About my animation The Machinery Of Freedom: Illustrated summary (2012)

In 2012 I published a video called The Machinery Of Freedom: Illustrated summary. It's based on an audio track of David Friedman talking about his excellent book of the same name. Here it is:

Comments I've gotten on this video lately made me realise that people often don't realise that it's made by the same guy who did George Ought to Help. I like to experiment with alternate visual styles and I suppose building a 'brand' for myself has never seemed urgent enough to dedicate enough attention to, and so this kind of thing happens! I hope this post goes a small way towards remedying that problem.

Background

Back then, I had published Edgar the Exploiter and was doing preparatory work for the sequel to George Ought to Help, which would end up being called You Can Always Leave.

I was very active on YouTube, answering comments on my videos - usually talking to people who'd never heard of anarcho-capitalism. It would often be necessary to sketch out how law would could be provided in a stateless society. I would either try to type a primer myself (time consuming) or provide a link to The Machinery of Freedom - but being a book I don't suppose anyone actually read it. I wanted a resource that I could point people to, that they were more likely to actually look at.

During that time I noticed that a Friedman lecture had been published on YouTube, in which he quickly outlines his vision for the provision of law without a state. Perfect! Except the video looked dull. In my view it was conceptually exciting stuff that I wanted many more people to be exposed to. The original upload didn't do it justice.

Workflow

As a quick (unauthorised) in-between project I decided to make new visuals for the lecture. For the format I took my lead from the excellent RSA Animate videos. As far as I know they're the originators of the 'hand drawing on a whiteboard' approach that's been used by many others since.

I divided the lecture up into scenes and figured out what kind of image I wanted to accompany each.

I can't draw half as well as the RSA person can, so I did things a bit differently to make things easier for myself. For each image I needed I made a screen recording of myself drawing that one scene in a fresh Photoshop document. Back then I used Screenflow for recording, but if I were to do it again I'd use Screenium (Mac) instead - while doing video game captures it became clear that Screenium can maintain a good frame rate more reliably.

I used a Wacom drawing tablet. While drawing I deliberately didn't do any zooming or panning. Later I imported all these recordings into After Effects and positioned each one to make sense as part of one large composition. Because I can kept a consistent screen position for each image while drawing, I could create the illusion of them all being part of the same canvas.

Using time-remapping tools I adjusted the play-back speed of each drawing until it was of a duration that seemed to make sense in combination with the narration track.

Unlike the RSA productions, all my drawing recordings were made to play back much faster than real time, and I didn't mind at all that my hand didn't appear in the drawings either, or that there was some back-tracking and some visible undos - everyone knows that people can make drawings digitally these days!

Finally, the virtual After Effects camera was made to move around the composition as the narration track played, nicely framing the parts where the action was, while preserving the general 'blank sheet filling up with drawings' idea.

Lessons

This whole process took a small fraction of the time it took to produce You Can Always Leave, though today a couple of years later, the numbers of views for both are quite similar.

This was the first time I suspected that there was a strong diminishing returns effect with regard to time and energy I spent on visual refinement with respect to changing peoples willingness to watch my videos - and that my preference to use relatively time-intensive styles of rendering might be hurting me more than helping. This is a lesson that reality keeps serving up, but one that's especially hard for me to internalise! (still working on it).

And a simpler thing to fix next time: If I try this approach again, I expect I will, I'll take better care to choose a heavier default brush thickness, looks better and that shows up better when video thumbnails are displayed small!

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Here are some other things I wrote that you might appreciate:

• There Are No Human Needs
• The Fundamental Brokenness of Democracy

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I'm Tomasz Kaye. I made George Ought To Help and other pro-liberty propaganda films. You can support my work on Patreon.com. I'm also on Twitter and Facebook.