Frequent Suggestions

You’re absolutely right, and there’s no group of people who would want documentaries for every major war than us. However, the circumstances regarding the creation of the War 19 documentary were unique, and are not likely to be repeated soon.

We never actually commissioned a documentary to begin with. A single member of the Corps (GB aka Potato aka Gil Brian Perez) took it upon themselves to make one, and made it their personal project for an entire year, unpaid (like everything else we do). All while not being able to do anything else for the PressCorps for that year. According to him, it took ~560 hours of free time away from school, work, and other activities to get it done. Of that time, he did ~90% of the work himself, including fact-gathering, scheduling and interviewing over 30 people, cross-referencing timelines, map making, editing, sound mixing, color correcting, archive footage searching, and narrating the whole script in English with an accent.

For a glimpse into that work, here is the 89-page document Potato used to centralize all the information: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iEOS_DIOnMPkZZuOie1eBk4crvll0ca-vQUuqE9ZadE/edit?usp=sharing

Having said all of that, we aren’t completely opposed to making documentaries in the future. However, we believe if a documentary can’t be done right, we’d rather not do them at all. And that’s not taking into account the possibility that a documentary could die at any point in production due to real life commitments and the non-stop nature of the ongoing wars. Excuses aside, we at least hope this highlights the incredible work done by GB, and brings new appreciation to what the PressCorps considers one of the greatest creative works spawned by the Foxhole community.