FOUND FOOTAGE: 5th ANNIVERSARY PLANS (Patreon)

If you watched the most recent top tier exclusive video, you saw it happen in real-time: it has dawned on us over the past week or so that this year marks the 5th anniversary of Mr Biffo's Found Footage.

I've said it before, but the months we spent making that series were some of the best of my life. Myself, Sanja and Horsenburger got to work with tons of brilliant people, we were guerrilla enough that it never felt like manoeuvring the oil tanker got in the way of creativity, and through it all I learned how to edit, direct and plan.

Digitiser The Show, by comparison, was an unwieldy monster. The issues weren't so much that it was too ambitious - arguably, The Trojan Arse Protocol was more ambitious, given the time and budget we had! I think it had to do with there being more people involved. Somehow, I ended up being the 'boss', and so it felt less creative. I'm never entirely comfortable being in the role of authority, but it meant my energies went into being a diplomat and negotiator as much as anything. The problems rumbled along for a year afterwards - for one thing, we had a huge issue with one of the sponsors, where it all got a bit weird and unpleasant.

Plus, while it was shot and recorded in a professional way, this sort of butted up against my intention to edit it all myself. I'm actually still embarrassed by how it turned out, and I struggle to watch the whole thing without  feeling a pang of regret, and remembering all the behind-the-scenes stresses. I got better at it.

And to top it all off, it tied the Digitiser channel into retro gaming in the eyes of many, and somehow for those people 'Digitiser' became synonymous with my co-hosts. I got diminished on my own channel. Consequently, trying anything that didn't fit into the format and subject established by those six episodes was met with vocal annoyance. 

We're only now getting back to a place where we feel our core audience can be heard again. Those vocal retrogaming fans kind of skewed the perception we had of what we were doing, and I spent the best part of 18 months blocking much of that out, and sticking to my guns in the hope that they'd eventually get the message! Heck, it became a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more they moaned, the less I wanted to encourage them by covering games.

Frankly, you lot on here have become our guide to whether we're doing the right thing; you're really who we're doing this for, and only if loads of you went away would we stop!

Nonetheless, all of the above is kind of part of why I've taken so long to sort out the Digi Show DVDs; every time I think about it, my heart just plummets. Thank god they're close to being done now.

Found Footage, on the other hand, just brings back the happiest of memories - mostly. Oddly, as does Digitiser Live. 

Last year's Lost Footage was meant to be the final word on that whole Xenoxxx universe, but as proud of it as I am - and I am VERY proud of it - it evolved into something slightly apart from Found Footage. 

Hamstrung by the pandemic, it didn't have the scale of FF, the guest cast, and the location filming, so I think this gave it a feeling of being somehow less significant. The original Found Footage was the first 'big' thing we had on the Digitiser channel - pre-dating Digitiser The Show, of course - and some of those episodes are still among the most watched we've ever done. 

I admit I got discouraged by the response to Lost Footage (admittedly, I barely promoted it, unlike the original), but I keep getting drawn back to that world, and something about the original series did resonate with a lot of people. 

So... sod it. It's the 5th anniversary. Let's celebrate it somehow. 

CELEBRATION TIME: COME ALONG

For ages now, Sanja and I have said how one day we'd love to do Found Footage Live. We sometimes brainstorm ideas for this mad, immersive, event, even though we know we'd never do it. But what we think we are going to do is mark the anniversary at Digitiser Live 2.0. Providing it goes ahead. The show will be a celebration of the entirety of Digitiser. That means nods to the original Teletext incarnation, Digitiser The Show segments, the Digi Minis, and, of course, Found Footage. Planning is already underway for this!

Now... the other big news... once we've finished the Digi Kickstarter rewards... we're going to start planning something I never thought we'd do: a brand new series of Mr Biffo's Found Footage.

When I finished the original, I had always intended to continue the story; I've often thought about where I'd take it next, how I'd structure the series, how I'd bring my recent experience of editing into it. Somehow, introducing more characters into the Digi episodes makes Found Footage a better fit. The video I uploaded yesterday of the Balacs ad was testing that theory, and both of us were taken aback by how well it was received. It feels like a no-brainer. 

None of this, I should state, will get in the way of the regular Digi eps; we're still going to carry on as we are, with Gannon coming back, more Supernatural World - all of that - but Found Footage Series 2 will slot alongside it. It might mean a few more short, FF-y, standalone videos going forwards, to get people reacquainted with the original madness, but nothing major will change.

And we're not going to rush into this. We've only just decided to do it, but... somehow we've been leading to this for a while, without even realising. We already know the sorts of things we want to offer if we ever did another Kickstarter (NO DVDs, but some physical rewards, and a whole bunch of exclusive, one-of-a-kind, ones). I know who I'd get involved. I know the way the eps would be structured. Plus, with enough build-up, I would have time to promote it properly. Lost Footage quite literally got lost, because it was all so impromptu.

Lastly, I want to make much more of the ARG element, and go through with my long-held plan to have a real, physical, prize of some worth that viewers will be able to track down by solving clues hidden in the episodes. 

All of that will take some planning, and we already have our regular weekly eps, a podcast, and a live show, to put on. Plus, of course, I need to earn a living somehow.

So, I think the current time-frame is that we'll launch the FF Series 2 Kickstarter in the wake of Digi Live 2.0, with a view to starting filming throughout the first half of next year - and release in the autumn, like the original. 

With, no doubt, some sort of live premiere event like we did before. I'd love it to conclude with a big, glossy, short film like the original series did, but frankly... it'll depend on how much money we can raise, and I admit I'm not sure we're going to raise as much as before. Certainly, I will plan for something modest, and hope to be pleasantly surprised that we can afford something on a grander scale. Digi fans have always been good at surprising me.

The other thing to say is that I now feel confident enough in my abilities as a performer to actually put myself in the series more than I did before. So that'll be a thing. 

Anyhow, there we go. Bit of news. Big bit of news. It's a way off, but hopefully exciting.