The wheel turns! I've had a lovely 10 days off, and now we begin the march towards our third and final video for this calendar year. Aiming for a ~12/21 public release, the next project will be a proper go at a now 8 year old video! (I was 18 when I made the first one.) So many new tools, techniques and methods, maturing artistic taste, and just general fact verification and improvements in my craft and writing have led me to make this decision. In fact, I am not stopping at Apollo 8, but I'd like to set some clear boundaries on how many Apollo missions I think should be reproduced.
I'm really bouncing around in my own head about this, because any video on the channel with the tag "Remastered" is already, itself a 'second attempt' at a video on the subject. Yes, there exists, buried deep down where I don't dare let anyone go, HIGH SCHOOL-era (2014-2017) versions of films on the Gemini, Apollo missions. The 2018-2022 era was chock full of so many "Remastered" videos that many came to believe that was just a creative naming choice without meaning, and the running practice of the channel. Redoing those older videos now would therefore be third generation attempts, and that seems excessive.
As always, I am going to lay my cards on the table and be brutally honest with you: There is a significant monetary incentive to recreating those older films. All of them are unmonetized and unmonetizable. From a purely financial standpoint, if I'd like to increase my ad revenue intake, then it's very much in my interest to eventually redo everything, including Project Mercury. But, rest assured -- that is not the only factor in my thinking. It has to be bigger than that. I have to be able to do it better, and not just marginally better -- sufficiently better. That immediately leaves out Apollo 16:R and Apollo 17:R. I genuinely believe those two films proudly stand on their own to this day, and frankly I can't remotely imagine a scenario where I'd make a single major creative choice differently. To remake those films would be pure greed.
Apollo 8-14 are different. I think they are starting to show their age. Like with Project Mercury: the captions are sophomoric and rough, without outlines and often too big or difficult to read. The music is too loud. The footage is sometimes not as good as it could be if I made it today. There are mounting reasons to justify recreating them, but rest assured there will not be a long uninterrupted string of "Re-Remastereds", likely only one per year IF that many.
Apollo 15 is a wildcard: I'm very much on the fence with that one, as in my mind it blurs the middle ground between "he's still learning" and "actually quite polished". I say again: 16 and 17, hell no. I love them just the way they are. The Gemini films are also safe.
I have at least ten completely novel video ideas floating around, enough to keep this channel going strong for 3 years at the bare minimum. Throw in the occasional re-do, and that looks more like 5-6 years. In the case of Apollo 8, it's something of a perfect storm. Not only is the video quite old and primitive, but with the passing of Jim Lovell and the upcoming mission of Artemis II, it just seems incredibly timely from a variety of considerations. The good news is that the cost will be lower, since I am not starting from scratch with footage. This means a bigger budget for ASTP next spring.
So, to wrap up my thoughts, here is where my mind is at regarding the video lineup. Since I am aiming for 3 films per year, my basic thinking was to split the projects into three categories: Crewed mission, Robotic mission, and "Re-Remastered" mission, in a rotating triplet.
April '26: ASTP
August '26: Venera
December '26: Apollo 9:R
April '27: Skylab
August '27: Mars Landers and Rover (The Red Planet? Needs a better title)
December '27: Apollo 10:R
April '28: Early Apollo (R&D phase, 1-7)
August '28: NASA's Flying Observatories (OAO, Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler etc)
December '28: Early Shuttle (R&D phase, STS-1-4)
I'd like to do Apollo 11:R around July '29 but this may require some monkeying around with the schedule, perhaps fit something shorter before then?
As you can see, it very quickly becomes a long calendar road, and there's still so many ideas left beyond that. My basic operating strategy is what I call "4-4". I'd like to get to a point where we have a $4,000 budget, and a 4-month production time. I'd love to hear all of your thoughts on this. This is the direction I am strongly leaning towards taking the channel.