"Animating" means that I am creating animated sequences for using the documentary, involving photographs, scanned pamphlets and ads, words, and other media to be placed among the interviews. In shooting this documentary I took a personal stand against filming people "doing things" just to make variation in the shots, and that lost "opportunity" will have to be made up in created sequences. The process isn't time consuming, there just could be a lot of it. How much is up in the air.

"Production" means that I am working on the DVD process, setting up the various ancilliary parts of doing a film, such as arranging for musicians, artists, and other folks to help with the final product that will come out. I'm also working out technical issues before they become insurmountable. It's better to spend some time on this months before they're needed, so I'm working on the right problems, and not trying to "learn on the go".

The part of the project I've referred to in the past as Research is still ongoing, as well.

"Research" means a lot of things. The first and most important aspect has been getting a grip on the BBS experience and understanding what made it up. To do this, I built this website with information on every BBS software package I can find. At over 800 packages and growing, I now have a way to keep track of what programs people were using and at what times, along with the myriad platforms that used to exist for home computers. This has allowed me to track such things as what programs were derivatives of others, and to have a place to store documentation and program files themselves, for study by myself and others.

Another big aspect of my research is building my timeline page, a script-generated site that gives information about any events I think are relevant to the documentary (and to BBSes, of course, but not always). It's still a little too sensationalistic, but those are the stories that are easiest to find. At 185 events listed, it's what I would call "thin". That will be fixed, I promise.

As time has gone on, the hundreds of folks writing in have made sure to ask me not to forget some important events and people from the BBS history (and pre-history!). Since I see a lot of messy descriptions of a good portion of these concepts, there is now a research page which is like a big open notebook as I track things down. You'll note, when you look there, that the information goes all over the place. It's when people tell me something is vital that I add it, and then I slowly learn what I need to, just like a regular notebook. If you have information to donate to me, then you get to go to heaven, where there's no line noise.

Meanwhile, I continue to update the TEXTFILES.COM and BBSLIST.TEXTFILES.COM sites as often as I can, since those were the genesis for this documentary and publicity and links from the documentary have done nothing but increase donations of text and information from folks.

The BBSLIST site, now handled by scripts and easy to maintain as a result, is getting lots and lots of updates because of the people who are sending in BBS lists. Thank you, folks! That site is really starting to make inroads into the 1980's, which was a big concern of mine. 103,000 BBSes! Goodness!

And TEXTFILES.COM is pushed past 56,000 files online and there's probably many thousands more on my sub-sites. I'm always looking for more artifacts and text to add to them, in case you're wondering what I do with my "spare time".....

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