We’ve got video from The Gathering 97/98, The Gathering G2000 and The Gathering G2 – and mighty fine it looks too. Thanks a million to Iain for making such high-quality copies for me to put on Google Video.

I suppose my personal favourite is the G2000 Havoc! “shopping trolley” interview, where Mikey and Newsboy took me up to the Domain, put me in a shopping trolley, and wheeled me around for a couple of hours while we chatted about everything Gathering. I could not believe how many people saw that show, and for months (even years) afterwards, if I ever mentioned it, people would go “Oh my God! Was that you??? I remember that episode so well!”

I still don’t quite know how that all happened. I know I wanted to do the interview outdoors, somewhere nice and nature-ish, which is why I suggested the Domain. And I remember Newsboy already had this shopping trolley idea – although I have no clue why – and he was really, really keen on it… so we compromised and did both. As you do. The only tricky thing was that the bumps on the ground as I was wheeled over the grass tended to make my voice go all jigglyjoggly – you can hear it if you listen carefully.

That was such a fun afternoon! Mikey and Jeremy are really really nice guys – I always enjoyed doing Havoc! interviews – and that particular afternoon I reckon we were all really on form.

I seem to remember one or two of the Gathering crew not being particularly happy with that interview – I think they thought it was too silly, or not respectful enough – but I like it. It turned out to be the most memorable interview we ever did – and I think it’s a Very Good Thing to be able to laugh at yourself once in a while…

Enjoy!

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!