My First Panel BTS 4 (Patreon)

Aaaaand the thumbnails!

So we've been trying to experiment a lot more with our thumbnail compositions lately, in an effort to better understand what people are most responsive too. These were our A+B tests we ended up trying!

The first one is a direct reflection of the video's content, sketched by Izzy. We've got our drag queen Felony posing on top of the speaker in front of a crowd while Rea pulls back the curtain. It's a 50/50 composition split, where Rea takes up half the shot while Felony takes up the other half. Fun fact: due to deadline obligations, the first version of this thumbnail was colored by Kaden in about 40 minutes, and a background drawn by Sam was re-used here instead of drawing a whole new crowd and building. After it ended up winning the A+B test, Kaden went back to polish it to up its readability. Things like:

1. Felony's dress color tinted slightly more purple

2. All sparkles on dress and surrounding Felony were re-done

3. Speaker is more tightly rendered

4. Background behind Felony is properly composited using layer overlays, airbrushing, and gaussian blurs. This helps her to better stand out from the BG

5. Rea's lighting is re-done to include a rim light to help them better stand out as well

6. Pink and blue airbrushing set to overlay is used on top of Rea to make their glowing hair and bows appear even more vibrant and colorful

The second thumbnail was drawn and colored 100% by June! Because thumbnails are so itty bitty teeny tiny, especially when people are browsing on a phone, we opted for a close-up of Rea's face right in the middle. Our hope was that when people saw this version, they would ask something like, "What happened?" and be more inclined to click!

In the end Thumbnail A won by about 3%, which may not seem like a lot but actually: that's about 3,000 extra people for every 100k views. Gay math!!!