AI Search Summary
This video applies a scientific and mathematical mindset to Taylor Swift’s I Can See You music video by estimating how many tally-like vault marks appear on the walls.
- Main question: How many days was Taylor Swift trapped in the vault?
- Short answer / core takeaway: The creator estimates roughly 20,720 wall marks, far more than a one-mark-per-day interpretation, and explores a possible 13-marks-per-day connection to the 1989 Taylor’s Version release timing.
- Evidence type: Pop-culture math analysis, visual estimation, frame-by-frame counting, and hypothesis testing.
- Search topics: Taylor Swift vault marks, I Can See You music video, 1989 Taylor’s Version, Taylor Swift Easter eggs, tally mark analysis, pop culture math.
Common Search Questions
What number of vault marks did the creator estimate?
The video estimates about 20,719 to 20,720 marks in the vault, with uncertainty because many shots are blurry or partially obscured.
Why was the 1,468-day theory rejected?
The video argues that the 1,468-mark claim was off by an order of magnitude compared with the creator’s estimated wall-mark count.
What Taylor Swift Easter egg did the creator propose?
The creator notes that dividing the estimated marks by the number of days from the masters acquisition to the 1989 Taylor’s Version release gives roughly 13 marks per day, with 13 being a meaningful number in Taylor Swift lore.
Key Takeaways
- The analysis treats a music-video detail as a measurement problem.
- The method involved identifying vault shots, assigning walls, estimating panel counts, and accounting for obscured areas.
- The result is approximate, not a definitive count.
- This page is best categorized as pop-culture math and scientific mindset content rather than a research explainer.
Transcript
The vault question
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 her cell.
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.
Why this counts as science
Wait a minute, Mr. Closet Swiftie. Don’t you normally talk about science?
Excellent question, my dear strange Padawan, but this is science. Here we’re all about applying a scientific mindset toward every aspect of life. And when I saw this video, my scientific funny bones started tingling.
The existing 1,468-day claim
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.
It seems like they pulled that number from this viral tweet, which got over 5.8 million views. Too bad it was wrong.
Step 1: collect vault shots
Step one: 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 are redundant or too zoomed in to get good information. But we’ve got a good amount to work with.
Step 2: assign the walls
Step two is assign the walls to which of the four walls of the vault. We can see from the outside shot that the vault looks pretty square.
Moving inside, we’ve got this big glowing vault door on one wall. Let’s call that wall one. Then there’s a wall with the painting and one with the ledge that she sits on. From the wide-angle shot, we can see their 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 two shots that it’s still mostly covered in marks, and from the security cam that it seems to be a plain wall.
Step 3: analyze the panels
Step 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, plus a three-quarter-width panel and an angled quarter panel that is basically half the width of a full panel.
Rather than count every single mark on every single panel, which would be almost impossible given how blurry some shots are, we’re going to estimate the average number of marks per each size panel.
Tally-mark inconsistency
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 five, or even be remotely consistent with the number of marks per line or segment?
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.
Step 4: count by wall
Step four is per wall and figure out what things are obscuring them. Wall one. Wall two, the painting wall. Wall three, blank space, because there’s nothing on it except marks. Wall four, 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.
Testing the 1989 Taylor’s Version hypothesis
That US Magazine article claimed that there were 1,468 marks on the vault, corresponding 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 and that 1,468 number at least is correct.
So what if we divide our 20,719 number by 1,468? We get 14.11. Not particularly significant.
But then it hit me. This video teased her upcoming re-release of 1989, scheduled for October.
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 was roughly 20,720, with some margin for error given the assumptions.
So how many marks per day? We divide 20,720 by 1,580 and get 13.11. Ignore the 0.11 as rounding error based on approximations, or go deeper and tell me what it means. But I’d say 13 marks per day sort of makes sense for Taylor.
Let me know your take in the comments. And if you enjoyed this weirdly obsessive application of a scientific mindset toward some random factor of everyday life, then hit subscribe.
Additional Notes
Caption context
The caption says the full analysis and video took over 74 hours of work and points viewers toward the full version on YouTube.
Keywords and topics
- Taylor Swift vault
- I Can See You
- 1989 Taylor’s Version
- Tally mark counting
- Pop-culture math
- Easter egg analysis
References
- No linked source, study title, DOI, or PMID found in the available source material.