DIGITISER THE SHOW: IT'S COMING HOME (BACK)! (Patreon)

Those of you over on the Top Tier will know this already… but we’re doing a second series of Digitiser The Show.

Well, hopefully.

I mean, crowd-funding dependent. And not before all the Kickstarter rewards from Series 1 have gone out. Which should be done soon.

I think this is okay to reveal here now?

Sanja and I have kind of resolved any issues we had from the first series, mostly, and are now firmly in thinking-about-it-seriously mode, and how we can make the whole thing run more smoothly, more efficiently, and less stress-inducing-ly…!

So, that’s exciting yes? Hopefully.

There are going to be some changes, however. It won’t be exactly the same format. There were things that worked better than others last time, both on-screen and off. Plus we obviously want to introduce new games and segments, and hopefully get out and about a bit this time. We had a bunch of on-location ideas we wanted to do on Series 1 that we had to drop for various reasons.

We all loved the gang feel of Series 1, so we still hope to feature many of our most favourite people, but we’re whittling down the core hosting team to mainly Gannon and I. That’s not to mean you won’t see some of the same faces from series one – I’ve already reached out to Larry and Octav1us – and hopefully plenty of new ones.

While it may have worked in the finished show, having five people host was unwieldy from a production perspective, and it put additional pressure on the budget, and not everyone was able to get a fair bite of the cherry.

That also goes for the production overall; Series 1 felt like a huge machine, and hosting at the same time as carrying that on my shoulders was an absurd amount of stress. So, the production overall will be leaner and more focused. But it’ll still have the same energy and chaos and retro-gaming focus as the original.

For me, it’s important we give the show its own channel. I don’t want it to get in the way of the main, weekly, Digi channel, and I need to avoid what happened last time, which was us gaining huge numbers of retrogaming subscribers… then me losing interest in doing weekly retrogaming stuff, which pissed them off. Once every few years is fine! So, there’ll be a Digitiser Gaming Channel of some description, and the usual channel will continue as normal (or abnormal, more appropriately).

Backer rewards TBC… as the jury is still out as to whether I’d want to do DVDs again, but one thing we would like to offer is the chance to come along and watch filming. When we had people there last time, it really helped our energy levels, and it’d be a unique experience for supporters. Experience, I think, are far more valuable.

The last thing to say now is… I’m not sure when this will be kicking off. We’ve got Digitiser Live to organise between now and the end of August (there are still a few tickets left; we’ll be working with the Arts Centre to make attendees feel as safe as possible… and please get your jabs, if you haven’t already).

But I also don’t want to launch it too near to Christmas, so I think sometime in September makes sense. Then we’d aim to start pre-production late-2021/early-2022, and film around Easter, possibly, leading into early summer. We crammed everything into 5 days last time, and it nearly killed us. So, we’d be looking at a more sensible production schedule.

Chris Bell of Superpage 58 has reminded me that Digi’s 30th Anniversary takes place on January 1st 2023. Even if we launch the series before that date, it might be nice to tie it into the anniversary somehow.

Anyway. That’s all I’ve got to say right now. We don’t have more specifics… just loose plans, that’ll start coming into focus. I hope at least some of you are excited at the prospect, even though it might be a slightly different show to the first series. But not that different. You know what to expect from me by now.

Paul