by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

There was a conversation about a film I made in Blender called Moria's Race. And the main question was "Why doesn't it have views?"

Two running theories that members of various communities proposed were:

- There was not enough Effort put into the movie.
- There was not enough Quality.

Effort and Quality are rather subjective things that are hard to put into math. But today I gave an attempt at doing just that to answer this question.

The movie was released 119 days ago on 26th of August 2023. And in those 119 days the movie gained somewhat about 617 views. Comparing the 617 views of my movie to something like 5.6 million views of say Sintel that was released way before 119 days ago, wasn't a good way to go about it. So I had to find 119 days since release estimates for the other movies.

Using the Wayback Machine I could see what was the number of views on any given recorded day. And looking for a target of about 119 days since release date I got the following numbers.




If either of the theories mentioned above are true, the effort and the quality graphs should show roughly the same distribution.

To calculate effort I used the announcement dates of the project and the publication dates to get roughly how much time the project was in development. And I multiplied it by the amount of people mentioned in the credits. Basically the thinking is, if all this work had to be done by one person, in how much time would this person do the whole project from beginning till the end?

Here is the graph for Effort:




As you can see Moria's Race is not in the bottom of the list as would be expected if effort was a kind of proxy for views. And Sprite Fright is not on the top of the list. Cosmos Laundromat, with the most effort, is about in the middle of the graph of views.

So perhaps it is not effort but rather quality that governs the views. So to find quality I did some more math. I took the length of the movie and divided the effort by the length. Getting a kind of even distribution of effort per any given second of the movie.

Here is a graph:




This time since Moria's Race is half an hour long, it is the lowest on the Quality scale. And Agent 327 is the highest, being also among the highest on the views graph. So you could theorize that quality is in fact a proxy for views. But if you look at the other examples, Wing It! is in the middle of the graph of views. Charge is also about the middle. So nothing makes sense here.

I was curious and made two more graphs representing fairness for both categories. One is Views / Effort and the other is Views / Quality. And here are the results.







Using both Effort and Quality metrics I didn't get the answer on why Moria's Race is not being watched by enough people. Judging by both graphs the views of Moria's Race should be roughly the views of Big Buck Bunny at 119 days after the release. But it is nowhere near close to it.

Big Buck Bunny at 119 days from the release had about 337,822 views. If Quality was the determining factor Moria's Race has only 0.18% of what it should have. And if Effort was the determining factor, Moria's Race has even less.

So it is neither of those things. I wonder what those things are.

Happy Hacking!!!


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