📅 2021-04-02 | ⏱️ 24:35 | 👁️ 30.9K views | 👍 4.3K likes | 💬 1.8K comments
Pea takes viewers through the complete behind-the-scenes process of creating one of her videos, from first coffee to final upload. She documents every step across three days of production for a single 15-minute comedy video (her upcoming "types of expats to avoid" episode), revealing her scripting process, comedy writing techniques, equipment setup, editing workflow, and the relentless comment management that bookends every release cycle.
What's Covered
Day 1, Morning: Post-release recovery and comment management
- Released her budget video the night before at 9 PM, stayed up answering comments until 3:30 AM, got about four hours of sleep
- Release nights happen twice a week and she dreads them because she has to stay up all night
- Morning routine: coffee and toast while releasing/answering the backlog of comments posted while she slept (when it's night in the Philippines, it's daytime in the West, so comments pile up)
- Also has to manage Patreon messages, emails, and text messages — this alone takes all morning
Day 1, Afternoon: Writing the script — the most critical step
- Pea's philosophy: "the most critical thing to making a good video is having something to say"
- She doesn't wing it — she scripts nearly everything (exception: casual interviews like her lunch date with Gracie)
- Wants videos that "tell a story with a beginning and an end"
- Maintains a schedule of topics planned weeks in advance, alternating between series videos, interviews, and comedies to keep variety
- Today's video is a comedy about types of expats women should avoid — she already has scattered notes and funny lines jotted down over weeks
- Plans to structure it like her "Don't Feed the Scammers" videos — chapters with funny names for each expat type (e.g., "Mister No You See Him Now You Don't")
- Needs 7-10 categories to hit the target of 10+ minutes of footage
- Notes that comedy videos where she talks fast end up shorter, so she has to be careful about having enough material
- This particular topic is easy because she can write from personal experience: "please don't ask me how I know these guys"
How she inserts cultural references (her "secret weapon": Google)
- Explains her process for finding references the audience will connect with
- Example: she wrote a section about alpha males being "pilots" in their relationships and wanted a reference about someone jumping out of a plane
- Googled "famous person who jumped out of a plane" — first result was D.B. Cooper
- Her logic: if it's the top Google result, most people will know who it is
- But she has a backup method to verify (revealed later): she runs references by patrons as a focus group
- How she knew Ted Kaczynski: watched a show about the Unabomber on Netflix
- How she knew "Danger, Will Robinson": Lost in Space on Netflix
- Her insight: "you'd be amazed how much you pick up from watching Western TV" combined with "Google University"
Fine-tuning the script: word-by-word precision
- Uses Merriam-Webster's online thesaurus obsessively
- Example: she'd already used "ridiculous" once, so she looked up synonyms — found "cockamamie," chose it because "it sounds funny to say so it probably sounds funny to hear"
- Changed "sometimes he has a ridiculous story about a secret mission behind enemy lines" to "sometimes he has a cockamamie story about a secret mission behind enemy lines"
- Uses rhyming word searches for punchlines — needed a rhyme for "dipper" (for a section called "The Honey Dipper"), found "zipper" which works because of the innuendo
- Goes through "every single sentence and every single word" until satisfied
- Admits she's "kind of OCD about my videos"
- Solving the "Casanova" problem: originally titled a chapter "The Casanova" but realized that just means a guy who's good with women, not specifically a cheater
- Googled "famous historical cheaters" — got Tiger Woods and Donald Trump, but "The Trump" didn't sound right
- Left it with a question mark; eventually a patron suggested "Lothario" — which means "a selfish irresponsible guy who has a lot of women" — perfect
The Patreon focus group system
- Sends drafts to friends and patrons to check for grammatical errors, unfunny jokes, confusing references, or things that could be better
- Sometimes posts individual lines or punchlines on Patreon to see if the audience gets them
- This is how she validates cultural references like D.B. Cooper — if someone says "who the heck is D.B. Cooper?" she has time to change it
- Calls it "kind of like a focus group"
English learning tip
- Always watches shows with subtitles turned on
- Her reasoning: when people just listen to a foreign language, they ignore words they don't know and focus on what they already understand
- Seeing and reading words simultaneously helps with spelling and doubles the number of new phrases she learns
- Says it makes new phrases "stick in my head better"
- Her friends find this habit annoying
Day 2 continued: Comment management never stops
- Has to take breaks from writing to release and answer comments before they pile up
- This constant back-and-forth between creative work and community management is a recurring theme
Day 3: Filming day — the studio setup
- Picked a black outfit because it's been a while since she wore black and "it's easy to match against almost any background"
- Studio setup is minimal:
- Green screen: actually blue fabric duct-taped to the wall (blue works the same as green)
- Camera: RealMe 7 Pro cell phone (a cheap Indian-made phone with a good camera and battery)
- Audio: light boxes and Cybernetic wireless mics
- Teleprompter: her laptop sitting on a shelf behind the camera with adjustable text speed
- Sound absorption: foam stuff stuck to the walls ("I'm not sure if it's really working but I read about it on the internet")
- Notes she'd like better equipment but doesn't need it
Filming process
- If she stumbles over words, loses her place, or mispronounces anything, she restarts that entire section
- Has spent as long as five hours filming a single long video — "and that's before I even start editing"
- Wants everything to be perfect
Post-filming: clip selection and the wardrobe malfunction story
- After filming, sorts through footage to pick the best clips (always has more footage than needed)
- Pre-release review by friends is critical — tells the story of a wardrobe malfunction in Dare The Pea 2: while climbing a coconut tree, the camera operator on the ground accidentally shot up her shirt, capturing a few frames she didn't catch during editing
- Someone else spotted it before the video went public
- Also reshoots the Star Trek ending from her budget video because she thought of a funnier line — has to swap the blue fabric for green so her blue dress doesn't disappear during green-screening
Day 3 continued: Editing
- Editing time varies wildly — a couple of hours for simple videos, a full day for complex ones
- "A Thousand Ways to Die" video took a full day because she had to insert clips from other videos plus her own typhoon footage
- This comedy video's editing involves: importing clips, stringing them together, picking a background photo for green screen replacement, creating text boxes with expat type names, recording audio clips for the chapter names, adding an outro scene
- Uses an existing outro this time since she just released a new one
Upload and final steps
- Internet is very slow — even a short video takes up to 45 minutes to upload
- YouTube tasks: write description, fill out the content form (sex, violence, nudity, controversial material), wait up to two hours for YouTube's copyright infringement scan
- Sends the uploaded video to friends for a final check before making it public
Release night: the cycle repeats
- Publishes at 8 PM
- Then reads and releases comments all night
- The entire three-day process starts over immediately for the next video
Pea's closing thought: "if you want to start your own YouTube channel just remember that if you have creativity and you're willing to work really hard there's nothing I do that you can't do"