above image) then you can take every set for just £245, therefore saving £275!

If you want all the unsigned Postcards (13 sets) just raise your pledge to £95 which saves you £35!

Please note if you have already pledged for cards (many have) then simply adjust upwards, for example if you have already pledged £80 for two sets of signed, then just raise by an additional £165 to get them all! The backer message you should send us simply needs to say you have increased by another £x for all signed Postcards.

Posters
Many of you have asked for posters, we are happy to announce both signed and unsigned A2 glossy Posters are now available. Simply choose an image from the postcards pictured above, from left to right (1-4) so for example you would say Team 17 poster number 2 (for the Alien Breed cover).

All Posters are rolled and supplied in tubes! Simply state signed (£35) or unsigned (£20) per poster and raise your pledges accordingly and send us a message that you have done so.

So please support us by visiting the campaign and sharing this link;
https://t.co/yVCgzga3T3

And Finally...
We have a last batch of filming coming up in November, musicians, journalists, artists plus a legendary C64 coder who we weren't able to get in the first film but happily we will be talking to very soon!

Thank you as ever for your wonderful support and we hope to be hitting more stretch goals soon!

Best wishes!

Ant & Nic

[copse]

Backed it yesterday, the 2 disc bluray special edition. Looking forward to it!

[lifeschool]

I upgraded my £10 pledge to £30. I selected the DVD for £20, and added £10 for the double disc set and all digital downloads. Hopefully that will mean I get the DVD, Badge, Beer Mat and all the extras, and all the hours of content. Its the only way to make sure. The way it is written is a bit confusing, and it took a while to sink in that I had to add £10 over the pledge bonus level for the double disc. I also didnt want to risk not getting my Boing Ball Pin Badge if I'd just chosen 'download only' for everything. Again, I'm not associated with this project, I'm just a fan.

[turrican3]

I bought the movie on vimeo but doesn't have subtitles ????

[wanderer]

Originally Posted by turrican3

I bought the movie on vimeo but doesn't have subtitles ????

The film was just finished, so they will start making them now. The DVD/Blu-Ray will have them and I am hoping they will release them separately before that, but I don't know for sure if and when that will happen. They'll let us know soon I hope.

[UberFreak]

Originally Posted by turrican3

I bought the movie on vimeo but doesn't have subtitles ????

Are any languages other than English used in the movie?

[fryguy]

Originally Posted by UberFreak

Are any languages other than English used in the movie?

There was some french (by the guy who made Another World, "Eric Chahi" iirc) but it was hardsubbed.

[UberFreak]

Great, thanks!

[turrican3]

ok thanks for the reply... But it was ok, i understood nearly everything.
I will look it again with the subtitles.
I wanted to thank you guys for this great documentary.
The amiga miss me even much more now... If only we could have something like the amiga in 2016. We need a revolution, i find the videogames evolution today a little boring.
That makes a long time since i said : whaaa how they did this trick or that music. Perhaps i'm too old to be impressed, i don't know.
Sorry for the OT.
It was a great day : 1) this movie and 2) the jim collas interview.