minuteearth

How the spiders Georg video came to be...

Added 2024-03-19 16:32:09 +0000 UTC

A few weeks ago, we published a video about statistics and old Tumblr memes - and this was a weird one in every way possible!

Normally, the ideas for our videos are pitched between the writers, who then discuss whether a topic will work or not and lean on their considerable experience and expertise to design the best narrative.

That did not happen for this script.

This script started as a joke between Lizah and Arcadi in between in-depth Rocky Horror Show and Stardew Valley discussions. Somewhere along the way, one of us stumbled upon a Tumblr post. And not just any Tumblr post, a legendary Tumblr post

This inspired us to retell the story of Spiders Georg!

Let us tell you the story via a set of screenshots from our Slack channel:

And by some fun chance, all the small sketches in this slack-chat ended up in the final video. (you can see from the timestamps that the excitement was real)

Maybe this means that we should more often base our videos on casual chats, but I fear that this is an outlier that should not be counted.

The decision to bully Cameron in this video was easy: (we never truly explained the joke to him. Honestly not sure if we ever untied him)

After some careful writing and rewriting together with David, we created a story that explained how statistics can be skewed and how numbers can be misleading.