The Production

Speaker 0: Hello, and welcome back to Digging the Rabbit Hole. And in this episode, we're going to talk a bit about how a show goes from a pitch through to release. Now in the last episode, we discussed that very first part. We discussed what a pitch looks like and why we may choose to commission a show over others. But there is obviously a really big gap between agreeing to do something and getting it out the door.

Let's start by talking a bit about some of our team's strengths, because I think that helps contextualize the process we've created as well as some of our shortcomings. So, our strengths. Right. Really good at making video, actually. Really good at taking something from idea, creating the graphics required, actually filming, editing, and finally, publishing content.

We have a few people in the organization who are good at this from various teams. So the ability to create video was never a challenge. And in fact, I would go as far as to say, many of our team have an affinity towards creating video content, but there are some challenges. Firstly, all of those steps that I just described take a lot of time. And in fact, time is the challenge with this project.

We don't have a dedicated person running directors TV, and indeed, it would always require a cross team effort, right, to make sure shows have, you know, a few different faces involved in them. Being a 35 person company across the board from core engineering through to marketing sales, you know, general administrative over in developer relations, all of us, 35 people, is that we move really, really quickly. But by moving quickly, projects that you have to keep returning to are often the projects, that get left behind, and indeed, this has happened. There are video series on our YouTube channel, where there were 2 or 3 episodes, and then we simply run out of time. There was always something more important, more pressing, you know, more impactful to do, and those series were just left, unloved.

So that is a little bit of context as to our team. Really good at making video, but it takes a lot of time and time is the enemy. So what did we do? We created a process which basically involves batching work. When an idea is pitched, it is pitched with a number of episodes that will be produced or that are being pitched as part of that series.

Sometimes that's a negotiation, you know, sometimes we pair it back, Sometimes we will increase it and so on, but we have a clear idea what is going to be created and how many episodes will be released. We have a big content calendar. It's basically populated now, like, 4 or 5 months ahead of time, which is lovely. So, when an idea is accepted, it also comes with a release date, and that release date will be months away realistically for most shows. From there, we work back.

A week before that is the editing deadline, and then generally, like, 2 to 4 weeks before that, depending on the series and the complexity of the edit, is the deadline for all the footage. Instead and this is the key. Instead All of the recording happens together. Then we have an amazing editor, Nat. He was gonna join me on this episode, but he's a little unwell.

And that will basically then get the whole package. 100 acts in a 100 hours an episode a series is 10 episodes. He gets all 10 episodes raw recording at once. Now the team don't need to care about the editing so much. We just have to care about producing the raw footage.

We hand it off, and that creates 1 episode if it's a new show for a look and feel so we can approve it, make sure it feels good, tweak it, and so on, and then he can go and batch edit them all. Batch upload them all, batch prepare them all inside of the director's instance that runs director's TV. More about that in the next episode. And then each day, we simply release, distribute, and share. And that allows us to pour our full energy into making sure that people are actually watching them, that we're actually doing episodes justice by sharing them far and wide in communities that will find that content interesting.

And that's really it. That is the process. So stuff goes from a pitch to being approved, then the planning portion comes in. Some shows, you know, I I have to go out and find guests, for example, then there's a filming part. Once the filming part has concluded, there is an editing part, and then we go ahead load it all into the director's project that runs director's TV, and we go ahead and release it.

And so, yeah, I wanted to talk just very briefly about this process we've created because it is what enables this absolute powerhouse of a content production machine is this process. Now don't get me wrong. That isn't without its challenges to actually be able to block out time to using a 100 apps and a 100 hours as an example to do the minimal preparation for each episode and then record it. I mean, you're talking now half a week completely carved out or, you know, half a day every day for a week or however that may may be organized. But you are we're demanding more time of our team, but just in a batch.

And then they know I don't have to worry about finding the time for this series, on an ongoing basis because that's then taken care of, and centralized as well. So that's a little bit, about how it works. We also have a design team who managed to create all of the lovely graphics for each of our shows. We're giving each show its own unique identity look and feel while making sure they look good as a collective when presented with each other. And I think that's kind of it.

Yeah. I just wanted to give a little bit of a rundown about this process we've created, about how we kind of batch the work. And the other fantastic thing about batching work is it allows us to do what we have done today on the release day of this episode, which is, release into you know, know what's coming, an entire slate of shows, and the confidence that we will be able to deliver that slate because all the recordings done, Most of the editing is done, and then it's all just, you know, batch kind of admin work. So this was an episode all about the process. I hope you have enjoyed it, and we'll see you in the next episode of digging the rabbit hole.

Bye for now.