The Mathematics of Monkeybread (Patreon)

Hello Good Humans!

The Monkeybread video is live, and I'm pretty happy with it! It looks so tasty in a headset, so if you have a cardboard or other VR headset do check it out in VR! 

If you saw the earlier draft, you'll notice that while much of the content of the script is the same, the tone is now lighter and more casual with all the tiny details that I obsess over for weeks when editing a script to try and make it both deep and accessible, humorous and serious. I'm especially fond of "batch of cookie". That's one of those little details that I hope people catch, because an earlier draft over-explained it but I think it's more rewarding this way. 

I did keep most of the original footage though! I redid some shots from further away to try and make the whole video work better flat without navigating, because between gravity and youtube's default framing there's no way to get a close shot looking down at the counter without being out of the default frame. But in the end I ended up going back to the original footage and really targeting VR180 instead of compromising for ease of user experience.

I wasted some time agonizing over that decision but in retrospect it should have been easy, firstly because this is another video partially supported by Google to be in VR180 so it makes sense to optimize for that version even if the flat version is a little clumsier for it, but mostly because my main worry with "making" people have to click and drag to reframe the video is that less-than-perfectly-smooth user experiences make people unsubscribe or bail on a platform/video, and whenever anyone compromises their artistic vision in favor for a smooth user experience or more subscribers I know what I'd say to them about that.

Mostly, though, I love the close-up butter-pouring footage in VR and all my decisions revolved around keeping it. This is why my videos are art and not entertainment or education, because in entertainment or education it would be perfectly appropriate to optimize for user experience, but not for art. It's all in the butter. Art-butter.

Ok, that's enough accounting of my overthinking of things!

So you may also notice that this is the Monkeybread video and not the How To Make A Scutoid video; yes I switched orders. But I'll be working on that next! It'll be out by the end of the month, hopefully sooner rather than later.

And if I do make another in the series, maybe I'll show the Monkeybread-like baking arrangement that mathematically leads to actual scutoids, according to the actual definition and scutoid generation algorithm in the original scutoid paper. If not, at least I'll do a post about it eventually.

Ok I hope you like the video, and see baked goods a little differently from now on!

Vi Hart