How episodes are made
Every Aevolio episode answers one question about how something in the past worked. This page sets out how the films are made, how every claim is checked and what happens when something turns out to be wrong.
The pictures are drawn in code
Every scene is drawn with code: flat shapes with ink outlines, one line weight and one palette per era. Nothing is filmed and no frame comes from an image generator. People appear as small figures at work and never with faces, so no one is given an invented likeness.
Objects held by museums under non-commercial licences are redrawn in code and cited by their museum number instead of shown. Photographs appear on this site only when the museum or archive has released them as CC0 or CC BY, and each one carries its credit line.
The voice is synthetic
The narration is read by a text-to-speech voice that runs on a computer at home. The captions are timed to the narration word by word.
Every script is checked by a person
History scripts go wrong in known ways: citations nobody has checked, quotes that cannot be found in their source and round numbers with no source behind them. So no script is recorded until it has passed the check below, and a single failure stops the episode whatever the schedule says.
The ten-minute truth check
- The primary passage. Find the passage, document or museum record the episode rests on and read it in context.
- One scholar. Confirm the reading in at least one peer-reviewed or university-press work.
- Numbers and dates. Every number is attributed to a source or given as a range. Every date is confirmed in two independent references, with care over the Julian and Gregorian calendars and over arithmetic across BCE and CE.
- Quotes. Every quotation is found word for word in its source or rewritten as a paraphrase.
- Earliest source. Note who first wrote the story down and how long after the event. Where historians disagree, the episode says so.
- Too neat. Single causes, tidy word origins, round numbers and anything called the first, the only or the largest need a specialist source or a hedge.
The source card
Every episode shows its primary source on screen in the same place and the same type: the work, its date and where to read it, down to book and chapter or museum number. When an episode rests on a disputed point, the card changes to "historians disagree" and names both positions. The episode's page on this site lists every source, primary sources first, each with a link and a locator.
What counts as a source
- Primary sources, read critically and in context: the original text, document, object or archive record.
- Peer-reviewed research and university-press books that interpret them.
- Museum and archive catalogues for objects, dates and inventory numbers.
- Reference works, only for basic facts and never as the only source for a claim.
Podcasts, videos (including other history channels) and unsourced web pages are never cited as sources.
Hard history
Plague, conquest, colonial trade and settler history are told with the human cost acknowledged honestly, without skipping it and without dramatising it. The films show systems, objects and places. They show no gore, no weapons in use and no caricatures of any people.
Corrections
If an episode gets something wrong, say so in a comment under the video. Within a week the correction is pinned under the video, the article on this site is fixed and the change goes into the corrections logwith the date, what was wrong, what is right and the source. Every corrected page links to its entry.