Guest,
The reason for the lack of new variations has nothing to do with other projects (such as the message board) getting in the way. What it comes down to is the funding to make such projects possible, and the desire to improve our product. The product I'm speaking of, however, is not the variation you see on the website. It's the variation you purchase in our store.
Without the sales of the CD-ROM of previous variations, we would never have been able to continue running the website in the first place. Nowadays, through the sales of other products such as music and videos, we are able to stay afloat, and the CD-ROM sales are contributing to what will be our next film shoot.
3 or 4 years ago, a CD-ROM with 15- to 30-second web-compressed video clips was considered acceptable. Nowadays more and more people are expecting a full-quality DVD production (and who can blame them?). So not only did the sales of the CD-ROM decline faster than the natural attrition rate in 2001, but returns of the product have actually increased.
As a result, we have ceased production of any more "web clip" style variations, and are saving up our pennies for a full production film shoot. The next CD-ROM of Variations won't be a CD-ROM at all. It will be a DVD.
We're hoping to have another film shoot in mid-January. I can't guarantee this -- life sometimes gets in the way -- but in all likelihood we will stay on schedule and have raw footage in the beginning of the new year. Editing may take a month or two, which puts the release date of the DVD sometime in late February or March. But I can edit single variations for the website much faster, so I suspect that you'll get your first taste of the new material early in February, if not sooner.
If I had had a bit more foresight last January, I would have used that film shoot to do the next set of variations, instead of the bronze Foxtrot and Waltz figures (still as of yet unreleased). But at the time, we were thinking that we could boost sales through the release of some more basic videos. I still believe that now, but I'm just more aware of the urgency of more variations on the website, and only got the idea relatively recently to combine the two concepts and schedule a film shoot to make a DVD for the variations.
So in short, your variations are on the way. I know you don't want to hear empty promises, but trust me... I always deliver on my promises. I'm just sometimes slow with the delivery. That's part of the drawback to running a website and a business almost entirely on your own. But like I said, in the case of the variations, it's not a lack of time that's been the problem. We've just been waiting on the money.
Regards,
Jonathan Atkinson
www.ballroomdancers.com
