Funded: £60,780
Campaign: Doc Rowe Film & Archive Project
“Britain’s greatest folklorist.” – The Guardian
Doc Rowe has been documenting the folk traditions of mainland Britain since the mid 1960s, and has built up a vast collection of irreplaceable audiovisual material spanning 60 years. Rob Curry and Tim Plester (the co-directors of The Ballad Of Shirley Collins and Way Of The Morris) began making a film about Doc during lockdown, the primary impetus of which was to ensure that the archive was preserved for posterity.
They wanted to feature as much of Doc’s incredible footage as they could in the film, but, in the spirit of ‘being the change we want to see’, they wanted to play a role in permanently securing Doc’s legacy. Rather than just digitise the bits they needed, they launched a crowdfund to create a permanent digital archive of all the material related to folk traditions that is currently languishing on film stock and old video formats in Doc’s hallowed archive in Whitby.
The initial plan was to try and raise enough to digitise all Doc’s film material from the 1960s and 70s – an abundance of treasures in itself, but a tiny fragment of his enormous audio/video/photo archive. The first informal funding target was (what seemed to be) an ambitious £9,000, and the first official target was an enormous £25,000.
Campaign journey
“Two days after launching, we hit the first of our informal targets (£9k), then passed the next (£17k) just in time for Hallowe’en. On 4 November, ahead of Bonfire Night, we hit our main funding target of £25k, meaning we knew that, in conjunction with awen productions CIC’s lottery funding, we could definitely digitise all of Doc’s wondrous footage of vernacular seasonal events stretching back decades.
“And with two weeks to go before the end of the campaign, we had a new and very ambitious plan…
“Could we raise enough to digitise all of the film and video that Doc’s ever recorded?
“By 9 November we got to our first stretch goal of £39k ensuring all Doc’s VHS footage was safe, then £43k on 13 November also guaranteed all his C-VHS footage. And this morning, in the final minutes of the campaign, we made it past a frankly astonishing £58k – meaning all of Doc’s Mini-DV footage will join the digitised collection. Phew!
EVERYTHING. HE. HAS. EVER. FILMED. (Prior to switching to digital recording techniques)”
Press coverage:
5 November: The Observer
6 November: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001s54y (starts at about 1hr44min)
8 November: Canadian National Radio
cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/weird-british-folklore-1.7022494
15 November: Yorkshire Post
24 November: News at Ten
Since funding:
Rob and Tim are in the process, with support from Doc, of digitising Doc’s one-of-a-kind collection of working-class British social history. VHS, film, and mini-DV recordings of folk customs, seasonal events, traditional song and storytellers are being safely chaperoned up and down the country.
Thanks to Crowdfunder’s always-on option, the funding campaign remains open, and has raised in total over £60,000 at the time of writing.