After six months of waiting, my VideoNotes Kickstarter project - video essays about the recent Bond films - has been cancelled.

Backers should be getting refunds at last. I’d like to be gutted, but at this point it’s a relief.

I’m gonna tweet about it for a few minutes.

A quick digression: 18 years ago I wrote one episode of Doctors for BBC1.

It was about a pair of guys - surrogate father and son - who go to donate blood. Which back then you couldn’t do if you were gay.

The younger guy is revealed to be gay. The older guy hella overreacts...

We assume homophobia. But the reveal was: he couldn’t give a damn about this lad’s sexuality. His wife had bled to death, and giving blood back was something they were doing together. In memory.

A thing they could do together, to redirect that pain, just got taken away from him.

In August, when my friend - and likely yours - @sebpatrick died, once the shock became something wider and sadder, I didn’t know what to do with the…energy that created.

So I put it into a project of the kind he did all the time. A fan project he’d have liked. VideoNotes.

It started as one test video, which I posted here, then ideas spread to a series. I’m a lousy (and slow) editor, though, and the new Bond was coming.

But if I could pay for an editor...? Maybe someone to handle the channel, maybe animation, subtitles.

Hence the Kickstarter.

I never mentioned the Seb side of things. I didn’t want a penny put in that wasn’t just for the merit of the project. Plus there was a fundraiser for his family and I’d have felt like I was taking from that to make my own egotistical thing.

And you know what happened. Copyright claim. Kickstarter froze the page.

Like my silly episode of telly, a thing I could do to redirect some pain just got taken away.

So in November, you might have seen me having a bad time on here. A lot of you sent kind, helpful messages.

We raised the money for the project! It’s hard work to get that to happen, weeks of prep and a month of hard selling. Not my natural mode. I was thrilled. Then copyright lawyers intervened, Kickstarter started avoiding my emails...

I’m sharing this cos…it adds up. The depression crash I had back in November? This was part of it.

And Covid, my Grampy’s funeral right before lockdown, the dog nearly dying of chocolate poisoning (our fault) and all the other things.

The support was amazing, but...yeah.

That’s why one guy on Twitter doing a Nelson “Ha ha!” about the project’s failure got to me. Like, *really* got to me.

Kickstarter have been lousy. Ignoring almost all emails, not responding to enquiries. I took legal advice, clarified the non-profit status. I’ve no idea if they even communicated the requested clarifications to the Bond lawyers (whom I blame for nothing).

With the page shut down, I couldn’t edit it but their original email said I could send a list of what needed changing. I did, but they didn’t make the changes. I provided clarification of non-profit status, the budget figures, deleted social media posts as requested. Nothing.

The legal notice specifically said the lawyers did not object to my making video essays, Fair Use and all that, only my making profit. And i wasn’t - the backers were only covering production costs, crew.

Still, using Bond material at all was a HUGE mistake on my part.

At one point Kickstarter pointed complaining backers back to their stock responses, suggesting that since the fundraiser was successful I had their money, and Kickstarter offers no refunds. Neither of these things is true.

If you want the timeline and details, here’s the email I eventually sent to KS (April 30th) that ended it all.

It feels to me like they were waiting it out, letting me get more and more frustrated at the silence until I said “I give up, just refund everyone”. Without saying it.

This whole endeavour has been too stressful to ever attempt again. And I’ll never back another project on Kickstarter, or use their platform for a project.

It’s hung over me for so long now that this ending, that should piss me off more, is just a weight off.

But there is one good thing, and it’s this:

The time since lockdown began has been the best of my professional life, however personally crap. So I can now afford to fund one of the videos myself.

One way another, the Quantum of Solace VideoNotes will get made.

The script was written before the project was frozen. I’m happy with it, I think it’s got worthwhile stuff to say.

It’ll happen. And that’ll make me happy.

Thanks to 260 backers. To innumerable kind tweeters. To my inspirational friend.

Back to work. Back to making something joyful.

Oh, and P.S. the ‘shutdown’ email I got from Kickstarter suggested I could contact backers to let them know the outcome.

Which I’d like to do. But apparently their website prevents me from contacting backers through a shutdown project.