This cartoon I recently finished for MashedIn is a little over three minutes long. At a frame rate of 12 frames per second, that means it consists of about 2,160 frames. Almost every one of those frames had to be drawn individually.

Each frame consists of multiple layers. For instance, this image of me checking my wallet contains a layer for my face, another layer for my beard, a layer for my shirt, and a layer for my hands. (The microphone is another layer, but it’s a static unchanging picture, so it only had to be drawn once.)

My hands, luckily, are only visible for about a quarter of the cartoon. I used various shortcuts to avoid having to do my shirt over and over, but it still had to be drawn a few hundred times.

So there are, to be conservative, about 5,000 individually drawn images in the cartoon. It took between thirty seconds (for the beard) and two minutes (for hands and faces) to draw each of these pictures. So, once again guessing conservatively, call it an average of a minute per frame.

5,000 minutes is about 83 hours.

Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad. 83 hours is only two weeks of work, give or take. And I worked on this cartoon, off and on, for almost two months. So why’d it take so long?

Well, bear in mind, that’s 83 hours of pure, mechanical, repetitive drawing. That doesn’t include any time for reflection, aesthetic evaluation, leaning back in the chair and stretching, or pausing to make tea and bring up a new artist on iTunes.

Nor does it include all the extra work involved in filming and editing the original video, hunting down sound effects, tracing my co-workers’ faces for the “virtual wallet” section, and making all the elements flow together smoothly.

I’m not complaining. I consider myself very lucky that I’m getting paid to do this stuff. But I often wonder if the investment of time is worth it. How many people, in the end, will ever see this cartoon?

Of course, every time we create a video, it’s a gamble. We’re gambling a few weeks of my time on the chance that the video will find a wide audience. If it doesn’t – and so far, none of them have – we can still throw the video up on one of our blogs for the amusement and edification of people who wander by.

Still, it makes me wonder. Are we gambling wisely? A couple months back, Brendan pointed me to this Social Media Revolution video. At the time, it had been seen by a few thousand people. “We should make a video like this!” he enthused. And his instincts were bang on – before long the video went viral, and now it’s got 1.8 million hits.

But what would “Social Media Revolution” look like if I made it? Instead of Fatboy Slim it would have a soundtrack by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. And instead of graphics that flew by almost as fast as you could read them, it would have a stammering voiceover by yours truly. And instead of 1.8 million hits, it would have 180.

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