Tangerine Dream

Well, according to popular opinion, it's not the length that matters...but what you do with it

It's great that at long last someone is making a documentary about TD. It seems amazing that apart from Signale aus der Schwäbischen Strasse, no one has seen to make a documentary about a band with such a rich, lengthy, important and fascinating history. Really looking forward to it. But it seems really odd to me that there's a crowd-funding campaign. I believe the production firm involved has been around for 15 years, so they shouldn't really need to receive fan funding for a standard band documentary. I might be wrong, but I'm guessing most of the documentary will be talking heads and archive video footage/photos provided by the band. This shouldn't be hugely expensive to put together. It's not as though they'd have to licence loads of concert footage and video clips from various production companies around the world, because as we all know, until about 10 years ago, there wasn't a huge amount of TD promo videos/TV performances in existence. And all of the DVDs released in the last 10 years are all on TD's own label, so I'm assuming they've retained some form of rights to the concert footage. So there's no big expense there. Editing time? A firm like this should have their own studio, so there's no expense there either. Don't get me wrong, making these things has lots of expenses, but a long established firm should be able to cover them. And a commissioned doumentary should come with an advance from the broadcaster/commissioner, to cover some or all of the production costs. Plus docmentaries like this tend to have very small crews. On set, there's usually only operators for camera, sound and lights, plus director/producer/researcher/assistant. That's usually it, so there isn't a huge amount of wages to pay out. Equipment hire would be minimal as the operators should come with their own kit. Just seems odd to me that they needs extra funding.

You don't get ought for nought!!