February 2023 Production Update

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I started January with finishing my move into the new house. After that, I started working on part 16 and 17. The first thing I always do when starting a new 50 ways video is to come up with enough ideas for the clips so I can make a plan to stick to during production. The good news on that front is that, when starting to brainstorm ideas for part 16, I already had a lot of ideas and even perfectly usable finished clips left over from part 15’s production. The bad news is that I didn’t do a very good job organizing them and so I had to spend a huge amount of time going through my notes and tracking things down. I only just finished organizing everything less than a week ago and have only just started brainstorming ideas for parts 16 and 17.

Last year, I spent so much time on a single scene in Part 15 that it pushed my release date back 6 whole months and prevented me from finishing any other videos. It was probably my channel’s worst year since 2016 by just about any metric. So this year, I’m going to make sure I don’t bite off more than I can chew again. I’m going to put all of my more ambitious ideas for 50 Ways clips on hold for a while so I can focus on simpler clips and make the videos faster.

Of course, the more ambitious clips tend to be the ones that are the funniest or most entertaining, which means there’s a risk that by avoiding those, the quality of the video might suffer. But good content and hard-to-make content aren’t necessarily the same, they just tend to overlap a lot. Whenever I brainstorm ideas, there are always a few good jokes I come up with that don’t require me to animate a stop motion tyrannosaurus getting into a fight with Optimus Prime or whatever. But the high-quality easy-to-make 50 Ways clips usually show up more rarely than either bad easy-to-make clips or good difficult clips, so in order to come up with enough of them to make videos, I’m probably going to need to spend more time brainstorming. I think it will be worth the time, though, because taking the extra time to come up with more quality easy clips ideas will lower the number of quality hard clips I will need to make to not feel like a hack, which will probably save more time than the time lost to brainstorming.

So for February, I’m going to continue brainstorming ideas until I have at least 40 good, simple clip ideas to work with for both part 16 and part 17 (so 80 total). Once I’ve got enough ideas, I’ll begin production on the clips. I’m going to be optimistic and hope that I have enough finished clips (120 total) by April to release both Part 16 and Part 17 in June, but if not, only Part 16 will come out in June and Part 17 will come out in November or December. In that case, hopefully I’ll have gotten far enough into Part 17’s production by that point that I’ll have enough time to finish Part 18 before December so I can release it alongside Part 17. I really hope I can release two 50 Ways videos within the same month again like with Parts 12 and 13. That would really help put my channel back on track.

Part 16 and 17 progress

34 / 80 good clip ideas

91 / 120 total clip ideas