The Four-Month Plan

I've spent quite some time fumbling about in EVE Online, trying to get my bearings and learning about the gradual evolution of the game, the company, and the community. I've been writing script, Ryan has already created the skeletons of many of the tracks, and Arcaxon is working on the templates that will be reused throughout the whole video.

But now that we have a deadline of May 6th, I have enacted The Plan.

It begins with finishing the rough draft. From the beginning, I have planned for the EVE Online video to be three hours long, but after beginning the script, four hours is a more realistic estimate. Working off of that assumption, I found a word count that would approximate that length for Down the Rabbit Hole, purposefully overestimated in order to make certain that we move at a good clip. To calculate this, I plucked the word count for a script to one of the episodes of Down the Rabbit Hole, specifically the Deep Blue video, since it was a bit over 2 hours of solid narration. As it was about 19,500 words long, I doubled that number to estimate the length of the EVE Online video, which is 39,000 words. Dividing that into 45 work days left me with approximately 850 words a day to finish the rough draft, a thoroughly achievable number. After that, two weeks will be given over to editing the script into a final draft, then one week to record final narration. After this, I plan to video edit 15 minutes of finished video per day to finish on the final day of April.

While I write the rough draft, I am recording the parts that I write and sending them to Ryan, who is writing music to accompany it as it is being written. (It was extremely flattering to hear how much he was enjoying even the early stages of this script) This music is highly malleable and will be adjusted to fit the finished narration, which should be a relatively fast process. Ryan has managed to acquire a very impressive synthetic church organ for the epic moments of the video, and Rachel (our vocalist) is onboard to return, as well. We'll also be looking to get our violinist and saxophonist to lay down some tracks again.

In the meantime, Arc and I are going over the script and incrementally creating the assets. Once these assets are created, he'll be able to use them to diagram and detail the important moments in battles and to explain complicated concepts in short order. Specifically, he'll be creating ship silhouettes, ship loadouts based on the in-game fitting window, and simplified layouts of the EVE universe based on Dotlan, the primary map used outside of the game by players.

While 850 words per work day is manageable, it still will be quite a task; every word of DtRH script has to be matched to a source to make certain that I'm making as few errors as possible, and in my experience, it's much slower than most other things I've written. Script writing is also not a linear process much of the time; sometimes, those 850 words will consume an entire day's worth of work. Other times, I will finish it much faster. But the 850 words is a minimum to which I'm keeping myself, and I intend to exceed that number on almost every day. If done correctly, we should be able to beat our deadline with comfortable time to spare.

Thank you all for being patient with me as I took time to work through personal issues and dig into something so complicated and vast as EVE Online. This is the largest project that we have ever attempted (and likely will ever attempt). The next four months will be a marathon, but we've done this sort of thing before and we'll do it again.

-Fredrik