Hi Alison,

I have just watched the Gathering documentary. I was there. Watching those dance scenes just bought on such great feelings. That was a magical event. Dancing in the hot sun with the gathering team firing water over everyone… absolutely epic stuff.

I just want to take this chance to thank you and the Gathering team for the wonderful parties you put on over the years. I can`t really thank you enough because I have had some of the best times ever at these events (I went to three – and am 39yrs old  now).

Maybe you could pass this on to the team… “Thank you so much for your hard work and the parties that I will never forget”.

Yours sincerely,
David Montgomery

Thanks David! We really appreciate your thanks!

I was thinking as New Year ticked over a couple of weeks ago that it was exactly ten years since we were up on Takaka Hill seeing in the new millennium and wondering if the skinheads were gonna come and get us – and it’s now 12 years since we filmed The Gathering documentary – so it’s just brilliant that people still watch it and still love it and still feel motivated to say “thanks”.

I think it says a lot about the awesomeness of The Gathering as an event, and about how strongly TheG imprinted itself on our national psyche. Very cool.

To me the most important part of David’s email is the thanks he sends out to The Gathering crew – and it’s why I asked him if I could post it on the blog.

Every one of the hundreds of crew members worked their ass off every year at TheG, for not much (if any) money, and in enormously stressful conditions – and for the most part it was done in style, with smiles, and with complete dedication. Individual crew members didn’t always get thanked for all their hard work, so it’s really nice to have an opportunity to pass on a Gatherer’s thanks to the people who made it all happen.

I’m having a bit of trouble getting the high-res version of The Gathering documentary 97/98 online at Google Video – it took quite a few days to upload – and then it failed… I have no idea why. Rats! I’m trying again now…

So in the meantime, here’s a little news report from the same event – I guess this was probably broadcast on 1 January 1998. Nice! Let’s see how it looks embedded on the page. Hopefully the high-res will look ok. I’ll test it here before I put it on the website.

Those of you who’ve already watched the large-screen version of the doco on Google Video will be aware that the quality leaves something to be desired. It looks OK at the embed-on-my-web-page size, but anything larger than that, and there’s quite a lot of pixellation. Well, Iain has fixed all that.

Viewing it on my laptop it’s very close to being DVD quality. I began the upload-to-Google-Video process a few minutes ago, and if the experience with the lower-quality (much smaller) version is anything to go by, it will probably take a week to upload. Literally!

We shall see.  We shall also see how much loss of quality we get once Google have done whatever it is they do to videos. Hopefully not too much. I’ll link to the new version from the original page on Google, and  I’ll let you know in the blog when it’s up. Woohoo!

And once that’s done, I’ll get started on uploading the other new video I’ve got  – also in super high quality.

Watch this space!