Transcript
How long was Taylor Swift trapped in this vault before her eventual werewolf jailbreak? For those recently returned from hibernating under some rock, we're talking about her most recent music video for her song, I Can See You, where Taylor has been imprisoned by someone, and in traditional prisoner style, is marking out her days of captivity on the walls of herself. Too bad, she's really bad at it. More on this later. And guys, I wasn't expecting this at all, but if you're into Taylor Swift Easter eggs, the result I get at the end here was pretty mind-blowing. Wait a minute, Mr. Closet, Swifty. Don't you normally talk about science? Excellent question, my dear strange, Padawan, but this is science. Because here we're all about applying a scientific mindset towards every aspect of light. And when I saw this video, my scientific funny bones started tingling. So how long was she in there? It should be a simple matter of counting up the marks, right? US Magazine thinks that it was only 1,468 days. Which it says is the number of days between her masters being sold, and the release of the new Speak Now Taylor's version. aren't really known for their talents in complex areas like counting marks on walls. It seems like they pulled that number from this viral tweet, which got over 5.8 million views. Too bad it was wrong! Now let's dive it. Step 1. Collect the vault shots. I spent a while combing through the video for any shots that could possibly include the walls of the vault. There are 21 total shots that show it, but some of them are a little bit redundant or just too zoomed in to actually get any good information. But we've got a good amount to work with. So, step two is assign the walls. to which of the four walls of the vault. We can see from this outside shot that the vault looks pretty square, but moving inside, we've got this big glowing vault door on one wall. Let's call that wall one. Then there's this wall with the painting, and one with the ledge that she sits on. Following, so from this wide angle shot, we can see the relative positioning. So let's go clockwise and call these walls two and four. We only ever get partial views of wall three, but we know from these two shots that it's still mostly covered in marks and from this security cam that it just seems to be a plain wall. Now for the nitty-gritty. Three, analyze the panels. Each wall is 30 panels high, and we can break up the width into three components. It's 10 standard panels wide, but we can see from this delightfully clear and stable shot, for once, that there's a three-quarter width panel and an angled quarter panel that is basically half the width of a full panel. And rather than count every single mark on every single panel, which would be pretty impossible given how blurry some of the shots are, we're going to try to figure out the average number of marks per each size panel. And now we see that Taylor is really bad. at this and is obviously not an engineer. Would it have been too much to use standard tally marks with the cross at the five, or even just be remotely consistent with the number of marks per line or per segment? But I guess she had to amuse herself somehow. So, the average number of marks per standard panel seems to be roughly 16, putting the three-quarter panels at 12 and the half panels at 8. This isn't fully consistent, but we're going to run with it for the sake of our sanity. But how many of these goes to each wall? We've got some obstacles to deal with. So step four is per wall and figure out what things are obscuring them. Wall 1. Wall 2. The painting wall. Wall 3. Blank space. Because there's nothing on it, except marks. Wall 4. The ledge. Adding it all together, we get 20,719 marks in the vault, which would have taken 57 years to mark down at one per day. So, outside of weird time dilation, that's probably not what happened. So let's work shop it a bit. That US magazine article claimed that there were 1468 marks on the vault, which corresponded to the days between her masters being sold and the music video coming out. That's obviously bogus and off by a full order of magnitude, but I checked in that 1468 number at least is correct. So what if we divide our 2719 number by 1468? We get 14.11. Not particularly significant. But then it hit me. This video teased her upcoming re-release at 1989, which is scheduled for October So let's recalculate. Get ready for this. The total number of days between her masters being acquired by Scooter and her 1989 re-release is 1,580. The number of marks on the vault were roughly 20,720, with some margin for error given the amount of assumptions we had to make. But we can be pretty sure she was marking down more than one mark per day. So how many marks per day? We divide 20,720 by 1,580 and get, drumroll, please. 13.11. nor the 0.11 is a rounding error based on our approximations, or you're really off the deep end, in which case you say half of 0.22 is 0.11, and that means something you tell me. But I'd say 13 marks per day sort of makes sense for Taylor, don't you think? Let me know your take in the comments. And if you enjoyed this weirdly obsessive application of a scientific mindset towards some random factor of everyday life, then hit that subscribe.
Additional notes
Did you see it coming? 🤯 This whole analysis + vid legit took me over 74 hours of solid work. Hope at least a few of you fellow nerds actualky sit through it! (Especially the full version on the tubes) #taylorswift #taylorsversion #icanseeyou ##1989taylorsversion #1989 #edutok
References
- No linked source, study title, DOI, or PMID found in the available source material.