The Gathering documentary

My poor old blog - I've been neglecting you so badly recently! I do have a good reason, however - I've been working like a mad thing doing a final big push to get The Gathering archives website and blog ready to go online.

I've got the blog up and running - it went live a week ago - and it's been a lot of fun getting it working. It runs on Wordpress (the on-my-own-server version), and it's been quite educational teaching myself how to adapt existing templates and redesign them to look how I want them. I'm still working on adding more widgets - but I'm happy for that to be an ongoing process, in the same way as I work on WebWeaver's World.

The most popular post on the blog so far is, of course, the one about The Gathering documentary 97/98 - which I spent most of the long weekend putting up on Google video. It's had a couple of hundred views so far, which is great - hopefully there will be many more to come. Every time I go to check it out on Google I end up leaving it running in the background - as a kind of soundtrack to whatever I'm doing. I love it! I pretty much know it by heart now...

Here's what I wrote to accompany the video on Google:

The Gathering was New Zealand's biggest and best outdoor dance party, which was held every New Year for six years between 1996 and 2001. This is the first Gathering documentary and was made about the 97/98 event, which was held at the magical Canaan Downs site on top of Takaka Hill near Nelson.

The documentary includes behind-the-scenes views of the setup and running of the party; the wild and crazy days and nights of the party itself; interviews with the crew, and you - the party animals; and interviews with "grown-ups" like the Mayor of Tasman District and the local police.

We hope you enjoy it and that it brings back some awesome rave memories. Check out the new Gathering archives website at http://www.thegathering.co.nz for more Gathering-related goodness! And be nice humans :)

On the blog I've written a bit about the story of how we came to make The Gathering documentary - and I've also linked to the large-screen version of the video on Google video.

If you were at The Gathering and want to re-live some happy memories - go check it out!

Technorati tags: The Gathering, The Gathering documentary, documentary, 1997/98, 97/98, outdoor, dance party, rave, New Zealand, Takaka Hill, Golden Bay, Nelson Bays, Canaan Downs, dance, music, doco, YouTube, Google video, WebWeaver's World, webweaver.