Welcome to MEGA: The Ukrainian Divide, The Multimedial Article!
This project has been a long time in the making, I first started writing it all the way back in September 2022 as a followup to our first documentary on Ukraine, MEGA: The Ukraine Narratives, as you’ll see described in the first episode’s introduction I found that the war continued when we expected it would quickly end, as the Ukrainians put up far more resistance than much of the world expected, with the war on the ground continuing the information war did too, and with the extension of that conflict I felt an extension of our work was necessary, although Narratives had been a production with a small audience those who had watched it gave us a lot of praise for doing the topic justice and discussing it with a nuance they hadn’t seen elsewhere, so it seemed like more of this material would be something of great value.
Initially what was then simply called “Ukraine Narratives 2”, later given the name “The Ukrainian Divide” by Massi, was written as a script that I planned to be produced as a single video just like Narratives. but it ended up growing and growing over time as I found more topics I wanted to address.
It started focusing on current events, then I moved examples of misinformation about the Ukraine conflict I had seen spreading around, after that I started expanding on Russia’s motivations, more historical context surrounding the war and Ukraine’s identity politics, then speculating on how the conflict could end, most of this was my work but Massi endorsed the project and contributed to parts of the writing as well as helping with the research, that’s where the next 2 topics came in, the “Socialisation of War” and “The First Casualty - Truth”, both examining the part social media had to play in the conflict, I also opened up a chapter on the allegations of genocide relating to the conflict, eventually leaving us with a script spanning 60 pages by late October - 42 of which were the script itself and 18 being a list of links to our sources (for comparison, the entire Ukraine Narratives script was only 15 pages).
From there I pitched Massi an idea, I wanted to record some of the narration for the project, both just out of a general interest in presenting and having my words spoken in my own voice and also to help cut down on the burden of recording on his end, since my microphone was low quality garbage I asked if I could come over to visit him in Germany and use his equipment to do my recording sessions, I kind of working holiday for us if you like, luckily for me he and his family were happy to host me!
My thinking was that I would polish the script, we would record it all during the trip, then produce the documentary after that, in a few weeks or a month after the visit it would be finished and ready to share with the world.
But it didn’t turn out that way, we did spend time refining the script and its organisation, but we also found ourselves looking into a new thread, the web of Far-Right and Neo-Nazi groups related to the Ukraine conflict, this was a topic we had touched on relatively briefly in the Ukraine Narratives and at the time we thought we had found all there was to find, but this time around we found ourselves diving into a rabbithole, finding more and more groups and people, political parties and paramilitaries, the whole only seemed to get bigger the more we looked and we started to realise this was an elephant in the room we had to talk about.
So we started a repository on a note taking program called Obsidian.md, at first just focusing on the Ukrainian far-right but later expanding it to the Russian far-right as well, but as this dual work on the repo and the script continued it steadily became obvious that we weren’t going to be able to get everything done by the time my trip was over.
With the kind acceptance of Massi’s family I extended this working holiday, what was originally supposed to be just a few weeks turned into an entire month, but even then it wasn’t enough, we decided that I would record half of the script in the time we had and Massi could record the rest when he was ready, he also gave me an old microphone of his to replace my crappy one at home.
At this point I was stressed about the workload and how long it would take to finally produce this project, with Massi trying to reassure me by saying that it might take a year to finish, but it would be done in the end, my overriding thought was anxiety about this prospect, I didn’t want to still be stuck on this project in a years time!
Once I was back home these anxieties only lingered, even though Massi had done a great job helping me manage my stress, my main concern was that as a piece of current events journalism, an intensely long production cycle could leave us behind current events, with our commentary being outdated before the documentary was even released, but Massi still wanted to put the time in and do my work justice.
So he came up with a compromise that would suit both these needs, what he called the “Multimedial Article”: We would massively simplify the design of the video versions of the script and then release a companion version of the documentary made via Obsidian, after some explanations of what this would look like I agreed and plowed on with the work, we developed the unfinished, unrecorded parts of the script and began writing a new segment based on our findings about the far-right, at first I had thought this could be a simple subchapter of the misinformation section, then we realised it needed to be a chapter all on its own, then it became so big it needed to be an entire episode, leaving us with a final structure of 4 episodes in July 2023, by this point the page count had exploded to 185 pages (131 pages of script, 54 pages of citations).
Even with the reduced workload from simplifying the presentation of the documentary, using standardised graphics and backdrops rather than needing constant b-roll and highly varied editing, this was a massive workload to undertake, those 15 pages of the Ukraine Narratives amounted to over an hour of runtime, now our page count was in the hundreds and almost always growing rather than shrinking, it was very hard to find any points to cut down on because this intense length wasn’t a case of bloat or waffling too much, it was the sheer volume of topics the series takes on, it turns out it’s very hard to explain a conflict with over a hundred years of context in just a few hours, funny that.
This caused my stress to essentially boil over, and I spent much of the second half of the year detached from the project, finding other passions like getting hooked on live music, trying to find some escapism from the burden of such an intense production, I wanted to do the topic justice but production was in Massi’s hands.
I’m not an experienced editor (and I didn’t have access to the files for the edit anyhow), my niche is writing and researching and I had done almost all there was to do on that front, with the script essentially finalised all I could do was wait.
It was a long wait, not only was this project a sheer mammoth making fast development from a team of just 2 people, 1 on the production front, essentially impossible, Massi had also been working on another project alongside Divide, a documentary on the Unreal Tournament game series, setting that up as my Germany trip was wrapping up.
But when production on the first episode of the series did begin my cynicism quickly went away as I saw the work he was doing on the project, the presentation style stood out to me and it worked, I realised that this “Multimedial Article” style was a brilliant solution to our production problem and I decided to get back into participation, giving feedback on the edit as it progressed.
After a lengthy editing process and a mad dash to finish several last minute revisions Episode 1 finally released in video form on December the 3rd 2023:
I was very happy with the final result and work soon started on Episode 2, I helped with gathering all of the sources we’d need for the subsequent episodes but other than that there wasn’t too much left to do on my end, so I waited.
But then we ended up back where we were a few months before, Massi ended up being drawn to several other projects, most notably an investigation into the company Sweet Baby Inc and the culture war surrounding them, this ended up leaving Divide on the sidelines, although Episode 2 was brought to a fairly complete state it didn’t manage to pass the finish line yet.
In fairness, my attention drifted away too, this was a mutual thing, I contributed a lot to the SBI video and ended up focusing on my own projects too, like my articles for Entropic Domain, so although most of the work was done on my end I have to admit that neither of us had been advocates for this project around that time.
And that was something I wanted to change, we’d been extraordinarily lucky with the current events situation, nothing in the conflict really did change things so much that the script needed to be written or got outdated, the only exception to that was the Wagner PMC mutiny in Russia, which I had to write an extra section for at the end of Episode 1, but I didn’t think that luck would last forever and I didn’t want to still be locked to the project another year down the line, I’d said that before and I was, but that wasn’t something I felt I could do again.
So I decided to do what I knew best, write: The Obsidian version of the Multimedial Article had been in limbo since we first came up with the idea until May 2024 and I decided to resurrect it as a way to get all the episodes out and ensure they’d see the light of day.
I expected this would be something that would take weeks, but it was actually a much easier process than I expected, most of the script already worked as an article and many of the sections that required visual showcases on-screen showcases (which were designed with the video format in mind) could be resolved by include the showcase as an embed, whether that’s a screenshot, a tweet or a YouTube video, as a result it only took a grand total of a day and a half to put this format together, from 14th to the 15th of May, the text was copied straight from the script with a few corrections and changes to fit the format, “thank you for reading MEGA” instead of “thank you for watching MEGA”, for example.
My idea with making this was to ensure that at least some version of the project would be finished, even if the video version never came to pass, I wanted it to be released as soon as I finished it, but that was easier said than done.
Me and Massi agreed that we wouldn’t be hosting the article via Obsidian itself because to do that you have to pay a subscription for their Obsidian Publish service, another monthly expense just to host this wasn’t something we wanted (which goes on top of the existing subscription that had to be paid for synced editing between our PCs), so the plan was to use the free alternative platform Quartz to do the job.
The problem with that was that going from Obsidian to Quartz wasn’t a 1:1 conversion, which massively delayed the release. Eventually my frustration peaked again and I decided to just add Divide as a set of regular articles on Entropic Domain in September 2024, no reformatting needed, but the website wasn’t updated for a while and by the time it was the video version had resumed full production, with Massi being determined to see it through, so I decided only to release Episode 1 of Divide (the video version of which was already out) and leave the others unpublished.
The video versions of the remaining episodes released in January 2025 (Episode 2 on 6th, Episode 3 on the 10th, Episode 4 on the 20th) and this was where I considered the documentary finished, but we still wanted to get the Multimedial Article and Far-Right Repos out and work on bonus content for the doc, so in August I went on another trip to Germany (2 and a half weeks instead of a full month this time) to finish off Divide and work on other projects, in just the first week we finished writing all the planned bonus articles and got the Multimedial project out, with improvements to Quartz meaning that Massi got the porting job done in just 1 day, so now the only thing left is to record and produce the video versions of the bonuses, which I would expect to take around another month or 2.
The 2 repos were originally meant to be hosted seperately but I combined them back in June as I was working on finalising them since Obsidian’s sync feature only allows you to sync 1 repo at once, making editing them back and forth a pain (Obsidian was still being used to produce the repos even though Quartz was decided on for hosting), ultimately it’s much better having them in 1 place for easy navigation and we’re very happy with the results, with the release the backend has now migrated from Obsidian to GitHub.
I hope you enjoy exploring this project and its unorthodox presentation style, it’s the product of years of research, the equivalent of 261 pages (164 pages of script, 97 pages of citations).
That’s the count on Google Docs, where the script was originally put together as a single document, the article format created through Obsidian will make those hundreds of pages much more digestible as every subchapter has its own page, it’s still a mammoth of a production, but one that’s less jarring to look at.
Originally I didn’t like the idea of using Obsidian for this, it had certain formatting quirks that I found frustrating (you can’t name pages with certain symbols like question marks, symbols that are used in the chapter titles) and I didn’t think its non-linear structure was fitting for a linear narrative like this one, but it was Massi’s idea and I now see that I was wrong, he was absolutely right, putting this together has actually been surprisingly fun and I love seeing the end result with all of the subchapters and pages connected via the graph, it’s an excellent presentation style that I never would have thought of myself, just like the way we presented Episode 1 on video.
I also came to terms last year with just how much I asked of Massi with this project, one far bigger than any other we’ve worked on before or since, and how he came to terms with the sheer amount of time it would take to make happen long before I did, I was still trying to work with the production mentality of our previous MEGA documentaries, with their comparatively tiny scripts and much tighter focus in terms of topics, while in my writing mentality I was creating something gigantic and nearly all-encompassing in theme. Nonetheless, I always noticed that no matter how big the script got, Massi never once insisted that I cut content, drop topics or anything else, so when you read this Massi I just want to say thank you very much for that, even though the pace of this project hasn’t gone the way I wanted by a long stretch I was given immense creative freedom and encouragement in making it and I owe much of that to you.
I’d also like to say a big thank you to G0utBack, even though you’d rather stay anonymous you know who you are, you were also a massive help in managing the stress surrounding this project and that’s a debt I don’t think I can really repay, thank you also for the suggestions you made related to the writing, keeping my creativity going.
Ever since I had to come to terms with the fact that this project was going to take a lot longer than I had hoped I’ve been debating with myself if it was worth it, constantly flip flopping as it saw its highs and lows and honestly just as the chemicals fizzed around my brain, but at this point I think it was, this is a personal project of mine that sucked up a good half of a year of my life, and a little more after that, but I do think we’ve put together possibly the most comprehensive documentary on this topic that exists, and I think it’s worth the time, effort and length that has gone into it, hopefully you find it inciteful, whether its end conclusions appeal to you or not!
- Written by Elwood, 15/05/24, updated 23/12/24 and 26/08/25