Behind the Scenes of TLDR (Patreon)

For those unaware, Andrew, one of our two main video producers, is also a 3D animator. Five months ago, I set a goal of "creating more work" for Andrew so that we could level the pipeline. The idea was to increase his workflow (to saturate more hours per week, e.g. create a job) without bloating my own bandwidth beyond impossible levels. Part of that approach was to start running more animations in our videos, as seen in this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3uwpuNY-Ww

By scripting a video and hosting it, then handing it all off to Andrew, I could guarantee he'd still have several hours of work on animations while I finished testing and ad sales, or other business-critical tasks. It wasn't my intent, however, to create 5 months of passive on/off work. We spent that getting the render times right on this animation, but it came out great!

There are a few hiccups from failed frames, but they're hard to spot. The animation was reduced from a 3.5 hour per frame render time to about 30 minutes per from, with a total of 3300 frames. We left the render going while we were in China (in June) and in Seattle (last week, for PAX). That render finally finished, and the result is the above.

If you look carefully, it's obvious this was shot in April. Actually, it may not even require a careful  look; my hair was way shorter, so that's an instant giveaway. There have been zero haircuts since then. Since CES, actually -- but that's off-topic.

The point is that this took forever, but we now know what to do for future videos. I'd like "TLDR," or whatever we call it, to become something of a series. The goal is 5-6 minute educational videos with animations for more abstract or unseen concepts within components.

What do you think?