What It Took to Build The Censys Field Guide
- Sourav B
- Aug 10
- 6 min read
Long before there was a camera, a script, or a channel to publish on, there was a phone held at an awkward angle over a workbench. A customer had a question that was hard to answer in words, so Matthew Davis, Director of Customer Success at Censys Technologies, filmed a short clip showing how he does the thing rather than describing it. That habit repeated itself often enough to become a pattern, and when the same explanation keeps needing to be improvised, it is asking to be built properly.
Matthew flew to California to train a new customer on the Sentaero platform. When he arrived, the team was already familiar with the aircraft, more familiar than he expected from people who had never touched one. He hadn't mentioned the Field Guide series existed, but they had already watched every episode. The videos were built for existing customers who already knew the system. Watching a brand-new team show up prepared, without being asked to prepare, was a different order of evidence than a good review.
That moment is the reason the series exists in the first place, even though the series came first and the proof came later.
Some procedures resist writing. You can describe a sequence of steps accurately and still leave the reader unsure whether they are holding the component correctly or whether the screen looks the way it should. Matt kept running into that limit, and the short clips on his phone were a workaround for it. A couple of years ago he and Adam Zirkelbach, Director of Sales and Marketing at Censys, began tossing around the idea of a YouTube series, though it did not gain much traction at the time. It was Axel Learn, Creative Brand Manager at Censys, who eventually brought it into action.
Matt does not mind picking up the phone for a quick question, but knowledge delivered that way has a short half life. What he wanted was a persistent teaching method, something an operator could return to as often as needed. A phone call is a conversation. A video is a reference, and references can be consulted at two in the morning before a flight.
That is also, in the end, the whole pitch for why it matters to the people watching. The videos work for customers because they were made by the people who actually support them, not by presenters reading a script about a product they don't fly.
Looking back, Matt feels the finished series landed close to what he imagined years earlier, with the exception that the results Axel produced were more polished than he had pictured. That is a fairly rare outcome, and it probably owes something to the underlying idea being modest and specific from the start. They were trying to make a small number of difficult procedures easier to see, and nothing larger than that.
What Accuracy Costs
Technical accuracy was the primary goal, and the production method followed from that decision. Every video was peer reviewed by other pilots, and that review did lead to redos when small technical errors surfaced. On the filming side, Axel would often set up a wide shot that kept everything in frame and let Matt walk through the full content of an episode once, without interruption. That single pass gave him the material to track a solid voiceover and told him which details needed shooting afterward in close up. If something did not make sense or was not working, it also gave them a natural place to stop and start again.
Achieving that level of precision often required more work than viewers ever see. Recreating an airspeed sensor calibration error proved unexpectedly hard, mainly because the fault did not occur often and certainly did not occur on request. You cannot schedule an intermittent problem. The mission planning episode was tedious for another reason, since they had no software installed to highlight the clicks Matt made inside Auterion Mission Control. Axel created each highlight bubble by hand, more than two hundred and twenty of them, which is the kind of labour that becomes invisible the moment it works.
People Who Were Not Hired To Be On Camera
The Censys Field Guide features people from customer success, mechanical engineering, and customer service rather than presenters, which created an obvious friction. Matt has been candid that he is not made for television, that he blanked out several times on intros and closings, and that a fair number of inner rehearsals and pep talks were involved. He could talk through the training material on the first take. Ending a video was another matter, and the outros were where he stumbled and rambled.
Because the episodes usually had no full script, just Matt working through the material, several intros and outros had to be rebuilt afterward. Axel remembers the outro for the first mission planning episode as a favourite moment. The two of them worked through what would sound best, and after a few takes they landed on something they were happy with. Matt turned to him and said, "Well I think you might have found the one thing I am not good at here!", and they had a good laugh about it.
What resolved the discomfort was a change of frame. The people watching were the customers Matt speaks with regularly, and the feedback has confirmed that this matters to them. As he put it, "they are happy to see my face instead of some actor they don't know."
Familiarity is a form of credibility that production polish cannot substitute for.
The Arithmetic Behind Ten Minutes
The numbers give a sense of the ratio between effort and runtime. They filmed five episodes, four with Matt and one with Max Seige, Design Engineer at Censys, in one hour shooting slots once or twice a week. Matt would arrive with everything tested in advance and an outline worked out in his head, so once the cameras were set up he was ready to go, and having his topics early let Axel prepare everything else beforehand. The raw footage came to 219.6 gigabytes and close to three hours of material. Editing and captioning consumed the most time by a wide margin, from around four hours for the shortest episode to eight or ten for the longer ones.
Choosing What Earns An Episode
The series covers mission planning, aircraft setup, Remote ID, calibration, maintenance, and Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations. The selection began by mapping the basic tasks required to operate and then finding the sensible seams between them, working from common issues and the questions Matt fields most often, with the aim of producing five or so episodes that would give an operator a strong starting point. More remains to be made, and the hope is that engagement will generate requests rather than guesses.
Translating years of experience into repeatable instructions turned out to be the easy part. Matt has a long background in the military and now in aviation training and teaching, so transferring knowledge comes more naturally to him than performing does. The stressful part was ensuring accuracy for customers.
The project also fed back into the company. Matt gained comfort in front of a camera, and more broadly it grew their thinking about what they can produce for customers and potentially for other unmanned aircraft system (UAS) operators. Employees from other parts of Censys have begun suggesting topics, which suggests the commitment is shared rather than assigned.
What The Numbers Say now
The success metrics have stayed grounded. Matt now gets almost no calls about the small operational questions the episodes cover, which he treats as the meaningful measure. Axel points to operators finding the content on their own and re-watching it, and to episodes accumulating a few hundred views without being shared or promoted, which is notable given how minimal their YouTube presence had been. When reflecting on the journey, Matt says he wouldn't do anything differently if he were starting again today.
The misconception he most wants corrected is one that explains a great deal. Consistency is key. Developing a strict workflow and following it is critical in aviation, because most errors happen in the gaps where the workflow was abandoned and a step went missed.
When viewed this way, the Field Guide is an effort to make the correct workflow easy to see and easy to repeat, which is the same instinct that once made someone raise a phone over a workbench.
