in the first minute of watching the latest folding ideas video i got excited for a sec ’cause i thought they were about to present this thing jon bois-style, but as it continued i actually felt that that aspect was a bit disappointingly under-/mis-utilized? the presentation is spiffy and all but, for me, the big timeline that presumably serves as a central visual/conceptual anchor for the video kinda fails to deliver a decent sense of space or growth or even just the actual passage of time.
like, okay. it’s a video about world of warcraft, so they have to show clips, but those clips can be p visually noisy, so for the sake of legibility it’s best to present them at full screen, meaning that they often have to cut away entirely from the big timeline, hindering its ability to establish itself as this space we’re abstractly accessing. and it kinda feels like the video attempts to compensate for this by leaning into a more ambitious camerawork and set design(?) when the timeline is on-screen, but all that does for me is hinder my understanding of the spatial relations of the elements being shown. and the movements of the camera can be so irregular that the demarcation of the years and months on the timeline feels vestigial, like why even have them labeled there if you’re just gonna fly past them at such speeds and angles as to render them pointless to try to read. an appreciation for the passage of time doesn’t seem to be a priority here, which feels kinda weird for a literal timeline.
and the big timeline is completely static. that isn’t necessarily a criticism, but the best of jon bois and his imitators accomplishes this sense of accumulation as the story develops, a narrative magnitude progressively made literal with cities made of stories and towers made of stats. the timeline here isn’t really organized and presented like that, and that’s fine, but it does feel like it’s missing out on one of the biggest strengths that make this style so compelling to begin with.
overall i actually do think it’s a good video, i recommend watching it! but as a fan of ~the jon bois style~ i struggle to understand the motivation of the big timeline.