quantifica march (part 1)

Hey team! April comes for us all. Let's look at the numbers.

MANA

This is the breakdown for the entirety of Everyone But Me Is Wrong About The Cornetto Trilogy, including the work done last month. I'ma be honest: I did not go about this one wisely. Editing and Illustration fall under the same wedge of the pie chart because I was doing them in tandem. Which I am not supposed to do!!! For videos of this length and complexity, the workflow I came up with ages ago was to do separate passes: a video pass, an illustration pass, and a text pass. (Nowadays I would probably restructure that as video pass, illustration + text pass, animation pass.) The point here is to give myself milestones, to not get stuck in a "perpetual middle" where it feels like I'm just trudging through an endless swamp of work. But, with how much animation I have been doing of late, there was a bigger problem: if I'm doing all three in tandem, whatever density of effects I put in the first ten minutes has to be maintained throughout the video! I can't establish a lot of visual motifs and then abandon them. But going back to take out effects is also a lot of work. The benefit of doing a few passes is, upon completion of the video pass, I can assess, "Hey, how much work was that? And how much more do I wanna put in?" And I can calibrate the complexity of the illustrations accordingly. Ditto - and to a greater degree - on starting the animation pass.

I don't have this problem with TARP videos because it's all illustration - I literally can't start editing until the illustrations are done. So I'm forced into doing separate passes, and I do cut out some planned effects when I feel it's not worth the extra time and labor.

All this is to say: I'm very happy with the video, but I worked myself way too hard on this one. Illustration alone was significantly more mana than the entire previous video! And a lot of unexpected Normal Life Shit happened, and I got a bad cold, and having to push through all of that while working was a nightmare. I've been taking it a bit easy this past week just to recover.

Once the video was online, I did a personal postmortem on it to see where the worst time sinks were and set some goals for avoiding them in the next video. The basics are: 1. be willing to cut more digressions, 2. do fewer animated transitions, 3. don't animate to temp audio because I'll have to re-sync it later, save it for the final pass, and 4. don't talk to Nebula about sponsorship until there's a rough cut, to avoid deadline crunch.

EXPECTATIONS

Interestingly, it looks like I underestimate my mana use on standard weeks and overestimate it on busy weeks; tipping point seems to be somewhere around 15? This is not surprising: you say "this is probably an easy week," odds are it's harder than you think; you say "this week I'm gonna do ALL THE THINGS," you're probably not gonna do all the things. Major exception was the final week, where I had to crunch hardest to meet deadline and the ad read took way, way, way more time than I expected.

So. Good to have a rough estimate of where my expectations and abilities diverge, and under what circumstances. I can put anywhere from 8 to 25 points into work on a given week, but I'm probably underestimating a sub-15 week, and overestimating an over-15 week.

FINANCIALS

Looking pretty spiffy on this!! Nebula paid out more than I was expected on multiple axes - my sponsor rate was a little higher than I had projected, and my revshare through the platform was 10x bigger than my usual! Plugging an exclusive video and an alternate edit of the current release seems to have driven a fair amount of traffic. Oh, and Nebula revshare is based on watch time and a 30-minute video is gonna pay out more than a 5-minute one, that makes sense. So I'm a good 30% above target for the year, nearly a month and a half ahead of projection. Things are looking stable for the channel, which is a massive relief.

BINGOS

Eyyy, first box ticked! While it is technically possible to get 5 in a row at a rate of one box every three months, it requires use of the free space, which this box does not align with. I trust things will pick up as the year progresses. But we're on the board!

MARCH MINIMIX

More tunes. Finally making use of the websites I mentioned in the New Year's video! And they paid off.

Capture & Release
- music map: looked for a band similar to Marmozets

Jelly
- every noise at once: exploring the glitch-hop microgenre

Bad Wine and Lemon Cake
- discovery queue (I'm hesitant to put this on here as liking this song sounds like a cry for help, and yes it did get me relistening to Van Helsing Boombox by Man Man and Sweet Adeline by Elliott Smith, but I don't think I need emotional intervention at this time???)

Clinpf Eepfwoof
- music map: looked for an artist like Venetian Snares

Killer
- every noise at once: exploring the pixie microgenre (though this song sounded very different from the others on the playlist, not sure it's representative of the genre)

When I Grow Up
- was trying to find a song to end the Cornetto video with, and this was thematically appropriate but did not fit the tone; I did, however, completely fall in love with the song