Sons of the Forest - Update #4 - Pre-production complete

Good afternoon all, hope you're all smashing. It's the end of the 5th week of pre-production work on a Sons of the Forest video-essay. And it went something like this:

• Week 1 & 2: Reviewing the 17 livestreams and marking lots of useful clips and highlights.

• Week 3: Built up the broad structure of a video-essay. Organising the points under their relevant topics.

• Week 4 & 5: Writing the script itself. Filling out about 40 smaller sub-topics. That process is mostly complete. There are gaps to be filled in later however.

I feel like 5 weeks is enough time to assign to this project on my own initiative. For that's the editing time for a regular bullshiterry. It's going to take much longer of course - to be expanded upon below. But for the moment that's probably a good moment to pause.

Now I need to ask you, collectively as my crowd-funders - how would you like me to go forward? There are essentially two paths to go down.

• Option 1 - Just continue with Sons of the Forest. Next I'd start the recording sessions and making "work in progress" chunks for your viewing. Saving the heavy-duty quality assurance until the very end. I don't necessarily know if I'll be able to commit to the entire edit of course. Breaks would be nice. But option 1 is that you're happy for me to continue.

• Option 2 - Set this to one side and return to it when it later -  For there's plenty of other bullshittery options I can work on in the mean time. And I can simply come back to this when the project is my choice again.

On Sons of the Forest however let me give you some stats:

• The Sons of the Forest script is broken up into about 40 segments of varying length. It follows an extremely similar format to first video. Cycling between plot walkthrough moments, bookended with amusing clips from the playthrough, with breakaway topics to analyse game mechanics. Usually how they compare to the first Forest and how the series has changed/evolved. For the better or for worse.

• Collectively the script is about 34,282 words. For context, the original Forest video essay was about 36,000 to 40,000 words. But after revisions let's assume it's probably in the same length. So we can reasonably assume it's about 3 hours of content when in the final form.

• That's a very chonky editing time. The principle editing of the original Forest video-essay started in an October 2022 and was delivered at the start of May 2023 - which is 7 months of editing. So estimated final delivery would be November 2024. Amusingly, the Premiere editing time for the first essay was 31 weeks. That's the same amount of time that the plot relevant characters went missing for in Sons of the Forest. They must have been making a video-essay.

• The first project included four  "work in progress" deliverables for the Patrons/Twitch subscribers, showing the segments as they went. That would doubtlessly repeat here. With 3-4 WIP video segments to ensure I am providing some content. Albeit with a lack of polish.

I'll do two polls for your thoughts. One here for the Patrons and the other for the Twitch subscribers. Then I'll periodically combine the results in the comments. If you wanted to provide any comments away from public view you're also welcome to email me at sovietwomble@gmail.com with your thoughts.

Thank you all for your patience folks. What would you prefer I do now?