Fifth Column FIlms
17th November 2023We Only Went And Did It!
So, then. This morning, we reached the end of an exhaustingly brilliant 28-day crowdfunding campaign.
In that time, we have successfully raised over £58,000 to help digitise all of the audio-visual footage* shot by "Britain's Greatest Living Folklorist", David 'Doc' Rowe: that includes calendar customs, seasonal events, folk-singers, storytellers, events, lectures, pub sessions, and so much more.
Two days after launching, we hit the first of our informal targets (£9k), then passed the next (£17k) just in time for Hallowe'en. On 4 November, ahead of Bonfire Night, we hit our main funding target of £25k, meaning we knew that, in conjunction with awen productions cic’s lottery funding, we could definitely digitise all of Doc's wondrous footage of vernacular seasonal events stretching back decades.
And with two weeks to go before the end of the campaign, we had a new and very ambitious plan...
Could we raise enough to digitise all of the film and video that Doc's ever recorded?
By 9 November we got to our first stretch goal of £39k ensuring all Doc's VHS footage was safe, then £43k on 13 November also guaranteed all his C-VHS footage. And this morning, in the final minutes of the campaign, we made it past a frankly astonishing £58k - meaning all of Doc's Mini-DV footage will join the digitised collection. Phew!
EVERYTHING. HE. HAS. EVER. FILMED.*
The real work starts here, and we have already begun the process of digitising, marking-up and cataloguing, and soon co-directors Rob & Tim will begin trawling through all 1,500 hours of footage, selecting material to use in the film.
The team behind the campaign are still recovering from it all, to be honest! But we owe quite a lot of thank-yous.
A big thank-you to all those who shared the campaign with your friends, family, colleagues, musicians, dancers, green men, osses, beasts, fools and more. A few of the influential people who lent their voices to help get the message out were Alice Fisher, Elizabeth Alker, Mathew Baynton, Billy Bragg, Eliza & Martin Carthy, Bridget Christie, Rob Cowen, Tom Cox, Mackenzie Crook, Jeremy Deller, Neil Gaiman, Robin Ince, Keir-La Janisse, Phill Jupitus, Andrew Kötting, Sam Lee, Benjamin Myers, Maxine Peake, and Martin Simpson. A big thank-you also, to those who donated rewards for us to share with backers, including Alan Moore, Robert MacFarlane, Johnny Flynn, Mat Osman, Stephen Ellcock, Boss Morris/Alex Merry, and Folklore Tapes (plus a few of you whose rewards we simply couldn't include in time - but thank you too!)
An absolutely massive thank you to the over 1000 (!) people and organisations who supported the campaign with your money, especially in this time when we know so many people have so many other calls on their budget.
An enormous and incalculable thank-you to all the people and communities who have carried, maintained, and updated so many of these customs and traditions for decades, riding out one revival or another, and coming out year after year.
And above all, we all owe an enormous debt of thanks to The Doc himself. He has maintained, often unsupported, this unique and irreplaceable archive himself for many decades - sometimes ensuring the archive was safe and housed when he himself wasn't. The legacy he has built and continues to build constitutes the most extraordinary record of mainland working-class Britain in the second half of the 20th century that we may ever have seen.
Cheers from - ROB CURRY, TIM PLESTER, JO BREEZE, SIMON COSTIN, JOHN McMAHON, STEPHANIE BESFORD, BEN EDGE, BARBARA SANTI, SOPHIE PARKES-NIELD, ANNA FC SMITH & NEIL FOX
* Prior to switching to digital recording techniques