Progress Update: 01/01/25

Happy new year, one and all!

With my transatlantic move nearly completed, I've settled in nicely and can return to work in full. While I've been doing so, Arc and Ryan have both been hard at work at the animations and music respectively.

As I've highlighted in an earlier progress update, I'm changing my production methods to help the flow of production; as I've mentioned, I've brought on one more member, DerEineSchwarzeRabe, to help with research. (They've been responsible both for some research assistance and art in the past, and they've proven quite resourceful)

One of the major changes that we're making is that we'll have multiple videos in production at any one time. Both the EVE video and the video that we've been producing since then have been quite large projects, but as you might imagine, I'm not terribly happy with our output schedule. And so I'd like to share with you our complete plans for the future.

Rather than only focusing on very large, complicated videos as we've done over the last few years, we want to produce a mixture of smaller, simpler videos (think the Purr Cat Cafe) and larger, more complicated videos (like most of our fare from the last four years). The ultimate goal is to release a video every two months, with a series of smaller videos interspersed with much larger projects. The length of these videos is indeterminate, but no matter their length, they'll hopefully take about the same amount of time to produce. We'll use the smaller videos to get ahead of schedule and build a backlog to give us time to work on the larger ones.

Given this fact, I'll be dividing future progress updates into sections to describe how each video in production is faring. Right now, we have two in production and one in pre-production. The first, as you likely already know, is the video about one of the longest battles in gaming history, which lasted for three straight days: the Battle of the Baths in Foxhole's War 106, which I'll be calling the Foxhole video. The second is a project whose subject we're keeping silent until release, which I'll simply call Project A. The third is our next large project, which will be about the history of the Power Rangers franchise.

The Foxhole Video: Ryan Probert, our composer, has completely finished the music for the first half of the video, including recorded instrumentals from guest musicians, and has moved on to the second half. He expects to be finished by the end of the month, after which we'll only be waiting on the animations, which will receive their own progress update in the next week. Arc has gone above and beyond to make these animations as clear and enjoyable as possible, including adding sound effects straight from the game. There's not a ton for me to do right now for this one, so I've been working on other projects.

Project A: This video is in the research phase, but now that I'm back to work properly, I expect the research to be done in the next week or two, and the script shouldn't take terribly long either. If I focus, I can have the script done before Arc is done with his animations for the Foxhole video and Ryan can begin work on the music for it.

The Power Rangers Video: This one is only in the planning phase, but this will likely be a massive project and there's a good chance that the runtime will exceed that of the EVE video; as such, there will probably be a lot of smaller videos in between the next video and this one, but I'll still keep you all apprised on this. This video will only be possible through a connection I've made streaming. (I try not to speak too much on my Twitch streaming endeavors here on Patreon since it's mostly unrelated to my videos, but it's been going well and I've been quite enjoying myself) A good friend I've made, Roy Chiato, came onto my stream to discuss the history of Power Rangers, and as he was speaking, I realized that this story is an absolutely perfect subject for Down the Rabbit Hole. He's agreed not only to help me, but to gather a number of enthusiast friends who are extremely knowledgeable about the history of Power Rangers to assist me in the research and writing, as well as providing relevant visuals.

I want to thank you all for your patience while I've stumbled through a rather turbulent period. I would very much like 2025 to be a "comeback year" in a sense, with regular uploads, and you all are helping make it possible. I'll see you all very soon.

-Fredrik