June 2025 Production Update

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This one’s long, so TL;DR

I didn’t get much work done on the Elden Ring video because Pitfall took so much longer to finish than I expected. The next 50 Ways to Live is taking even longer to make because it took me more than a week to discover that it’s going to be over twice as long as the last one. I reached my $600 per month goal, but I’ve decided to continue making monthly small videos anyway since the last one did so well.

More Details

At the beginning of May, I had only finished recording and editing the first half of 50 Ways to Live in Minecraft – Pitfall. I originally intended to finish that video in 2 weeks and release it on May 3rd, but it ended up taking me 3 and a half weeks and coming out on May 11th. Since my strategy is to spend the second half of every month making a new small video, I always start working on it on the 16th of every month, which meant that I only had 4 days to brainstorm ideas for 50 Ways to Die in Elden Ring (I spent May 11th weeding my Mom’s garden for Mother’s day). Near the beginning of the time I set aside to work on the Elden Ring video, I came up with what is, so far, my favorite Elden Ring joke idea, so I spent the rest of those 4 days trying to get a few mods I need for that joke to work with each other.

At the end of those 4 days, I had finally succeeded in getting the game to run with all the needed mods installed and functioning and only then did I discover that, while the functions of those individual mods still worked while the other mods were installed, their functions weren’t compatible with each other (in more detail: I tried to use the Enemy Control mod along with an old version of Seamless Co-op on version 1.09 of Elden Ring to get one player to play as an enemy and attack another player, but taking control of an enemy on one computer didn’t cause the enemy to be controlled on the other.)

So then May 16th came and I got to work on the next 50 Ways to Live video and I’ve been working on that ever since. At this point, I wish I could say “It’s almost done and will be up on my channel tomorrow or Sunday”, but unfortunately, I’m even further behind this month than I was at this point last month. Last month, I had finished recording and editing the first half of the video, but this month, I’ve only finished the script, recorded and edited all the dialogue, recorded the video for the first scene, and I’m currently working on a blender model for a new character. This new video doesn’t even have a Premiere file yet. It’s looking like this one is going to come out even later than the last one.

The reason this one is taking so long is because it’s more than twice as long as the last one. When I decided that I was going to try making a 50-Ways-to-Die-in-Minecraft-trailer-sized video every month, I was expecting them to be about as long as the 50 Ways RL Craft and 50 Ways Create+ trailers, which were each a little over 3 minutes long. So far, not only has every single one of these new “smaller” videos been longer than that, but they’ve also all been longer than the last one. This next one is probably going to over 12 minutes.

Why does this keep happening? I don’t know. The reason these videos are as long as they are is because they would feel incomplete if I ended them earlier. The first draft of The Boy Who Spied wolves ended right after the first prankster got killed by the hyenas, but it felt way too abrupt to end it there, so I added more. I can’t imagine how I would have ended Pitfall right after the characters discover that jay was thrown in the Sarlacc Pit. Each of these videos are about to be as short as they can be without feeling incomplete.

To me, it seems the right way to handle making shorter videos is to choose a story that doesn’t take as long to tell in the first place, but the problem with that is that I don’t have any idea how long the story will be until I’ve written the first draft of the script, and in this video’s case, that took most of a week. That’s almost half of the time I gave myself to make the whole video! Starting over with a different idea after most of a week has passed means I would have just a little over one more week to write a new script and make a video from it. And that’s assuming I even have any other good small video ideas in the first place. I haven’t figured out how to solve this problem yet. I really hope my next “small” video idea really is small.

On the bright side, the Pitfall video did even better than the Boy Who Spied Wolves or the How Much Does a 50 Ways Video Cost video. Thanks to Pitfall, it’s looking like this channel is going to make over $500 in ad revenue this May, which is impressive for a month that only had one new non-50-Ways-to-Die video. It also brought in an extra $200 for Patreon each month, bringing the total monthly support to over $600, which means we’ve reached our first goal!

If you’ll recall, I said that at $600 a month, I’d drop the monthly small video every other month so that I could focus on the next 50 Ways to Die video. When I set that goal, I assumed that most of the Patreon support this channel would get would come right after the How Much Does a 50 Ways Video Cost video. The monthly small videos were just supposed to bring a little more ad revenue each month to slow the bleeding of my bank account and prevent the YouTube algorithm from completely forgetting about me. I was not expecting the small videos to be so effective at raising Patreon support or to consistently grow in viewership with each new release, but they have, so I’ve changed my mind.

I’m going to keep making monthly small videos until either the Patreon is high enough for this channel to sustain itself again (around $1,467 per month) or the momentum from these small videos slows down, at which point, I’ll fall back to my original plan of only making a small video every other month.

For now, I’m going to keep working on the next 50 Ways to Live video.