SamuKata
bobbybroccoli
bobbybroccoli

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Behind the Bog: Some facts that got cut

Hey everyone, thought I'd do the occasional text post about behind the scenes facts from the latest video. Patrons will get it for a week, then I'll make it public. No spoilers for part 2, just some content that got cut for pacing or other reasons:

- The Bogdanoff's grandmother Bertha had a super interesting life by the sounds of it. In world war 2 she acted as a translator for the Germans while simultaneously hiding Jewish refugees in her castle.

- The symbols you see on the dominos in the video might look like textures I made, but they're actually shadows being cast by wireframes (the shadows can be seen, but the wireframes aren't rendered). I had this overly ambitious idea to have the spotlights gradually turn on after each chapter, which would end up projecting a shape relevant to each chapter's topic, but rather than on the domino face itself it would be like the shadows of the domino holes you see in he video. It became clear that a lot of math and a lot of fiddling would be required to get it to work, and it wasn't worth the effort in the end. I could have just made the symbols as textures, but I had already gone to so much effort.

- The Sokal hoax is actually part of a long and complex academic feud in the 1990s in between physicists and post-modern philosophers called "The Science Wars". It's quite dry and I barely understood any of it, and every time I tried to write about it the intro ended up being boring as hell. The chapter 1 you ended up seeing is almost half of what the initial draft was.

- I spend a lot of time picking out music for my videos from the Youtube Audio Library. A lot I pick up while just listening in the background, and if I like what I hear I add it to my growing collection (over 5 hours of music atm). Believe it or not the last song in the video (Danger Snow by Dan Henig) was one I found literally the day before uploading. I couldn't find a song that had the tone I was going for, until I filtered the songs by "Angry" and I heard this DOOM 2016-like song come on.

- Speaking of which, I didn't plan from the beginning to make this 2 parts, but as I wrote it eventually became a natural choice. Making 2 videos is much more manageable than 1 long one for a variety of reasons, but dividing a coherent story into logical "acts" is a lot harder than you'd think. The Schon trilogy was actually going to be a 2 part series. "Rise and Fall of XXXXXX" is a title you see everywhere on youtube, and it makes sense. Easy structure to write to. The issue I had with Schon was that the script for the "Fall" was nearly twice as long as the script for the "Rise", and finding a logical place to cut it (and throw in 2 satisfying cliffhangers) was a monumental task. I'm pretty proud of the "Rise Lies and Demise" structure, with "Lies" being my favourite of the 3. The Bogdanoff saga does not have a logical rise and fall, and you could argue it just kind of keeps rising until we reach a plateau in the current day. When you see the ending to this saga you're going to think part 1 is the "tame" half. 

Comments

I wonder if you're a first born (or worse, an only child like me) because I feel like this kind of attention to detail is a struggle/badge of honor common amongst us in that group. It takes me literal hours to decide on a font, it's ridiculous. Actually making the leap from preparation to completion is still a challenge for me so I love to see you putting out the work you love. Just wanted to say these little details do not go unnoticed! And I love the behind the scenes insight! Thank you!

Danielle Nelsen

Thank you for this post! I'm definitely looking up more stuff about the Science Wars now; sounds like a very interesting topic.

Probl


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