The first look at the finished book, and (finally) a shipping update
over 3 years ago – Tue, Apr 27, 2021 at 05:50:36 PM

After a few additional nerve-racking weeks of wait, we finally received the first 5 advance copies of F8MOUS:

These copies are from the actual print run, air-mailed direct from the printer in Seoul, South Korea. They also serve as the final printer proof, and after a close inspection, we gave the printer the go-ahead to load everything on a boat and send them our way.

Unfortunately, international shipping had already been upended by Covid, even before this happened:

The books themselves won't be passing through the Suez Canal, but the boat they were originally scheduled to ship on was canceled when the logjam in the Suez disrupted hundreds of shipping vessels worldwide. 

Fortunately, all of the copies have now been re-booked on a new ship, which we're told should arrive in the U.S. before the end of next month. As soon as they do, it will be all hands on deck to get the books packed up and shipped out to you as soon as possible.

We'll be locking orders at the beginning of May, so if you've changed addresses since your initial order and haven’t notified us yet, please email [email protected] right away with your new address.

If you ordered contact sheets or photo prints as part of the initial Kickstarter campaign, we'll be reaching out to you individually by email in the coming days with more details on both. Contact sheets will ship along with your book, while photo prints will ship separately.

It's been a long road, but we're almost there. The production team we worked with -- both in Portland, Oregon, and in South Korea -- had an incredible eye for detail and did an outstanding job with the book. And there are more than a few extra surprises included that we hope will make up for the extended wait.

Here are few more photos of the finished book to tide you over:

F8MOUS exists, thanks to you. We’ve held it in our hands, felt its weight and smelled its new-book smell. Soon, you all will get to as well.

—Christopher Hass, Chris Dilts, Dan Mouradian, Dan Napoli and the rest of the F8MOUS team

Proof of life
over 3 years ago – Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 08:38:58 PM

A few days ago, we signed off on the final printer proofs for F8MOUS.

These are high-quality printouts, printed on the same paper stock as the final book, shipped direct to us from the printing plant in Seoul, South Korea, that will be producing the book.

The final pages will have an additional layer of spot-varnish applied, in order to seal in the heavy blacks and make the color images more vibrant, but these are as close as you can get to the final product until all 2,000 books are printed and bound.

The printer proofs are the final chance to make any edits, corrections, tweaks or adjustments in order to ensure that everything reproduces properly. It’s an expensive but important step, the kind of thing we never had the luxury to do when producing P8NT back in the day (and as anyone who has seen those old magazines can tell you, they had more than a few printer errors and screw-ups on our part).

At this point, everything is in the hands of the printer and the shipping companies that will get them to you. We’re still waiting on a ship date, but hope to have one soon.

Unfortunately we’re continuing to hear all kinds of horror stories from other publishers about production and shipping delays due to Covid-19, but we’re hoping to avoid the worst of those. Either way, we’ll keep everyone in the loop whenever we get updates on the progress. Covid-19 has certainly slowed us down quite a bit, but it hasn't stopped us. 

In the meantime, we’ll be following up with backers who ordered prints and contact sheets with details on how to select from the available options. And if you’ve moved since you placed your order and haven’t already done so, don't forget to email us at [email protected] with your new address information.

—Christopher Hass, Chris Dilts, Dan Mouradian, Dan Napoli and the rest of the F8MOUS team

100%
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Dec 17, 2020 at 03:10:58 AM

F8MOUS reached a big milestone today: 100% of the content is now complete. Everything has been written, designed, copy-edited, proofed, polished, reviewed and re-reviewed. Here's a look at the aftermath:

We're coordinating with the printer now on all the logistics and timing. As the size and complexity of the book grew, it became clear that it would have to be printed overseas, as U.S. printers rarely handle this type of book anymore. We're working with a company based out of Seattle with a long history of producing high-quality art books. They estimate it will take up to six weeks to complete production, followed by another six weeks for shipping, though the world is still moving slowly due to Covid-19.

In the end we added more than a few surprises that we're keeping under wraps for now, but when you do finally get to see the book in person I hope you'll agree it was worth the wait.

And it has been a long wait—far longer than we'd expected. I feel like we owe an explanation, but I'm not sure what to say: We've all been living the explanation since March.

From the beginning, we knew this was going to be a challenging project, but no one could have predicted just how rough 2020 would be, from start to finish. I know I'm not alone in having lost friends or family this year. When we sent out our last update in October we were nearing the end, and looking forward to wrapping things up. Then in November my brother died suddenly, of a heart attack, and everything ground to a halt for a while. 

I’m telling this story not as an excuse or an apology—it’s just what happened.

My brother played paintball only one time. He didn't really like it. I never really thought of him as part of my paintball life. I used to think that you left your "real life" behind every time you traveled to an event, or stepped inside the field. But of course it's not that simple. It's all still there, inside you, good and bad. What I've learned over the past few years is that you never really leave paintball behind either.

I don't know what my brother would have thought of F8MOUS, but I wish he could have seen it. I'm glad you'll all be able to see it soon.

- Christopher Hass

P.S. We'll continue to keep you posted as the book moves through production. If you ordered prints, contact sheets or magazines, we'll be reaching out soon to coordinate all the details for those. And if you've moved recently and need to update your shipping address, just email us directly at [email protected] and let us know.

The final stretch
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Oct 16, 2020 at 03:48:26 PM

We know it's been a while since the last update, but we've been heads down finishing up the book and are in the final stretch now. We'll keep this one brief. 

We've edited down hundreds of pages across multiple drafts, and at this point all that's left is final copy edits, fact-checking and proofing -- as well as making sure every image is reproduced as perfectly as possible. 

A few familiar faces from the magazine days have joined in to get the project across the finish line. Sara Duckwall is helping with proofing, and Aaron Moore is using his encyclopedic memory of the early NPPL for fact-checking. Matt Marshall popped in and wrote a new forward for the book as well. 

The full book will be completed and to the printer by the end of the month. As soon as the printer gives us their final production calendar we'll let everyone know the exact shipping dates. 

We're a bit behind schedule, but the end is in sight. 

This has been a strange year to try and complete a project like this. Of all the challenges we anticipated, we couldn't have imagined anything like COVID-19. I know we're not alone in having had to deal with health issues, lost work, extra work and everything else that's come up as a result. It's also meant having to do 100% of the work on the book remote for safety reasons, which is a far cry from when we all lived and worked together in the same apartment, 20 years ago. 

We really appreciate everyone's patience though, as well as all the support we've received. It's been a long journey (longer than any of us expected), but we're incredibly eager and excited to get F8MOUS into your hands. 

—Christopher Hass, Chris Dilts, Dan Mouradian, Dan Napoli and the rest of the F8MOUS team

P.S. We know a few of you have moved since you first placed orders, and we've been updating addresses as requests come in. If you would like us to ship your book to a different address, just email us at [email protected] and we'll make the change for you. 

The Lost Rolls, Part 1
over 4 years ago – Fri, Jul 03, 2020 at 05:22:39 AM

Like the rest of the paintball world, we were all shocked to learn that Tim Montressor had passed away suddenly last week. I knew Tim from my days practicing at Futureball in Michigan, more than a decade ago, but I hadn't spoken to him in years. He reached out to me last year, shortly after we announced this project, to let us know how excited he was about it. I told him then that F8MOUS likely wouldn't exist if it weren't for him.

Myself, Chris Dilts and Dan Mouradian had talked about a project like this off and on for years, but what finally flipped the switch and convinced me to move forward with it was watching the webcast of the 2018 Iron City Classic. Part of it was seeing all the old faces I didn't even realize how much I'd missed, but more than anything it was seeing what Tim had built, and how he had built it, and the joy it had brought so many people.

Tim helped me remember the best parts of paintball because he was the best parts of paintball, and he made the sport bigger by being a part of it. It's a little bit smaller now that he's gone. But we're all better off for what he contributed.

Thanks Tim.

–Christopher Hass

The Lost Rolls, Part 1

Over the course of this project we've gone through tens of thousands of archival photos, but for the past few weeks we've been looking at something new—photos that no one, not even us, have ever seen before.

What ended up being the final issue of P8NT Magazine was published in the summer of 2004, but we continued to travel and document events for the next 12 months, for what would have been future issues of the magazine. But not only were the photos from this period never published, most of the film was never developed.

The cost of having these 160+ rolls of films developed was considerable, but thanks to the success of this crowdfunding campaign, earlier this year we were finally able to package them up for processing.

But that's when things got complicated.

Twenty years ago we could walk to our local photography store and drop off film whenever we wanted, and they'd turn it around within a few days. Today, almost every professional photo lab in Chicago has long since closed down, and the ones that remain often don't have the equipment or expertise to process film stocks that are no longer even manufactured.

In the end, we found two labs that could handle the film—one in Chicago to process all of the 35mm black and white film, and one in California to process the color slide film.

But the real question was: Had any of the photos survived?

Undeveloped film doesn't last forever—light slowly leaks into the canisters, humidity can cause film to warp, and the chemicals in the film stock change and degrade over time. We'd kept these rolls safe in a temperature controlled setting, but even so, 15 years is a long time.

A few weeks after we dropped off the black and white film, we got this message back from the lab:

"Obviously the film is foggy after all these years, the increase in development time has led to more pronounced grain, and they're all extra curly, as older rolls tend to be. But everything looks fantastic, all things considered."

Not long after, we got to see for ourselves.

It's true that some of the photos have fogged at the edges, and a few rolls were partially damaged.

But amazingly, out of the 81 rolls of 35mm film, only one was blank:

Going through these photos has been like opening a time capsule. Not only are these the final P8NT Magazine photos ever made, they document some of the crucial moments from this era of paintball, including the first events in which NXL players and teams were allowed to compete in the NPPL Super 7, as well as the first real meetings in what would become an epic rivalry between Dynasty and a team that everyone would learn to fear—the Russian Legion.

At the moment we're still waiting on the color slide film. The machines to handle this process are even more rare, and the lab that has them has been partially shut down due to Covid-19. We'll follow-up with another update on these photos as soon as we know more.

In the meantime, we'll be posting some of these newly developed photos from the "Lost Rolls" on social media over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out on Facebook and Instagram.

Thank you again to everyone who contributed and made it possible for us to rescue these photos. You'll be able to see dozens of them in F8MOUS, in all their glory, for the first time ever.

—Christopher Hass, Chris Dilts, Dan Mouradian, Dan Napoli and the rest of the F8MOUS team