Finally - the GOLD DVDs have arrived from the manufacturer. We're signing them this weekend, and they will be shipped to you all Tuesday, May 25th. This has been a long process, I know, with more bumps in the road than we ever expected. But we're finally there.

I thank you all for your patience and continued dedication to GOLD. Your DVDs and posters will be arriving soon.

-David

After a grueling three months of color correcting, sound cleaning and technical rig-a-ma-roll, we have a GOLD Season 1 DVD. We're just finishing-up the quality control testing right now, and then the disc will be off to the manufacturer in just a matter of days.

First, I want to thank you all for your support and your patience. This process has taken a bit longer than we anticipated - the first time out, I guess, always does. We've learned a lot and I can confidently say that, thanks to you all and your generosity, this will not take so long next time ;-)

So: housekeeping. I'll be shooting each DVD Club member an email today to confirm your mailing address. Please respond, even if it's just to say that all is well, so you can be sure to get your DVD/poster/etc. as soon as it is ready. Also in the email, I'll be asking you which DVD cover(s) you'd prefer. The special edition DVD comes with any one of 12 covers:

- Character Gallery (all 11 main ensemble members in a grid)
- Richard Wright
- Jon Drake
- Sam St. Croix
- Tim Calloway
- Charles Subar
- Oliver Crane
- Martha Thistlethwait
- Paul Hokes
- Jackson
- Persephone
- Cissy Drake

You can preview all of the covers here: www.goldtheseries.com/blog_entry/sneak_peek_at_the_dvd_cover.

If you gave $50 or more, you have two DVDs coming to you. You can have two different DVD covers if you like, or the same one. Up to you.

That email will be coming soon, and I'll be dropping short updates to let you know when the disc goes to manufacture, when we get it back, when we have our cast signing party, and when we mail everything out to you. Thank you again for all your support. We literally could not have done this without you.

-David Nett
Creator, GOLD

Well, it is very nearly time.

As of the end of this week, all of the pieces of the GOLD DVD will be in place. We'll be putting the discs through several rounds of hard-core quality assurance testing the next two weeks or so, and will probably have to tweak a few things here and there, but as of right now all the bits of the disc are mostly locked, so we can finally talk about what made it in.

Here's the final breakdown of the GOLD Season 1 Special Edition DVD:

• 
  
• 1 professionally replicated DVD (not duplicated - professionally replicated from a glass master)
• 
  
• with:
• 
  
• All seven original Season 1 Episodes, with completely (painstakingly) re-mastered color and sound (approx. 75 minutes)
• 
  
• English subtitles
• 
  
• 2 separate commentary tracks for each episode (1 courtesy of the creators, 1 courtesy of the cast & crew and a liberal amount of beer & wine)
• 
  
• An interview with the GOLD cast & crew, hosted by GirlGamer's Cricket Lee
• 
  
• A special DVD club "thank you" video from the GOLD cast
• 
  
• A selection of trailers and sneak peeks from the world of independent web television
• 
  
• and
• 
  
• A DVD Exclusive GOLD Mini-Episode: "Palace of the Silver Princess" - available only on the GOLD Season 1 Special Edition DVD!
• 
  

So, assuming you watch all of the episodes with and without commentary (and I know you will), and assuming my math is right (a dicier prospect, for sure) that's almost four and a half hours of content!

In addition, the Special Edition DVD will come with:

• 
  
• A special note from creator David Nett
• 
  
• A behind-the-scenes photo from the set of GOLD
• 
  
• A GOLD CCG character card
• 
  
• One of 12 different DVD covers (choose which cover you want at purchase)
• 
  

The good news: this is a packed disc. We are filling every available bit of space with content. The bad news: we weren't able to fit everything we wanted to; a handful of potential disc features didn't make the cut. Honestly, we just plain ran out of space. Once the DVD is released, we'll be working hard to figure out what to do with those extra bits and bobs. We've some ideas. Oh, yes we have.

What's that? You want to know when the GOLD Season 1 Special Edition DVD will be available? Well, since we've still got to QA the master disc and then manufacture it, we can't say for certain. We're hoping to make it available before the end of April, but it may leak into early May. As soon as we have a concrete release date, we will let everyone know. This whole process has taken a lot longer than I anticipated, but I'm so proud of what we've done.

Of course, DVDs and posters will be in the mail to eligible GOLD DVD Club members as soon as they are ready - you'll get yours first!

Thanks again for supporting GOLD, and independent television. The future is ours.

-David Nett
Creator, GOLD

I got an email from one of the DVD Club members last week, wondering what was going on with the DVD. It reminded me that I haven't done an update now in over a month, which is terrible. I hope you all can find it in your hearts to forgive me. I sure appreciate it. So, here's the update:

You know how, with complicated projects, the final 5%-10% of the work always takes the longest? Well, the good news is, that's where we are now. The bad news is...that's where we've been for a couple of weeks now. The video for all the episodes has been re-mastered and looks great, and the audio is very close to done. The subtitles are done. The special features have all been put together. The posters and DVD covers are ready for print. The process has been exhausting, and a lot more just old-fashioned grunt work (and cash) than I initially anticipated, but we're so very close.

The remainder of the work we'll be doing here before replication is a rotating process of getting the episode content onto the discs, determining remaining space, tweaking the extras to fit, applying all the content, applying extensive quality control testing to the whole thing, noting bugs and problems, fixing them, and doing it all again. Re-master, QA, log problems, fix, rinse, repeat. A boring and time-consuming but terribly important process.

And that is why we haven't had an update in a little while: we're so close to celebration time, but not...quite...there...yet. This whole process has taken a little longer than I'd hoped: my hope was to have the disc to replication by mid-march (right now), get them back for signing, etc. right at the end of the month, and have them to all the DVD Club Members (and ready for retail sale) by mid-April. It looks now like end-of-April is more realistic.

In the meantime, there's some fantastic news to share: we've been nominated for a Streamy Award for Best Ensemble Cast in a Web Series! More about that soon.

As always, thank you so much for your support (and your patience!).

-David Nett
Creator, GOLD

We're trucking along here at GOLD HQ, working hard on the episodes and the extras (we filmed the extra-special new scene this week). In addition, I've been playing a lot with the GOLD graphics - the DVD menus as well as the DVD cover(s) and the poster(s) we'll be releasing along with the DVD.

While the DVD cover/poster is not finished, I feel like I'm getting pretty close, so I wanted to share them with you folks. This the the treatment for the "Special Edition" - the DVD version which will be sold through the GOLD website (a "regular" version will also be sold through other sites - initially at least, the Special Edition will be available only directly from us). There will be 12 different covers for the SE edition - people will select the cover they'd like upon purchase (those of you who will be getting a DVD in return for your generous donation will get to choose as well).

Anyway, no more writey - more lookey. I'd love to hear what y'all think.

-David
Creator, GOLD

Happy New year, everyone. And Happy GOLD DVD Club inaugural year!

As you know by now, we did it: we met (exceeded) our goal, the DVD is being made, the DVD Club is closed, and its exclusive membership are the coolest people on earth.*

We're busy getting our schedule together and, while we probably won't announce a hard release date for a few weeks at least (many years working day jobs in software development has taught me not to do that until you are 100% certain), we're confident that everyone who pledged at least $25 will have amazing, exclusive DVD Club Edition DVDs in your grubby, grasping hands sometime in the 1st quarter of 2010. For anyone who missed the deadline but still wants a DVD when they are released, you'll be able to buy it through Goldtheseries.com, and maybe other places, shortly thereafter. I can hardly wait.

Now, some discussion of DVD Extras:

DVD SPECIAL FEATURES!

We're gonna cram as many special features into the DVD as we can manage and, while we will have at least English subtitles, I do not count that as a Special Feature (I hate when DVDs list "subtitles" as a special feature - that's not a special feature, it's just common decency). Some of them will be pretty typical - a gallery of behind-the-scenes photos (some never seen before!), a hilarious commentary track or two, etc., but some will be special indeed. I wanna talk about two of them here:

Never-before-seen Scene with the American Gamers

A lot of DVDs feature deleted scenes. The fact is, for GOLD, our schedules and budgets were so tight that we really didn't shoot anything we didn't use. Sure, a line or two was trimmed here or there, but we really worked so lean there's nothing notable in the way of footage which was left on the cutting room floor.

However, a lot of cutting happened in the writing phase of GOLD. After I originally outlined the plot of the first GOLD story, I broke it down into episode arcs and realized I'd need 20-25 ten-minute episodes to tell the whole story. I knew I couldn't afford to do more than six or seven episodes in Season 1, and I didn't want to stretch the story over three seasons (I knew it'd be hard to fund a second season, and I didn't even want to speculate on a season 3). So I collapsed what would have been the first two seasons of story into one season, and a lot of plotlines (and characters) were removed or greatly shrunk. (A side note: the Dangerous Gamers from Episode 4 were originally much more important in the world of professional Goblins and Gold, and were the American team's main rivals in the semi-finals.)

However, I'd already written a lot of stuff that would become seasons 1 and 2 of GOLD. Some of the stuff I was cutting was even good (no one is ever more surprised than me when my stuff is good). So, I found a little self-contained scene that I think is funny, and we're gonna produce it as a DVD exclusive mini-episode. The scene features Tim, Sam & Charles, and takes place between the Prologue and Episode 1, about a month before the Semi-Final tournament where Jonathan is injured. You'll get to see Charles again while he's just the Equipment Manager, Sam back in his original chainmail gauntlet, and get a glimpse of the inside of Tim's house. Exciting stuff indeed.

An Interview with the GOLD Cast & Crew

Another cool feature, we think, will be a sort of series-regular cast (and some crew if we can convince them) reunion-style interview, conducted by geek culture reporter Cricket Lee (FanGirl's Guide, GirlGamer.com, GeekWeek.com). We're gonna sit around and chat with Cricket and do our level best to be fascinating. There's a solid chance that one or more of us will break down in tears, and a near-certainty that Rick (Richard Wright) will pick a fight with someone and end up being punched in the face. Now you really want that DVD, doncha?

--

We've a few more cool extras planned, but I'll hold onto those details for another time. Thanks again for supporting the GOLD Season 1 DVD Club. I'll write again soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, you can post them here, or shoot me an email at goldtheseries@gmail.com. Make certain to mention you're a DVD club member so I can give you priority treatment.

Later, David
Creator, GOLD
*apart from Lenny Kravitz. That dude is just too cool to be challenged.

Everyone -

Thank you, everyone, for making the GOLD Season 1 DVD Club a success. I'll be writing a lot more about the process of making the DVD and how we're progressing next week, but I just wanted to wish all of our supporters (and prospective supporters) a very happy holiday season.

More soon.

-David

Hey there, everyone!
It's been a while since I've posted an update. We've been super-busy here at Casa del GOLD (I don't speak spanish, sadly) working on fundraising (always, always fundraising ;-( ), scripts and planning for GOLD Season 2, scripts for our GOLD spin-off, "Night of the Zombie King," and pre-production for our upcoming (in 4 days!) shoot for the pilot of our new series, "Alice & the Monster." Whew!

But don't think we didn't notice that you crazy-awesome folks have put us over the top. Yes, you read me right: the GOLD Season 1 DVD Club is 100% funded! Over 100%, actually. Which means that A) there will definitely be a GOLD Season 1 DVD in early 2010 and B) you guys are awesome. Which you already knew. There're still 20+ days in this Kickstarter, so we're hoping to build up a little cushion to help us with some extra-extras we've been discussing. If you've got friends who'd enjoy a GOLD DVD, encourage them to stop by and join the DVD club, pre-order a DVD, and generally go nuts.

Since we are now fully funded (once the Kickstarter ends on January 1), we've already begun work. The first things that need to be done are the most important: re-mastering the GOLD episodes for DVD. I thought I'd tell you a little bit about that here, and in the next week or so we'll talk more about DVD extras. Cool? Cool.

A word of warning: if you're not interested in the process of producing a DVD from content originally aimed at the web, you will fall asleep within 2 paragraphs. I guarantee it ;-)

Re-Mastering GOLD

Thanks to your generous donations, I've hired a cracker-jack professional editor to assist in the creation of the GOLD DVD. Re-Mastering GOLD essentially means returning to the raw episode edits and cleaning-up much of my ham-fisted post-production work. As of last week, this process has begun. It's a time consuming, laborious process, but I'm super-excited to see the end results.

Video:

When we originally made GOLD, we shot in glorious 1080i HD on my trusty little Sony HVR-A1u. While it's only a single-CMOS camera, the footage looks pretty darn stunning, I think. The thing is, we were aiming for the web, our budgets were tiny, and I was, let us say, inexperienced at color correction (I had never done it before ever). My inexperience bled over into the final product. What that meant was:

• 
  
• I colored it for the web. The range of colors available for display on computer monitors is much wider than the gamut of the NTSC standard used by television and DVDs in the U.S. I colored corrected the episodes to computer monitor standards (such as they are), not NTSC. Therefore, when you convert the current GOLD videos to DVD, you get some bizarre coloring where the current colors sit outside the NTSC standard.
• 
  
• Since I was such a novice, I had a hard time color correcting across different lighting conditions, etc. I took a shortcut which washed all the episodes with a yellowish, old-film look. By applying this wash, I was able to mask many of the cut-to-cut inconsistencies that I was unable to properly correct. It worked out, but sacrificed a lot of the richness of the original color for consistency.
• 
  

Probably the most significant amount of work that will go into the making of the GOLD DVD is to undo all of my novice color correction (a fairly easy, if time-consuming task) and re-color correct using professional standards. Episode 6 will be the easiest - we were fortunate to have the help of a pro color correcting EP6. Unfortunately, she was forced to match the yellow-washed look of the rest of the series, but working with her stuff will be least laborious.

In the end, I think the GOLD that you can watch online looks pretty damn good, especially relative to the overall world of web video. But I know there's an even higher level of quality that can be achieved with our source video - it just needs a professional editor tasked with unlocking that quality. Thanks to you folks, we've now got one.

Audio:

Good sound is the hardest thing to achieve in any indie video production. Proper equipment is expensive, and the environment constantly interferes. On the GOLD shoot we used a pretty high-quality boom mic and a great boom operator. But we had no lavs to work with (tiny mics which live on each actor for clear, crisp sound), the surroundings often interfered and, as with color, I was the most novice of novices when it came to post production sound. My processing and mixing skills were, um, raw.

The good news was, web video, especially at the time we were first releasing GOLD a year ago, was a lot more forgiving about sound than your living room entertainment system. Most people watching television on the web are listening using earphones or tiny computer speakers. A lot of the imperfections in sound can be easily masked when aiming at such devices. Not so with DVD. DVDs get played in your kick-butt, amplified, huge-speakered entertainment systems. The sound quality bar is much higher.

Fortunately, like the video, the raw sound we have is pretty darn good. Our pro post guy, Frederick, is confident he'll be able to make it very clean and pleasant. He's doing that right now.

---

It's so exciting to think about bringing GOLD to that next level. The DVD is going to look and sound amazing, and it is all thanks to you folks who backed the GOLD DVD Club. I hope you're as excited about seeing the end result as we are.
- David
PS: Since the Kickstarter does not end until midnight, December 31, the funds from your pledges have not yet been activated. According to Kickstarter, pledge funds will be secured starting immediately after the Kickstarter campaign ends, and should be in our hands within a week or two. This means that, if you need to plan to make certain you've got the funds in place, you should aim for December 31. Thanks.
Next time: Exploring and Planning DVD extras

Hey everyone. I wanna start out by once again thanking all of the DVD Club Members - you amazing folks have pushed us to the 50% funded mark in just a couple short weeks, and we really appreciate it. Only 50% (and 40+ days) to go!

Because I'm optimistic about the prospects, we're beginning planning for our DVD extras. Obviously, the bulk of our resources will be spent remastering sound and picture to DVD quality, but we wanna throw some extras in as well. I'd love your input: are these extras things you'd like to see? Are there extras I've not listed but that you think should be included? Drop me a line and let me know. After my production team (who help me figure out what is and is not possible, given time and resources), you DVD Club Members will have the most influence over what ends up on the DVD.

Here's a current list of extras we're considering. Please feel free to let us know what you think in the comments.

POSSIBLE GOLD DVD EXTRAS

• 
  
• Cast/Crew commentary tracks
• 
  
• Photo galleries, including exclusive behind the scenes photos
• 
  
• Interview footage from various sources
• 
  
• A special DVD release interview with cast & crew
• 
  
• more...(your ideas here)
• 
  

We'd love to hear your thoughts.

More soon.

-David

So, a mere four days after sending our official announcement (and just under a month since the soft-launch of the DVD Club Project), we are 45% funded. With just over 50 days to go. I'm thrilled.

I want to thank all of you who've pledged so far. Your support is so amazing. We've already started planning for our DVD extras so that, as soon as we're sure we're fully funded, we can begin production on the DVD, and have it available as soon as possible.

In other GOLD news, we've recently announced our GOLD Character Card Game. It's a fun, silly game to pass the time in between watching episodes (and seasons of GOLD) - easy to learn, and pretty quick to play. You can form teams of your favorite GOLD characters (I will just assume that all of you will have me [Jon Drake] on every team) and battle for the Goblins & Gold crown. You can find out more through the GOLD online store: www.goldtheseries.com/store.

That's all for tonight. Talk to y'all soon.

-David
Creator, GOLD

Folks -

Wow. I was wrong. The "Our First" thing is already getting old ;-)

Again, I wanna thank you all for supporting the GOLD DVD Club. The couple of weeks since we launched on this site have been the "soft launch" - basically, I've only been promoting it to a subset of our audience as I work out a lot of details behind the scenes. Plus, I don't know about you, but my inbox has been inundated with Halloween party invites and the like these past couple of weeks. Halloween being a big holiday in the Gamer/Geek world, I wanted to wait until next week to do the big promotional push for the DVD Club.

So, you can expect more contact from me starting next week, along with a few other exciting announcements in the world of GOLD. Thanks so much again for believing in us, and stay tuned...

- David Nett
Creator, GOLD

I've decided that all of our updates will start with "Our First..." and be followed by the object of the descriptive firstness (that's fancy grammar terminology - did you know I was almost an English teacher?). This will be charming for two more posts. Then things will turn ugly.

Okay, on to the meat of this update: after having been live for just a few hours (and having had almost no publicity yet), we've got our first backer! A very generous individual has joined the highest level of backer-dom I created for the project. Thank you so much, generous good sir! (When the project is fully funded, I'll be able to contact each person to see if/how they want their donation to be credited.) Thank you, thank you!

--

For those of you curious about how Kickstarter works, join the club. The service is a little over a year old, and, based upon the blog posts, etc., we're all sort of feeling our way around this crowdsourced funding thing. In case you're interested in trying it out for your cool-ass project, here's what I've learned so far:

1) Setting up your Kickstarter project is a nerve-wracking process of writing and re-writing, and obsessively reading all of the project content from other Kickstarters, both those whose projects are successful and those whose projects have failed to fund. This is an imperfect process, but the only way to get a feel for what works and what doesn't.

2) There seem to be four important parts to most successful projects: a reasonable and clearly-stated goal, a video plea (we're working on that now), ongoing updates & engagement, and, most importantly, a strong passion for the project.

3) Projects are pledge-based: You gather pledges during the project process, and no one who pledges is charged until the project end date (and only if the project fully-funds). This is a cool feature which ensures that you're not giving money to a project which will never see the light of day.

5) (learned just today) When your project gets a pledge, you get an email letting you know about it.

Pretty simple, no? Well, it seems that way. Now. Let's hope this thing works out.

More soon,

-David
Creator, GOLD

This is the short post that tells ya we're up and running. We'll be adding more soon, including a video to help (we hope) attract donors, and more news about other exciting projects in the GOLD world. You can also visit our website ( http://www.goldtheseries.com ), our Facebook page ( http://www.facebook.com/goldtheseries ) and follow us on Twitter ( http://www.twitter.com/goldtheseries ) to get all the latest news.

Wow. That's a lot of updates. Soon, we'll be knocking on your bedroom window with the latest GOLD news. Technology is crazy! Don't be scared. It's just us.