Behind the Scenes: Making Secret Base Video From Home

Posted On Sep 15, 2020 By admin With Comments Off

Seth under a blanket

How the Secret Base video team works under the New World Order

We get a lot of questions about how we place things up in our videos, and now that we have a website we have a good place to answer them. So every week we’ll show you one of the gimmicks or procedures we use to construct our sequences. And if you have questions, leave’ em in the comments.

According to a quick examination of my email inbox, it was Wednesday, March 11. Jon Bois and I were sitting near one another in the Vox Media office in downtown New York. It was near the end of the day, and most of the office had evacuated. I was busy lading up a hard drive full of shared graphics resources and other necessaries I imagined I’d need to work from dwelling for the foreseeable future. Jon was doing whatever Jon does; I find it best not to ask a magician how they kept their quirks together. I precisely enjoy the show when it was happens to happen.

“Scary stuff, ” I said. We had been talking about why I was furiously cramming a few years worth of work onto a hard drive at the last minute, as Covid-1 9 stalked closer to our doorstep. “Yeah, ” he said. “Scary stuff.”

Hard drive full, I got up to leave. “See you in a few weeks, Jon.”

“Yup. See you in a few weeks.”

I haven’t seen him or anyone else I is collaborating with since outside of Zoom.( By the road, congrats to them and all the lumps of money they’ve built over the last six months! I cannot wait to never use your service again .)

Everyone’s work lives have been disrupted by this pandemic, and I don’t mean to presume that our squad is peculiar in that regard. But we also exist in this sort of strange space in the world of yield. We don’t produce large-scale content, like some of our colleagues who create programming for Netflix or Hulu, so we don’t get nor would we need the higher-end workflow support that those crews do.

On the other hand, creating any sort of high-quality video content at the rate that we create it still requires a significant amount of coordination through all stages of ideation, creation and booklet, and so we’ve had to work hard to adapt to *~ OuR nEw NoRmAL ~* to continue bringing you the Secret Base content you CRAVE.

After the launch of Secret Base, our squad was able to take a collective breath and looked at at how the inferno exactly we were able to keep bringing you brand-new videos every week without bouncing a pace. If you’re interested, we thought we’d share some of that process with you.

In the Before Times, we were fortunate enough to have access to a wide variety of equipment and production space in our Vox Media office in New York, facilitated by the extremely wonderful and useful people on the company’s Media Production Technology team. You’ve likely recognise this in our videos: several voice-over booths that we use to shoot Beef History and record the yarn for all of our videos, as well as a perfectly decked-out studio space in which we shoot all of our on-camera talent segments, from Rewinder and Collapse to Weird Rules/ That’s Weird and Untitled. There’s also the behind-the-scenes goodies that help us deliver these videos to you fresh every week, like a line of well-maintained Canon cameras and audio paraphernalium, an endless supply of SD placards and a giant shared-data server that all of our computers is attached to so that multiple directors and journalists can cooperate on research projects and share aids with one another.

Out of all of those things, I ponder the server is one I miss the most. Coordinating, synchronizing and maintaining activity registers, shared resources and large-scale dollops of video and audio has been the most challenging aspect of directing from home for us. What used to be a simple drop off into the server has now turned into a Kafkaesque nightmare of dropping files into Slack, which get downloaded onto our neighbourhood drives until the project is completed, at which point they get zipped back up and archived. To alleviate this, the Media Production Technology team stepped up once again to provide us with this fanciful data transfer assistance announced Media Shuttle which, as the list proposed to, allows us to easily and quickly shuttle media to and from the server in New York.

In periods of actual yield, we recognized pretty quickly that we’d have to take our comfortable studio-based workflow and break it down so that we could immediately replicate it as best we could from our bedrooms and main office without sacrificing tone, which took a little ingenuity. The first casualty, which you may have noticed, was the on-camera appearance of our Writer/ Producers from every streak except for That’s Weird, which we record via Zoom. Although longtime YouTubers have figured out how to turn their living spaces into legitimate studios, we is my finding that foregoing that component of our videos, at least for now, allowed us to keep producing at our usual charge without having to pause for ordering and setting up that gear in our once cramped cavities. We do hope that members can to have seen our very attractive faces again soon, but for now, you’ll have to settle for the dulcet colours of our singers gently steering you through our videos.

To that resolve, we’ve had to come up with some creative setups to get high quality voiceover in spaces that are not even a little bit built for that. It turns out the manoeuvre is heavy blankets.

Seth working at his wife’s sewing desk while dog Trudy looks on

Smile, Seth!

Here’s Seth, writing from his wife’s sewing desk while their hound Trudy examines on disdainfully. When it’s time to record, Seth brains into his state of the art log equipment 😛 TAGEND

Seth under a blanket

Here’s Clara and her helper Alfie, hard at work 😛 TAGEND

Clara and Alfie at work

Good son, Alfie.

Clara heading under the blanket to record

Clara under the blanket, recording

I can only imagine what our bird-dogs must be thinking when we head under those comforters. “I hear the human is once again talking to themselves in the dark private — and hitherto when I lick myself,* I’m* the quirky one.”

Here’s Will’s setup, in which he has taken the policy of setting up his chair facing a reces like a Bad Little Boy 😛 TAGEND

A sad chair facing a sad blanket

Do you find the spans we go to make sure you get the goods? Do you ensure ?!

Post-production, thankfully, does not require such swaddling in thick-skulled fabric( though I tend to wrap one around myself when the cruelties of all countries of the world we live in get to be too much ). Here’s my setup.

A pink chair next two a desk with two monitors

I wish I could say my workspace always looks like that, but I removed six months worth of depression-induced detritus to make this photo. Also if you’re in world markets for a pink desk chair from Wayfair that spawns your back feel like it’s on fire, I have one available in Brooklyn, New York.

Vox Media’s kick-ass IT department was able to ship computers to those of us who did not have work-ready setups at home. Here’s JZ working his occult from his lieu 😛 TAGEND

A dual monitor setup with one screen turned off

( The second monitor makes, JZ is just ensuring that some things at the Secret Base remain Secret .)

Mike Das, one of our gesture graphics and pattern witches, elevates a more minimalist workspace at home.

A laptop on a clean white desk

That black slab in front of Mike’s laptop is his Wacom tablet, which allows him to use a pen as a direct input for artwork. He says he misses his usual setup, painted below.

Back shot of an engineer sitting on a desk and working on computers in a large clean control room of a modern printery

Getty Images

This isn’t real. But what if it was ?!

Earlier I said the thing I miss the most is our shared data server. When it comes to technology that’s true, but actually the thing I miss the most — the thing I think we all miss the most — is sitting next to each other in the department. Every video idea we’ve ever had, every bozo or amusing item, was borne out of the camaraderie that develops when you work side-by-side with your colleagues every day. Slack and Zoom are fine or whatever, but it will never repeat the sorcery of shooting the motherfucker at our tables and then watching something from that create a spark that turns into an idea that turns into a series that you fall in love with. I hope we can get that these votes in quickly, but in the meantime, we’re not going to let distance stop us from bringing you more immense nonsense for you. Plus now we can do it in the nude. Enjoy!