The grand strategy for the Jake Eyes channel is to work on a 50 Ways to Die in Elden Ring video every other month, then make a smaller video (usually a 50 Ways to Live in Minecraft) in the months between to keep the channel from fading into obscurity. Right now, I’m in a “small” video period of production which began in late May (you’ll see what the quotation marks are for later). Ideally, I would have finished and released the video I’m working on now (a new 50 Ways to Live Video) a few days ago by this point in keeping with the original plan, but unfortunately, I only just finished the first scene out of about 7.
Why am I so far behind? There’s a few reasons for that. The biggest reason is that this one is going to be MUCH longer than any of the previous 50 Ways to Live videos. Bloatmare’s script was about 7 and a half pages long, but the script for this one is almost 15! Before Bloatmare, I tried to keep 50WtLiM scripts under 5 pages long, but Bloatmare’s success has bought the channel more time to work with and, along with The Noobism Connection’s success (which was 11 pages long), reinforced my belief that longer videos do better in the algorithm, so I’ve become more ambitious runtime-wise. But a longer script takes longer to write and more dialogue and footage to record and edit.
And the next biggest reason for my lack of progress might be the fact that this is the first production period of a 50 Ways to Live video in which I haven’t been crunching the whole way through. In previous 50 Ways to Live production periods, I basically spent every hour I didn’t spend eating, sleeping, exercising, or doing absolutely essential chores working on the video 6.5 days a week. But then, I remembered hearing somewhere that crunch actually makes you less productive in the long run and reaching $1k a month on Patreon made my situation seem less dire and the crunch less necessary.
So starting in May, I decided to go out of my way to give myself a few hours of free-time each day. I think it worked during production of the Elden Ring video, because I seemed to make about the same amount of progress overall in May as I did in April, but it’s possible the extra free-time is partly to blame for my slow progress in June. It’s hard to be sure though when so much of the slow-down can be attributed to the script length, but the longer it takes to finish this video, the more pressure I’ll feel to crunch again.
That’s why I’m considering releasing this video in parts instead of all at once. There’s a few points in the script where “continued in Part 2” seems like it could fit in naturally, and if I just stopped at the next one, I could go back to work on 50 Ways to Die in Elden Ring for a month and pick it back up afterward. And then the next small video production period would go much more smoothly because the pre-production of Part 2 would already be done with and I could go straight into production instead.
On the other hand, splitting the video would remove the advantage longer videos seem to get in the algorithm, and I think I’ve also heard that sequel videos don’t do as well as original videos. On top of that, one of the main reasons I try to release these videos more frequently is that viewership tends to droop lower and lower the longer it’s been since I posted a video, but midway through June, my channel’s views jumped up for no apparent reason, lowering the need to stave off the droop. So maybe I will take the extra time to produce the whole video.
I’ll decide when I reach the first split opportunity. I’ll have a better idea of how long the rest of the video will take to make at that point.