Ok, update time! Sorry for the radio silence- life’s been pretty busy lately and I just haven’t had the time to sit down and write something out for you guys.
So first of all, thank you all so much for the support/donations thus far. As of me writing this, we have gotten a staggering $900 between 46 donors (47 counting myself 😉). That’s an average of $300 per month, which is just amazing! This includes $200 which we’ve gained in the few weeks since reaching our first goal, so we’ve already gotten a bit of a head start on our next goal.
Another neat thing that happened since hitting our goal was an Instagram shoutout from “@raretoystory” who has been interested in something like this for a while as far as I can tell. He made a post which got a suprising bit of traction, and we even got a couple of really big donations as a result! Of course, we always want to be weary about something like this on the off-chance that studio heads somehow catch on and don’t like what we’re doing… it had me a little worried for a bit, but we’ll just have to try our best to keep things lowkey-ish and we should be OK. I’m still grateful for the shoutout and will ensure RTS a copy when we’re finished!
As for what’s next… as I’ve said, we now need to focus on raising money to cover the considerable shipping costs. We’ll also need money to buy a hard drive for the scan to go onto, but I just might cover the cost of that myself depending on where I am financially when the time comes around. For now, let’s make the shipping aspect our priority!
We unfortunately still don’t have a concrete idea of how much shipping will total to, as Valeyard is recovering from a knee injury and can’t do any heavy lifting (therefore can’t weigh the print for us). However, my rough guess is that it’ll be between $200-300 from Australia to the cleaner, then $100 each to send it to the scanner and then to me. That may be overestimating on my part, but we’ll find out in due time.
With all this in mind, I think a good monetary goal for us to now aim for is $1300. That’s the $700 we’ve already raised for scanning/cleaning, plus an extra $600 for shipping from Australia and across the US, which I figure ought to be enough to cover whatever the costs will be in the end. Of course, we’re essentially a third of the way there already thanks to the latest wave of donations, which is great!
I encourage anyone interested in the print to donate if they can. If you can’t, then share the project with friends who you think would be interested. Heck, if you’ve already donated, then consider doing so a second time! I don’t mean to come off as pushy (still not limiting to donors only, though to be safe I’ll probably require proof of ownership of a legal copy of the film), but we’ve started to hit a lull in donations after a bit of a spike towards the first half of the month, and we’ll need all the support we can get to reach our next goal, and any help doing so is greatly appreciated.
Finally, a couple of things I had planned in store that I wanted to share. I mentioned in my first forum thread that I was potentially interested in streaming some Toy Story games to raise donations. This is still something I’d like to do, if just for fun at this point, and I’m going to try to fit it in sometime before the end of the summer. Something else I’m planning on doing is making a comparison video of sorts showing the 35mm trailer scan side-by-side with DVD footage of the movie, which I think would do wonders in really showing just how different this movie looks on film. Expect a link whenever I get around to it!
Once again, thank you guys so much for all the support. I could never have imagined that we’d make this much progress in just three short months, and I’m so excited to see what happens next. To infinity and beyond!!!
~Tristan
