Painfully unfunny War Were Declared start to annoy me)
Coherency should be rewarded: and that's why despite its flaws I have grown to appreciate C&Rrsenal more and more, despite Mae being a thing.
WWD was a way to punch up attention between the 3rd and 4th act. It was waaay too successful in my opinion. Ultimately it was retired bc I found it unimportant and yet it took up hours of effort. Trying to find related, humourous clips was awful and each WWD was country specific as best as possible.
Mae has been great. At the start, yes I dwarf the pieces in context, but I also only had two hands. There was no way to reasonably produce the whole show alone. At first it was me doing EVERYTHING, including the 2D animations. Mae just shot and gave a novice opinion while I ran the cameras etc. Just having a shooter was a relief.
Over time, however, Mae proved to be the best call I ever made for the show, it can just be hard to see it from the outside. She has a work focus even I cannot beat. She sacrifices sleep and will work through injury. Since coming on full time she has mastered the filming as was, improved the lighting, remixes the audio to remove faults or mask noise, creates all of the templated assets, does some additional light design work, and assembles the final show in software. This plus handling tax work and some social media etc.
You can see the show trend up in quality radically over her first year full time. That's because before her, and Bruno taking the animations, I would pick one night a week to not sleep in order to meet schedule and still have friends/family.
With Mae I dialed back to about 60 hours and can really cram in a lot more research with time to carry the extra details to script. Also gave me time to solve various pop up crises.
We both understand she isn't the greatest communicator, especially early on. However, she has never shied from or fought criticism. Without burning any bridges publicly, I have also NEVER found anyone else half as reliable or dedicated to keeping their word. I can't name anyone who would have joined me unrelentingly for a decade of hard work with low pay and no retirement planning, let alone being professional about it, except apparently Mae.
The one unfair criticism is that she doesn't "run" the guns. We simply don't because there are so many variables with used, borrowed firearms that each one is generally worked slowly with time and attention enough to catch faults and call for a stop. I would go just as slow and would be lowering enough to see the brass and chamber as I worked the bolt. I know it isn't "proper" but I have already caught wood shrapnel once from a rifle-turned-grenade and I want to remain figured more than I want to look cool on camera.