What do GB editors do? - Well, mostly Brad.

Assuming they work from 9 am to 5pm everyday (which is already a pretty slack work schedule), that equates to a 30 35 hours per week, excluding lunch. If they spend the following amount of time for activities such as:

1. 2 hours per day for video content (10 hours total)
2. 5 hours per week for podcasts (including prep)
3. 3 hours per week for UPF

That only equates to about 18 hours total. Let's assume they also take occasional breaks in between, bringing that total to 20 hours, what are they spending the other 10 15 doing? They don't write much written content anymore.

NOTE: I'm not talking about the video producers.

EDIT: I guess we're talking about what does Brad do all day since we can assume Jeff is stacking them meetings.

Meetings.

I think it's pretty clear that Jeff and Vinny spend way more than 8 hours a day in the office, and I'm assuming the same goes for the other guys. As to your question, I imagine a lot of their time is spent playing games to talk about on the podcast or in preparation for a Quick Look. Vinny and Drew also have to edit a lot of that stuff.

When you're producing audio/video, even if you have the best people, the best equipment and the best luck for things not going tits up, 1 hour of work will never, ever EVER equal to 1 hour of content. Never. Nope. Not a chance. That's not how things work. There's an insane amount of work which happens before, during and after the record button is pressed. There's alot of bad material you don't see which gets edited out, errors which are corrected, material which is scrubbed out to leave the good bits in and the bad bits out and that means going through hours of material over and over. Plus there's the time consuming process of converting things to different formats and making sure there are no errors when the file is converted into 5 different files. As for the live show, there's an insane amount of prep work required plus a couple of people in the background doing a fuckton of work to keep things rolling.

Well let me clarify here. I'm not talking about the video producers. I'm talking about the editors.

Which, I guess in this case only applies to Brad and Jeff. I assume Jeff is the one whose deeply involved in meetings over GB's future. But what about Brad?

Brad plays games and reviews them. He seems to check out a lot of little stuff on Steam just to see if it's worth covering. I bet Brad and Jeff are also in meetings with PR folk and publishers to arrange interviews or to get a game in early. I'm pretty sure they also read everything that gets put up on the site and edit it. Brad always was very attentive when it comes to grammar and punctuation and that's one of the reasons he was hired by gamespot in the first place.

I really think you underestimate how much time work costs to execute. I bet you can easily double the time you listed it takes to do that stuff.

I have absolutely no idea what editors are supposed to do, so I'm probably wrong about everything. But maybe they have to write reports on the stuff they publish to their overlords. The kind of reports that take way too long to write considering their purpose. They are obviously communicating with publishers and developers for news, trips, Quick Looks and whatnot. Whenever a game comes in they have to look at the embargoes, assign it to someone and plan what content they are going to produce for it.

All that said, I am with you that I'm really curious how their day looks like in the average week. I still want to see some video content of how they do things. There is a Dutch gaming site that is doing a lot of video content, at least one video a day and they actually show how their days look like. Granted, their video's are much more edited than on Giant Bomb, but it takes them a ton of work to get them ready every day.

You're probably underestimating stuff.

@white: Brad is sleepy. He needs his rest.

*I don't have an actual answer for this. I would imagine it's probably boring office related stuff like emails, meetings etc.

Windjammers.

We seem to forget that these guys are primarily writers who write reviews so most of the time they are probably working on that which includes researching, writing, editing etc. The other time is spent planning, meetings, booking events, going to events, answering emails, following as well as trying to make news, getting interviews or quicklook EX's and last but not least making content. there is probably stuff I even missed but I can imagine it being pretty busy. Just because we don't see it doesn't mean they do nothing all week. Also, it doesn't take 2 hours to set up a podcast and jeff isn't the only one who has to go to meetings it's a requirement for working at the company which means every employee has to attend them. most of them anyway.

At the moment they're going to be doing lots of phone calls and emails to set up their E3 schedule.

@sharkethic said:

This continues to be the best gif in the world

We all know Brad reserves 4 hours of each work day only to search for horrible stuff on the internet, flesh eating bacteria, maggots hatching inside people's knees, mexican drug cartel torture and such. The rest of staff has to compensate for the time he wastes and also find time to deal with all the horrible stuff they see when passing by his table, I believe 2 and a half hours of each of Jeff's days are spent in the bathroom crying for the things he can't unsee...

(You´re only considering the things you actually watch as work, man, there's a lot to do in any office, can you imagine what is to prepare for e3?)

@white: I don't know what freaky math world you're living in but over here 8x5=40.

@rollingzeppelin: Woops. I thought 9 - 5 is 7 hours.

@rollingzeppelin said:

Seriously, how did it take 15 replies for somebody to point that out?

DOTA.

I like to imagine when the cameras and mics are off they're just playing windjammers.

I think Vinny posted on his tumblr (but I just looked and couldn't find it?) that he works like 10 hours a day.

I'll assume the other guys work similar hours, but I'd suspect he and Drew and the engineers typically work longest, due to unforeseen fires that need to be put out.

i like how this devolved to "what does brad do all day??"

and answer is obv. LoL

Trying to eat box after box filled with bizarre Euro snacks you people like sending them so much.

I used to wonder this myself. But then I realized what my own work probably looks like from the outside. It's seemingly basic and easy to describe. But in reallity... not so much.

3-4 hours per day is mailing people back and forth. A single decision must go through a lot of people. There's a problem with an earlier decision and the same people must be informed and a new one must be made. Do what I'm supposed to do but something is broken or missing. The phone keeps ringing. Rinse and repeat.

Some days are pretty relaxed, but most days are juggling projects, people, time and money. I think it's something like that for a GB editor.

You are fairly low-balling those figures. UPF does not take 3 hours for example, there is a lot more set up and tear down either side of it.

This is also a legit question that I had. Vinny and Drew definitely work the most.

I don't think that's what the OP meant, but I'm always surprised when I see people thinking that the Giant Bomb crew could just record themselves playing games all the time and make good content out of that.

I'm pretty sure they go to a bunch of meetings to get E3 or Quick Look EX coverage or that they think some of their content through before doing it. If it was just them recording random game all the time, they would just become like any let's player there is, just with a better personality. While their content is often similar to let's plays, only that would get boring pretty fast I feel.

*barely held back laughter*

Scheming how to deprive non-subs of more content with "support the duders"-motto.

I bet an hour a day goes to just email management. And I'm pretty sure I've seen them eat lunch at their own desk, so that's a little more productivity.

Play and research video games to talk about. Makes sense though, because it is a video game website.

I always thought they spent a decent amount of time editing the wiki as well as the regular content they create.

Not getting better at playing games while talking and stopping making bad QLs of games so bad they misrepresent the game and cut into their sales and GB subscriptions, that's for sure.

Trust me, it takes more editing to make something appear unedited and free-flowing than having something appear super-slick and overproduced. Despite the fact that the bomb-crew appears to talk about lots of random stuff all the time, there's always a pace in their material, and that pace cannot be achieved without putting lots of hours into editing.

@stete:

How would that work for Quick Looks, though? I can understand the Bombcast, but not something like a Quick Look.

If my work is any indication -

25% begging for funds, 25% crafting elaborately detailed plans of what I plan to do with the funds, 25% coordinating between various groups for time and equipment, 25% writing CYA reports and answering the dumbest fucking emails you have ever seen. Then I work OT to actually do the project.

This is the corporate world. Pretty much the same everywhere.

Watch the "It's so Ryan!" video. It's a lot of outtakes from QL's, which shows that they start over and over due to technical fuck ups or just not finding the bit very good in the end/too much dead air.

@ghostiet:

I knew that they do multiple takes on Quick Looks; I thought he meant literally editing and shifting dialogue around post-recording.

@video_game_king:

Well unless they are doing it live, there are always good reasons to edit a quick look. Sure you need it to be as uninterrupted as possible to show an accurate representation of the game but there's bound to be some issues such as controllers desyncing, loading wrong save files, audio interference, sound balancing or any error which happens during production and is not caused by the game. Plus if they want to show you something specific in a game they might be something that requires lots and lots of retries, and if it's something that takes 100 tries and it's not a bug in a game then it makes sense just to edit it down to a number which is not tedious. Anyhow, point being, the sign of good editing is that you don't notice that there's an edit, and that tales ALOT of effort, which is a shame since skills like these are only noticed when they are bad and not when they are good.

Isn't it obvious?

Not trying to jump onto the "GB are lazy assholes!" train, but they clearly do not spend most of their time writing reviews or articles. Patrick and Alex put out a decent amount of written work, but Brad and Jeff haven't posted reviews since March and almost never post any articles. Playing games to prep for Quick Looks is pretty much non existent too.

I imagine most of the time is taken up with meetings, e-mails and other office crap that they have to deal with every day.

You realize that they leave in controllers desycning, loading wrong save files, sound balancing and a multitude of errors all of the time? The stuff from That's So Ryan was B-Roll from before or after a QL bumper, not stuff they took out in the middle. People complain all of the time about how boring or awfully-paced a QL can be, and Brad himself apologizes when something takes him too many tries. QLs can be boring and bland and tedious, and if they were editing that, they never would be.

Brad spends most of his days having sex on top of large piles of cash and video games. Why else would he be so sleepy all the time?

Working on his upcoming musical opus, Barkerville

Of course none of us know for sure, I just hope they aren't spending hours of worktime playing games only to fill what, 20 mins on the bombcast? Because they sure as hell aren't reviewing games anymore; Patrick reviews more games than Brad nowadays, and he's a news editor primarily.

Someone has probably already said this, but sometimes they just play games for review or whatever during work hours, but without recording it (I assume).

They actually record about 20 hours of Bombcast each week but it's eventually edited down to a tight three hours.

I get the impression that Brad's handling a lot of the back-and-forth correspondence, reaching out to developers, other PR shit, and various administrative things that used to be Ryan's job. Also, meetings.

Office life is counter-intuitive and anti-production by nature, and it's especially bad for a small team to have to deal with, because they just don't have the manpower with which to disperse the busywork. This has been the real curse of their move to CBSi.

Are some of you not expecting them to actually play games during their office hours? Should they use all of their spare time to play games and only use office hours for written, audio or video content production? That sounds like all work and no spare time.