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Andrew Smith's avatar

Nice! How much extra work went into the video? I would guess it's a LOT more than a typical Sadbook comic, but OTOH, video technology is moving really fast and coming a long way toward closing that gap.

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Sara Barkat's avatar

haha definitely more work than a typical Sadbook comic — there a lot of animation technologies these days that makes it easier, but it's still just many more steps to do than simply drawing a comic (if you can draw straight to digital it speeds the workflow more, but my digital drawings always turn out a bit wobbly... so I just ended up drawing each individual picture on paper as usual).

A normal Sadbook comic takes up 1 sheet of paper, but I drew Geometrified (the video) on 8 sheets of paper. Even a 1 minute(ish) video like this usually takes at least a couple of hours to edit (not counting "set up" like conceptualizing, drawing, taking pictures of the drawings, uploading/downloading & gathering assets/etc) since I end up having to go over the video multiple times in the editing software, trying to get the timing right with the pictures/music/various overlays.

(A couple of hours is *definitely* on the short side of people's average video editing time, too — the most impressive short films/music videos/animations that get made on youtube can take people weeks or even months with all the detailed work that goes into making those pieces.)

Would a behind the scenes of making Sadbook videos be something people are interested in? I could try to make something that shows a bit of the process...

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Andrew Smith's avatar

I mean, I can speak for me: yes, that sort of thing could be really interesting, but I'm also a fellow creator, so it's tough for me to put myself into the shoes of our (collective) readers. My own mantra for publishing is, "If I think it's cool, so will my readers, or they'll just leave." That's a pretty easy "true north" for me, but within that subset is A TON of substack-specific, or writing-specific stuff. I do end up talking about that part of my life, and I find it interesting.

My gut says some folks would really enjoy that sort of thing.

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LL's avatar

this is sooooo good. (and the pun on "petrified" is fun :)

i love how tightly the visuals are keyed to the (creepy) music!

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Sara Barkat's avatar

thanks so much!

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