On Video Frequency. (Patreon)

Hey everybody, we need to talk about video frequency. As you know we promised to try to double our output, and for a while it worked. But all the extra videos were made on borrowed time.

For example, the video we released yesterday has been made over almost two years. I started writing the script in August 2014, super jet lagged in the early morning before a conference. Since then it was revisited every few weeks or so until a month ago.  We designed about half of the video and then decided that the style we had choosen did not fit the idea we wanted to communicate so we threw all that work out and started over. And after the video was almost finished we decided that the script had to be changed again so it would be clearer (which of course led to another chunk of design work). It took almost two years and dozens of iterrations, hundrets of hours, until the video was where it is today – and I think it is one of the better ones we made.

It is the same story with our „Red Dwarf“ video. Lots of rewrites, lots of redesign and changes very late into the process. The first draft was written 2014.

So now we are at a point where we used up a lot of material that we have worked on for months (or years). There is still a good dozen or so scripts that are kind of finished but they feel like they need more time.

The only way we can really have a higher output is to lower our quality. And we really don’t want to do that.

Our goal is still do have between 14 and 20 videos in 2016 – but we won’t commit to a specific number or schedule anymore. Our videos just don’t work this way, we ourselves learned this in the last three months.

So, why are you funding us? Patreon is mighty important for us, no kidding. As some of you may have noticed, we try hard to get the quality higher than it has been. We invest more time on research and sources, we make more complicated illustrations and animations and are working on more complicated topics that need more time to explain – there are two 10-12 minute videos going to be released in the next few months that you (hopefully) will like a lot! Although we are more people now, we have gotten way better and faster at doing videos we continue to invest more time instead of less. All of this is made possible by your contributions.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about this whole thing!