First off, big big thanks go out to Ioannis, who was kind enough to allow the impromptu phone interview into his busy plate of work, and for spiffying up the transcription from the interview!

You can find out more about where Ioannis works at: Vivid Images, and more about the Road Journals themselves at Road Journals.

When I first heard about the Road Journals, I was at once intrigued and perplexed. It was like a riddle trapped in an enigma, trapped in a website. So I decided to go to the source and find out…

Just what the heck is this Road Journals thing anyways?

The concept is, it started actually as Trey and I were trying to find ways to do neat interactive stuff, and we’ve always been playing around with ideas, beyond the CD designs, going into stage designs and stuff like that, but the idea emerged a couple of months back. I said perhaps since web design is starting to become a major part of our business here at Vivid, something that complements what what we can do for artists, along with their CD graphics, that perhaps there may be an interesting perspective, a way that we could setup something interactive on the web, that a fan that cannot really go to a show, or visit a band, especially if they are playing in an exotic location, like if they are playing like in Japan or Australia or Mexico, that they could be sort of interactive or sort of be with the band, virtually. It’s a very voyeuristic idea actually. So that’s how the idea of Road Journals emerged.

And what it currently is right now, we came up with the concept right now at Vivid, and Trey allowed himself to be the guinea pig for it and augment the concept, but you know, he’s also an integral part of the whole process.

And basically what the fan is able to do is, somewhere around the cost of an import CD, so to speak, they will be able to login during the course of the tour, which is as much as the band wants it to be. I mean, some bands will want it to be the whole tour, where they might want to charge more, although we’d like to keep it all the same, or they might want it to be a selection of dates, you know, like a week run or so.

So something you should be able to do — or eventually what we will refine it to be –like I said we’ll be trying a lot of things with Trey, to see what works and doesn’t, and we’ll rely on subscriber feedback to see what does work the best, but what you should be able to do is, when you get home at night, you’ve finished your job for the day, and you just want to crash and relax, you pull up the website and live the day’s events with the band. You’ll be able to read the diaries, and Trey’s seriously considering doing some of those in spoken word. There will also be more intimate photographs, basically everything from getting up in the morning, having breakfast they’re having, to dealing with the daily requirements of being on the road. So it’s just sort of like living the day with them.

So you check out the site, “Yeah, so that’s what happened during that day.”, and you see photos of their experiences, and maybe some video. Right down to that night’s performance, you might get more photos, maybe some excerpts from that night’s performance. But I think most of the video will be available after the tour, on the CD-ROM, because Trey has to edit and encode it, and it’s pretty time consuming.

But the online part all is really just a teaser, and if you subscribe you get access to the web content, and when the tour is over and done with, then you’re going to get a memento of the tour from the band. You are going to get a CD-ROM, limited edition, signed by the band.

So you pop the Road Journals CD-ROM in, and you’ll get backstage video, and all the stuff from the site, plus additional material. You’ll be able to get everything more in depth, and the more in depth, will be additional video and other content — back stage, rehearsing, travelling. So you kind of live the experience with the group. Trey is thinking of it as a companion piece to “Live Encounter”.

The limited edition CD-ROM, signed by the band, is offered to subscribers. He’s doing a pressing of 1000, and then we’re also going to do a series of 4 limited edition postcards, signed by each each member of the band. Just for the cards and the CD, it’s a pretty good deal, but access to the initial material online, that’s a bonus.

At the end of the tour Trey will cull through everything, edit down the video, and produce the CD-ROM. We’re hoping to ship it in March, but as you can imagine, there’s a lot of work to be done. Also, the updates from the road are being made in between all the rigors of touring, so it’s not a pre-packaged, fictional experience but a real one.

The CD-ROM, unsigned and without the limited edition postcards, will be available after the tour until the balance of the 1,000 CD’s are sold. The best idea would be to subscribe before the tour is finished, so you get the whole package, and both the CD and postcards signed by the band.

If you noticed the way the graphics are done for Road Journals, they’re somewhat generic, in the sense that it works for music-based projects, but, necessarily Road Journals don’t have to be provided only by musicians, so for example if a famous director wanted to chart his experiences when he was making a movie, that would be a possibility. So in the future we are considering doing this with other creative people, outside of music, just to see where it takes us.

Right now, though, Road Journals is an experiment. Trey’s funding this out of his pocket, and he probably won’t recoup his investment, let alone make any profit. It’s not a commercial venture, it’s an artistic one, an extension of the text-based diaries. We’re doing the subscriptions and the updates manually for this first project, but we think the experience will make it worth it in the end.