Every back issue of Cinefex on your iPad. It’s now possible.

The first issue of Cinefex came out in March 1980 and was devoted to Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien. Since then, what has become the visual effects industry ‘bible’ has continued to be published in quarterly print format, with more recent editions also published online and as an iPad app.

But the back issues in print – covering seminal VFX films like The Empire Strikes Back, The Terminator, Jurassic Park and Titanic – have remained just that: in print. Many of these are in fact out of print, and often go for high figures on eBay.

That is, until now.

New Scribbler Press – the team behind the Cinefex iPad app – have just launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring 30 years of Cinefex print issues to the existing app. Their goal has been to take the detailed articles and imagery and enhance them for tablet viewing – the content will be searchable and images enlargeable.

Above: watch the Cinefex Classic Collection video featuring New Scribbler’s Mark Christansen, ILM’s John Knoll and MythBuster’s Adam Savage.

Why Kickstarter? Well, according to the publishers, there’s a mountain of work in translating the original printed text into machine-editable text, plus proofing for typographical and formatting errors and marking-up each word by hand with custom tags, and optimally adjusting thousands of photos for sharpness and level balance. The team say they are currently on issue 70 of the 126 back issues and have about six months’ more work to do.

The Kickstarter campaign will allow supporters to pre-order the whole Cinefex Classic Collection – 126 issues! You can also pledge for collections of issues such as Star Wars or Star Trek-related Cinefex coverage.

See the details at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/newscribbler/cinefex-classic-collection.

5 thoughts on “Every back issue of Cinefex on your iPad. It’s now possible.”

  1. I know I have every issue – and I have collected more – just as a collector… I think I have 8 issue #1 now ! and the Japanese editions, Oscar reprints, book versions that were done of key issues like Blade runner etc,.. but search them is VERY manual. This offers something valuable in being able to find what you are looking for !

    mike

  2. cyril conforti

    Hi everyone,

    I’m crazy about cinefex. I’m French, i’m working in visual effect and it’s thank this Guide ! When I heard that they wanted to convert the old cinefex on digital, I was happy…but less when I knew that was on Ipad only.

    I wrote to kickstarter’s team :

    [I]Hi Cyril, thanks so much for your comment about our project.

    At this time there are no current plans to bring Cinefex for iPad to another platform, or to distribute the magazine content elsewhere. The iPad is our target platform because it offers the best combination of features and installed base among the likely readership of Cinefex. We’ve even heard from people that they plan to acquire an iPad just to get this collection!

    Thanks again for contacting us!

    Warm regards,

    The Team at New Scribbler
    [/I]

    I’m not that everybody will buy an Ipad…So I created a survey. Maybe we’ll change their idea 😉

    http://fr.surveymonkey.com/s/QN3TKDD

    thank you, Cyril

  3. With 6 days to go they hit the goal for this project! Congratulations to the team and all those who helped!

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