On Production Times

Hello everyone,

It’s been a minute. Before I get to the meat of this post, let me let you know where we are in the production process for the next Down the Rabbit Hole.

Right now, I’m waiting on Ryan and Arc to finish making the music and the graphics respectively. I’m having regular meetings with both of them to guide them in the right direction while I wait, but progress is steady. The final runtime will be approximately one hour, but it’s going to be an incredibly dense hour. Half of the runtime will include animations of some sort, making this an incredibly ambitious video, but when it’s finished, this might be the video of which I’m most proud. Imagine the Wings vs. Syndicate duel or one of the chess games from the Deep Blue video except extended to an entire hour.

This, however isn’t primarily what I wanted to discuss. The last two videos have taken an inordinate amount of time to make, and I myself have been scratching my head over what about the process has made them so brutal. So far, I’ve noted a number of factors, and up until now I’ve believed that the culprit was burnout reducing productivity, a moral failing that I was overeager to accept.

But after analyzing EVE and the most recent video that’s nearly finished, I’ve divined the primary issue, and most importantly, I can solve it.

By far, the research and writing process for the last two videos have been the most laborious and intense, and I’ve identified the root cause: compared to previous videos, piecing the story together has been almost preposterously difficult compared to every other video that I’ve done. Looking back across my catalog, it’s been trivial to provide a sequence of events, making the process of writing mostly a matter of craft. For example, in the Purr Cat Cafe video, I could refer to the posts in order and show the gradual deterioration of Diane’s situation. For the Austrian Wine Poisoning, despite the language barrier, the events were discrete and could be easily placed onto a timeline. This same concept can be seen in nearly every video until now.

This was not true, however, for the Battle of May Island, EVE Online, or this newest video in production. A maddening amount of time was spent on each of them attempting to piece a timeline together from incomplete sources that frequently contained biased, erroneous, or misleading information, and for the latter two, I was forced to tear pieces out of the script and replace them numerous times. (For example, in the newest video, I thought that two interviewees were contradicting one another about the timing of an event until I realized that they were speaking of two different yet very similar incidents) With my most recent video, there were so few sources of information that I had to interview people present at the event and recreate a battle that has almost entirely been erased from memory, save for a scarce few pieces of evidence.

This is why I continually misjudged the time remaining on the EVE video: I believed that production would go much the same way that it had for every video preceding it, but this was a circumstance that I had not encountered in over half a decade of video production.

My reach has exceeded my grasp twice in a row. I am proud of what I’ve accomplished, even if I’m not proud of how long it’s taken, but this is not the way I want to conduct the channel going forward.

You all have been exceedingly generous to me, especially over the last few years, and I do not take that generosity for granted. I charge by the month instead of per video because Down the Rabbit Hole is a series that varies widely in scope and scale, and the creative freedom to pursue projects of varying sizes is something I believe makes the series something special; each topic is given its due. You all are a part of that: without you, I wouldn’t be able to keep my team and make it into what it’s become today.

However, I do not wish to abuse that generosity; some videos may take longer, but the timeline that’s emerged is, in my eyes, unacceptable. What’s more, I do not believe that EVE and the current video have played to my strengths in the way that prior videos have; I believe that someone with a more applicable set of skills could have done similar in far less time.

Therefore, in the future, I will be taking into account the ease with which I may construct a timeline of events and collate the information into a digestible script. After the release of this next video, the longest I wish for any video to take ever again is six months, and I would like that to be the absolute largest scale.

Thank you everyone, for helping to give me the career that I have; a younger me would be slack-jawed if he knew what he would eventually get to do. I would like to keep doing this as long as I am able, and I want to do it right.

-Fredrik