HEART OF NEON
THE FILM PARTNERSHIP THAT GIVES THE DOCUMENTARY ITS VIDEO
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story includes plenty of video clips, with interviewees including fans, journalists and other developers as well as Jeff himself. Unlike with previous projects, Digital Eclipse partnered with an external filmmaker named Paul Docherty in order to produce this footage. “At the very beginning of this project, it was like, ‘Oh, let’s set up a meeting with Paul Docherty,’ who we knew was doing this documentary,” says Chris, explaining the origins of the partnership. “We had a meeting of, ‘Hey, you’re doing this, we’re doing this, maybe there’s a way that we can help each other out.’ He’s obviously still working on the Heart Of Neon documentary, but he had a very early, very lengthy, four-hour rough cut. “At first, it was like, ‘We’d love to just watch that,’ because we were doing the research, I was reading the book that Jeff wrote and just absorbing everything I possibly could about Llamasoft,” Chris continues. “Once we determined what it was we wanted to do, and the schedule and the timeline of the project, it was like, rather than us trying to essentially reinvent the wheel and do these featurettes that we were going to need for our documentary, we figured Paul has been working on this for years and years, and he’s probably got tonnes and tonnes of footage. So we approached him to see if we could work something out where essentially, he would put the featurettes together.” Chris gives most of the credit for the final result to Paul. “We were like, ‘For our purposes, here’s a list of the ten subjects that we would like to cover, can you do this?’ And so he would come back and say, ‘This, yes, this probably not.’ So then we kind of worked it out,” Chris tells us. “Then we handed it off to him, he put them together, we did rounds of feedback, where we’d say, ‘We’d like to see more of this, less of that.’ It was a collaborative effort, but it was like a 90/10 collaborative effort, where we were doing what we could to help it along. But fundamentally, he directed those.” Because of the wealth of footage available, Chris believes there will be a considerable difference between the interactive documentary and the film. “When you’re watching those featurettes, you’re not necessarily watching what Heart Of Neon is going to be like – he’s telling a fundamentally different story. It’s about Jeff, but it’s about sort of the whole of Jeff’s life and all about the person, whereas we’re sort of breaking it down into individual stories of individual games, and going into a lot of detail that’s not going to be in there. So, if you like what you see, definitely check out Heart Of Neon because it’s gonna be something different.”