Project Description

We make weekly screencasts about various baduk-topics for our website. The videos are in English and free for everybody, short (10 min. max) and each explains certain positions, joseki, trick-plays or the fundamentals of the game of Go. Because of the format of the videos (they are short + we study the Go-sequences thoroughly and write out the spoken text before we record), they are very clear and to the point. New episodes come online every Monday morning.

Objectives

We want to share interesting and new/sometimes forgotten/generally not well-known details about the game with a wide audience of (Western) Go players. These details can be beautiful tesujis in certain joseki-patterns, trick-plays without drawbacks or simply ways of explaining the basics of the game. BadukMovies is a video- platform for Go players to learn more about the game. Since every episode has a different topic, we zoom in on all sorts of aspects of the game, which makes it interesting and fun to all levels of Go players: we get enthusiastic responses from 15kyus as well as from 4dans. The videos are uploaded weekly to give our audience a sense of continuity in learning.

Realisation

We spent a lot of time on making our website look and function as nice as possible: this paid off, since we get a lot of positive reactions about the layout.

There are 2 sections to each episode: WATCH episode and READ episode. The videos are easy to access (WATCH) and are all individually accompanied on the website by SGF-files that have the same content of the videos (READ); if the audience does not have time for a video, or wants to check the content again by clicking themselves, these SGF-files provide that possibility. To every episode we also attach professional games in the BONUS tab, with pro-content that relates to the episode.

An important part of the project is the feedback of the audience: people can leave comments to each episode or send us personal feedback through e-mail.

We make these free videos for go players and so we try our best to reach as many as possible. We have twitter and facebook accounts where we regularly upload new info on episodes or things we are working on (bloopers, screenshots of coming episodes, etc.). Recently we put a lot of work into creating a good intro for our videos: we used the suggestions of our viewers to do so. We also send out messages to go associations, forums and communities about our project. Recently a short article was posted on the website of the American Go Association.

So, one of the main things we need for our project is to build a big audience of Go players and let the Western Go community know of what we�re doing.

Resources

We are making the videos together, the 2 of us. This takes a lot of time and effort, especially with our perfectionistic approach. Feedback of our audience is essential to help us improve, and to get new ideas for videos. Money has so far been of minor importance, but if we wish to continue doing this for a long time a monetary reward would of course help.

Possibilities of copying this project

Since our project is a website, it is very international. This makes it ideal for Western go players everywhere and easy to access. Not only for Western go players, BadukMovies could also show a positive development in the English speaking go community through the eyes of Asian go players.