History in the making

I would love to be able to invest in a project that documented the beginning of maidsafe… for so many reasons.
Any thoughts russell? chrisfostertv?

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I would support a kickstarter project that would do a documentary on this.

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Or, mastercoin, counterparty, swarm, etc. I dont think something like this would be hard to fund. It would also be an opportunity to demonstrate the collaboration, editing and distribution of films on maidsafe

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@janeannford hmm, that’s not a bad idea. Docs can be a massive, massive undertaking. I’ve worked on 5 or 6 feature docs, so I’m at least familiar with. But I bet the workload can be alleviated by distributing tasks online.

What’s really interesting is, in theory, documentaries can be done remotely. Someone out there with the Maidsafe team can shoot, get interviews, then upload the material. Get people remotely to transcribe footage. Use a service like Slack or Trello to coordinate the narrative boards and distribute editorial tasks into pods.

We could definitely devise a system where people work with low-res, 960x540 h264. I cut on Avid, but Premiere can handle h264 without a hitch, especially doc material where there’s no effects/layer stacking.

I’m curious if Alex Winter’s documentary touched on this topic…

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I use to work with Dan, who did this doc on BitCoin: The Rise and Rise of BitCoin. I don’t really know him anymore but I’ll try to contact him…

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Channel 4 news got in touch with us last week and asked to be kept updated with our progress. Maybe they will do one?

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Channel 4 would be cool but a community created one would ROCK more IMHO!

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A slot on channel 4 news would be great. Not so much for itself, but it would put us in front of all the big media and probably boost mainstream coverage. Would be perfect once the network was ready for mass adoption by joe public (i.e. download and go ready).

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Not sure what anyone else’s particular motivation would be, but for me I think it would be an excellent opportunity to document the many times we went against conventional business “wisdom” to get here (and by “we”, of course I mean David :-)).

Much of this wisdom flies in the face of empirical evidence or logic, but the experts and advisers peddle this crap to naive entrepreneurs, costing them dearly.

If we can show how differently MaidSafe has been run from the very start, warts and all (and by “warts”, of course I mean “mistakes”), we might just save a few good souls from the wolves.

Necessarily such a project would be largely about David, but if it were able to focus on just the evolution of MaidSafe it would be cool, and you’d be more likely to get him onside :-). Not to say that there aren’t a good few stories I could tell about David - I know him from pre-MaidSafe days back when we both had lives - for just the right amount of whisky I’m sure I could be persuaded… :wink:

Anyway, thumbs up from me, assuming it can wait until we’ve got the network launched!

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Like Fraser said, SAFE is the vision of David Irvine and so his personal blog would give a fair bit of insight to the man along with his twitter account

I think the tech itself would probably not make for enthralling watching, but the story behind it certainly would. The whole thing around nature and ants etc…would allow some stock footage to be woven in.

Maybe the guys have old photos and video they would be willing to share…nights down the pub, David falling off his wee boat, or getting stung by ants etc :slight_smile:

Would definitely need footage from Troon, interviews with former girlfriends, teachers “Yes I remember David he was always…” You’d probably need subtitles though :slight_smile:

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I agree with @chrisfostertv that the tech itself wouldn’t make an enthralling watch for very long. You’ve got, at most, 4 minutes of graphics before people glaze over. But a solid explanation of how it works coupled with it’s implications could be interesting. Narratively, you’d want that to be a few minutes of a larger picture.

The unfortunate thing with documentaries is the 'warts and all" @anon86652309 is mentioning. A good documentary is about people overcoming obstacles, surmounting great odds. If this project is a success, the tech proves itself functional, and there’s real adoption, then that’s where the drama starts. That’s where shit gets interesting, but potentially it’s also where things go south for those involved.

It would have been great to have cameras around during the crowdsale.

Without the warts and Campbellian form, a documentary just becomes propaganda.

One approach could be to get interviews every so often from team members. But good interviews usually need good interviewers. So I wonder if there’s a way to set up a Hangouts interview + a good camera recording. Almost like an Interview in a Box™. The most important thing is tons of light and a good microphone.

Another approach is having people do interviews, then upload the high-res footage to someone curating the project. Maybe 3 people. So the footage doesn’t exist in one place (if Maidsafe is up and running… could just store it there…!).

But yeah, I guess this is the time to start something like this, and document it over the next year.

Also, what NEEDS to happen is getting good footage of when the first public testnet goes up. That sort of stuff.

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Yes! My thoughts were that the most compelling footage would emerge over the next few years and to position ourselves, the best we can, to capture what is significant.

Idea for the documentary.

When I first joined MaidSafe Dev list, I had many questions and skepticism. We (the community) had debates with the team and each other. The evolution of brainstorming and group solutions are literally documented in that forum, and on this one as well.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/maidsafe-development

One only needs to take some “snips” of our conversations, showing how we came up with the solutions we are implementing today.

Ever wonder how we came up with the names? How we decided on which analogy to use? Farming vs Mining. That stuff would be very interesting for new people.

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You know we don’t have any film on say the early founders of America either but people have done some really good documentaries on such topics…

Maybe a bit of what @dyamanaka is mentioning above…

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Yeah, that’s true. Those style of documentaries can work really well. They tend to feel more “TV.” History channel-type stuff. Although with those, they also tend to be more informative docs, as opposed to narrative docs. With TV docs, we also accept a certain level of content because the filmmaker is creating a doc from archival. We understand it’s a “look back” kind of story.

But if you were to see a documentary done about modern content it could feel cheap, and therefore not as engaging. When key players are missing from a documentary today, my first thought is that they had a bad run-in with those people and they refused to be involved. That makes me question the whole project. The really engaging, impressive stories are the ones where the players are front-and-center.

@dyamanaka you could definitely pull from that message board for some of the content. We could come up with some clever ways to depict that information. Eventually we’d need to dig more into the people, though. The best documentaries eventually are about relationships, not just the technical. And the Safe Network shouldn’t be about the tech, but instead how the tech affects us.

We could just make a technical documentary, but then we’re drifting into marketing material, not a real documentary.

EDIT: Fixing my tone, I sound like a jerk.

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Loving this thread, liked everyone’s comments, great ideas

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Once the Facebook and YouTube equivalents are on the safe network we will all be sharing our stories with each other. Lots of material to work with I’m sure.