Ok, here we are for the final status report! Since Friday we're officially moving - or rather our pictures are. I've received the first draft of the animation on Saturday and the second draft yesterday morning.
This is the last static graphic that was created - it's a bulletin board, representing the Bitcoin Trade page. (We have a tiny little section appealing to merchants and freelancers and why Bitcoin is a particularly great proposition for them.)
The rest of the new stuff is all animated and firstly a screenshot doesn't capture it and secondly I don't want to spoil it, since it's getting pretty close to final now.
But I will post one shot from the video, mostly because I wouldn't mind some input:
We're not all too happy with the title "rate"? But "Money supply" seems long and we are worried not everyone will understand it. "Limit" is already in the script and it somehow tends to draw forth deflation phobia. "21 million" is a possibility I quite like, though some people said it sounds arbitrary and in a way it is. So maybe it shouldn't be in the video. I'm interested to hear your views, we can incorporate any suggestion for the title or the italic text until around this time tomorrow. If you don't have a suggestion of your own, feel free to vote for one of the options that I've just listed.
Now to go through the remaining todos. Music. We had a long discussion with our composer and ultimately decided to go with a minimal beat with no melody. This may sound like we're wasting our chance to get an orchestral piece written for our puny little video, but form has to follow function: The video is very fast and rich with information. A minimal rhythmic piece, no melody adds the least amount of distraction. That does however mean that we get more revisions and time to spend on sound design (basically a fancy term for sound effects). All in all I'm very glad we went with a professional composer, having that specialized experience on board turned out to be invaluable.
Animation. I'd say we're about two thirds done, depending how many little details we'll find in the end that we need to fix. But we're only a few days away from wrapping animation.
Website. Yes, website. We looked around and while there are many fantastic links you can give to a newcomer (bitcoin.org, the wiki, bitcoinme, mybitcoin, bitcoinbulletin, bitcoinwatch, bitcoincharts, etc.), we wanted a page specifically designed to pick up where the video leaves off. Happily, one of the people who reviewed our script and in doing so got excited about Bitcoin was a webdesigner. He's agreed to help build a companion website for the video free of charge. The website will be fairly simple, probably much like bitcoinme.com - ideas, texts, audio, links and anything else that should go on the website are
very welcome.
Aaaand finally... I am happy to announce our
release dates!
The video will premiere at the Bitcoin Geneva meetup on Saturday, March 19th 2011.If you are anywhere in Switzerland or Southern France, or damn it, anywhere in Europe -
make the trip! This meetup will be awesome, we've got many cool people coming (many of whom haven't RSVPed publicly in the thread), so don't miss this chance to meet some real Bitcoiners in real life and have a beer with us! Newbies and veterans are of course equally welcome!
After that, we reserve the right to spend another day or two on it until our compulsive disorders are all satisfied and are planning for public release via YouTube on
Monday, March 21st 2011.
