So I Just Did A Thing

Heya patrons! Letting you know: starting this month I've flipped things over to monthly payments instead of per-video payments.

tl;dr
It'll keep you from getting double-charged if I release two videos in the same month, it supports all the work I do that is related to the videos but is not the videos themselves, and helps guarantee the videos come out more regularly. Your time is valuable to me, so if that's all the explanation you need (or, indeed, if you had just assumed we were already on a monthly setup), you can stop reading. But, if you want to know more, read on.

In short, I originally launched the Patreon it seemed like we might be releasing a video only 3 or 4 times a year, so it made more sense to me that I only get paid when a video comes out. Since crossing the first milestone, though, I'm keeping a nearly-monthly schedule, and that's presented a quandary: Patreon isn't a full-time job (not yet, anyway), so I have to take other work, which is why I can't guarantee a video every month. But now if I take a month off to do other work, I'm leaving nearly $700 on the table. Which is a big hit to the monthly income, and when I take hits to the monthly income, I have to take that many more freelance gigs to shore up the difference, which runs the risk of missing more months that I can't put out a video, and... you see where this is going.

The final week of We Don't Talk About Kenny was a serious crunch, because if I didn't get the video online by Monday, I didn't get paid for the month. And, in my world, that means scrounging up your rent money someplace else. That video proved to be one of the hardest videos I've ever worked on - moment-to-moment even harder than Why Are You So Angry?, though it mercifully didn't take up as many months of my life - and I still wish I could have taken even one or two extra days on it. It could have used a little more color-correcting, but that takes hours to render on my machine, and there's also a typo in the very first title card which I wish I'd had time to catch. On a monthly campaign, I can simply say "fuck it, it'll be a couple days late, and I'll just release two next month."

This is, actually, how a lot of other video essay Patreons operate (e.g. MovieBob, Errant Signal, and Cool Ghosts are all on monthly setups). And a few of you have even suggested I switch to monthly, which I was hesitant to do back when the campaign was below $400. But it makes sense now - I do sometimes release two videos in one month - heck, Why Are You So Angry? was six videos in one week - and when I released two back in September I just charged them as one, because honor system. I'm not interested in charging any of you twice in the same month, and I have some plans for future miniseries-ish videos, where I'll be, again, releasing several videos in a row.

Also, it means you're no longer just funding the videos themselves, but everything else I do for Innuendo Studios. The fact is, even on months when I don't release a video (which it's looking like December will be), I'm working. I am never not working. Some things are responsibilities I have to some of you - updating the Behind-The-Scenes blog, annotating the videos, sending off the remaining Kickstarter rewards. But then there's the stuff for everybody - I want to keep doing written pieces like my Angry Jack follow-up or my adventure game masterpost. (There's actually a series of written pieces dissecting different Angry Jack argumentation strategies that I've had to keep postponing because I gotta keep prioritizing them videos!)

And, finally, I never want deadline pressure to decrease the quality of a video. We Don't Talk About Kenny required so, so, so many script revisions that, for the first time in months, I don't have even a rough draft of the next script. I actually don't even know what the next script is. It's either gonna be this thing about art, or this thing about consoles, or this thing about violence, or this other thing, and all of those things have some bits written, but not much. All four are somewhat large, unwieldy topics, and will probably take a few drafts to get right. I like working ahead, editing one video while I write the next.

So! December is going to be a month of handling the myriad other tasks I have - annotations, scriptwriting, and blog posts. It's time to start crunching the Patreon numbers and sharing what data I have amassed so far with the people who backed at that level. You will be seeing a lot of me this month.

There just probably won't be a video til January.

Cheers,

-I