Hello YouTube audience!
I feel like I haven't said hi to you in a while, especially if some of you are not Patreon
subscribers you're probably wondering what has been going on.
And if you are a Patreon subscriber, there may have been some things you missed.
So I am here to catch everybody up on what's been going on with Cloth Map.
First of all, we've been filming a lot.
We went to Bosnia (in Sarajevo, specifically), Serbia (in Belgrade, which has this sweet
fortress), Croatia (in the city of Zagreb, the capital), and to Mongolia, where we were
in and out of Ulaanbaatar.
If you're a Patron, you may have seen these daily "Dispatch" videos recounting what we
did every day.
I've also been posting some behind-the-scenes photos to the Cloth Map Instagram account,
which has been fun because it's nice to have an outlet for shots that won't necessarily
make it into a feature video.
But from all of those trips we now have multiple terabytes of video footage.
It is now my priority to stay in the United States and edit all of that.
No more trips for a while.
We kind of stacked up the Balkans and Mongolia because, number one, it made financial sense
because I was already going to be in Europe and could just pop over to the Balkans, and
then Mongolia, the Naadam festival, which we went to see, only happens once a year.
But yes, now is the time for editing.
On that front, I have already made it though a big chunk of the work on the Balkans.
I have trimmed, sent off, and received 31 transcripts from the interviews and tours
that we shot.
So that's "sit down and talking to a person," and then also "here's a guide going around
and telling us about a place."
All told, it was 17 and a half hours of footage (not including B-roll), which equates to 370
single-spaced pages of transcripts.
I think this weekend I'm just going to maybe go somewhere nice and quiet and read for forever,
as long as it takes.
Basically, what happens is, I get these transcripts back from a transcription service who I've
sent those interviews to.
They type down everything that is said, I read the documents and then turn them into
scripts from there.
So it'll be my job to go through all of those things--maybe I'll skim though a few of them--but
basically break them out into "okay this is what Video One is, this is what Video Two
is" and arrange them.
And then from there I can start working on a script.
So, voiceover, "this sort of footage goes here."
And then from that outline, it makes editing so much easier.
I wish I would have figured out this whole process in the beginning of Cloth Map because
Chernobyl, the first big piece, was basically me just hitting my head against a wall, and
watching the footage over and over again and rewriting the V.O.
That one took a long time.
This is a much easier way to do it.
Speaking of editing, a big thanks to Joey Fameli for helping out with the edit of the
Cuba Travelogue that went up for Patrons, which shows how we got into Cuba, how we got
around, things we ate and drank, how to roll a cigar, Joey's dance moves, etc.
For those of you that don't know, Joey was the cameraman in Cuba as well as Brazil.
He didn't end up going to Mongolia or the Balkans with us because he and his wife had
their first baby, so congrats to them!
Also, you may recall, I teased another video from Cuba, specifically an interview with
a woman we met there, but I've decided to hold off on that video because we've shot
footage since then that I think we'll be able to tie into a better piece.
So that is coming later.
There were also two back-to-back trips to L.A., one for E3 in which I sat on the Giant
Bomb live show, which was fun, and appeared on the Giant Beastcast podcast.
And then it was back to L.A. a few days later for VidCon, the internet-video industry conference.
I did a live Q&A session from my hotel room where I basically spelled out everything that
I learned over the two days of the conference.
If you are a Patron and you missed that, there is an archive that you can go back and watch.
Speaking of Q&As, I will be doing another one of those for Patrons this month.
And actually, one of the things I was asked about during the VidCon livestream was the
idea of Cloth Map merch.
I have been investigating this, even going so far as to do some mock-ups and print some samples,
so stay tuned on that.
And I think I've figured out a way to do discounts for Patrons, so thumbs up if you're one of
those.
Worth pointing out that we could not do Cloth Map without the support of our Patrons, so
thank you to everyone who is contributing.
If you're curious about what you get as a Patron, you can go to patreon.com/clothmap.
And if, for whatever reason, you can't or don't want to go through Patreon but would
still like to support Cloth Map, there are other methods at clothmap.co/contribute, including
cryptocurrency, if that's your thing.
I know a lot of you, or some of you, like to stay anonymous, so that's there if you
would like to do that.
Boy, maybe I should do these videos more often because I feel like I just presented a deluge
of information on you.
But that is what's going on with Cloth Map.
Stay tuned for some dang videos!