Funktilda
patreon
Hello.
🕑 Added 2021-06-10 05:37:37 +0000 UTCIt's weird writing something and not knowing how many people will read it.
I guess I just wanted everyone subscribed to any of my Patreon tiers to know, that yes, I genuinely appreciate you. It's been getting hard for me to see a future in making revenue solely through YouTube/Google AdSense. My content has been completely all over the place. My Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss content hasn't really been doing as well as it used to be, and that's pretty much due to the fact that that cow has been milked pretty thoroughly.
For example, after I made "Loona Understands" back in March, I knew that the 3D Loona series was done. There was nothing more that I could do with that very surface level concept that made any sense. Even when I was still releasing those videos, I didn't want to upload a 3D Loona video if I wasn't genuinely excited to release it. The first two videos in that series were just lines of dialogue from the show, which isn't all that creative of an idea. Just a way to test my 3D skills, more or less. But after those started to take off, I decided to make it a proper series, but each video had its own "twist." "Loona's Treat" had a VERY shitty model of Blitzo, because I did not want to put effort into a model of Blitzo if I could get away with doing something comedic and surreal instead. I then made an alternate version of that animation which had a proper model with more detailed animation, which I also used as a way to show off how I actually approach 3D modelling, in the form of a half-hour long timelapse video.
Then, I made "An Interview with Loona" as a way of calling back to the whole "Come on. You know why." meme that often appeared on Reddit. That video ended up becoming the most viewed video on my channel that featured my timid little voice. At the time, I was still using Apple headphones to record my dialogue, but I've since gotten comfortable with recording in a proper audio environment, with a makeshift pop filter and everything.
And then, "Loona Knows What You Did," where Loona literally jumps out of my computer screen because she could sense that I had been committing horny crimes by making a whole series about her in the first place. That was the first animation on my channel to reach a million views. A video, with my shy, shaky little voice.....has a million views. It was at this moment that I felt that I had made it as an artist. Especially considering I had only been posting to my channel for a little over a year.
Shortly afterwards, "Pole Dancing" reached the same milestone, which is an animation that I made with a clear Lonney Tunes/Disney influence. In particular, I was influenced by the way Sergio Pablos animated his character's mouths for Netflix's Klaus. Not that it was all that obvious in the final result, but it sort of meant that Alastor's mouth moved more when he talked. In retrospect, the way I animated Alastor was really sloppy. I basically did the whole animation with chicken scratch and then desperately tried to clean it up afterwards, which was not very fun to do. The shot of Angel Dust was considerably easier to manage, since he only appeared for two out of the, in total, seven seconds of animation.
Later, I made "Alastor Swears," which included dialogue from one of the old Hazbin Hotel animation clean-up streams, hosted by Ashley Nichols, which at that point felt like beating a long dead horse, but I figured I could still do something new with it. I added a radio static sound effect to act as a way of "censoring" Alastor in a way that was somehow both in and out of character at the same time. Alastor doesn't swear, but this is probably what would happen if he did.
And, of course, I massively upped my animation game by actually focusing on giving Alastor solidity with his form. One piece of 2D animation advice that has helped me more than anything else is to focus on your keys. If the main drawings that actually convey the message of your animation aren't solid, then your animation will be really unfocused. Richard Williams actually mentions this in The Animator's Survival Kit. You can spend time on your key drawings, more time than you think you would need. You can always speed things up when you get to the in-betweens.
And all of this work and thought amounted to...about 15,000 views total, across both the rough animation and the finished animation, which I uploaded three months later (which, coincidentally, was about the same amount of time it took for me to get around to finishing and uploading "Pole Dancing").
Now, I'm not going to complain about low view counts. There was maybe one point towards the end of August 2020 when I had a bit of an emotional low point, after all of the videos I had uploaded that month underperformed and it became clear that the meteoric success that my channel had had during the previous two months was not going to last. But after that, I came to understand that channels ebb and flow, like many things in nature.
At the time of this post, my channel is currently experiencing one of those low points. And unlike my last couple of low points, I don't know if Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss content is going to work for me anymore. Maybe a Hunicast animatic would do well, but Ashley made it clear at the end of the last podcast that Hunicast is not going to be a regular thing. And even if it still was, the idea of trying to capitalize off of someone else's success, especially as someone who is starting to become incredibly confident in their own work, rubs me the wrong way.
And, when it comes to my own, personal work, I don't think YouTube plays all that big a part in what I want to do. I've tried making "commentary" videos, but those videos are not really what people are subscribed to me for, which wouldn't matter to me except YouTube would really rather I not make those videos if they're not what people want from me. And I'm getting kind of tired of making the same "hey, my last video is a 10 out of 10" joke to myself whenever I open YouTube studio to compare the performance of my last 10 uploads.
In terms of current projects, I'm currently working on a comic. Not every day, but my plan is to work on it often enough that it will hopefully be done some time in the near future, either at the end of this month or sometime next month. I have the script written out, and I've finished the first page, both of which will be available to $5 patrons. To be honest, and I'm not going to divulge too much in this post, making that comic made me realize some things about myself. And it's that process of raw self-discovery that's making me re-think my approach to art.
I don't want to be known as the "Hunicast animatic" guy. Or the "3D Loona" guy. I would say I don't want to be known as the "guy who uploads clips from Helluva Boss" either, but it's pretty clear that that sort of content gives you no recognition whatsoever anyway. I almost regret doing that, by the way. It may have given me an extra 10,000 subscribers, but it's further derailed my channel from its original purpose. And it's left me wondering about the percentage of people subscribed to my channel that actually care about my more high-effort content.
I suppose I'm lucky that "Pole Dancing" has a million views, because that video took nearly half a month to complete, once I decided that actually finishing that animation was something that was worth doing. It's probably not often that someone who's catapulted to moderate YouTube success can say that one of their high-effort works is also one of their most well-known works. Really, it's not often that someone is catapulted to moderate YouTube success in general.
I first started browsing /r/NewTubers in August 2020, a couple of weeks before it had fully set in that my channel's long-term success was not guaranteed. I had just enabled monetization for my videos, but it would be a few more months before I actually received my first paycheck. I remember feeling weird about the fact that so many people were expressing difficulty with reaching the milestones that I was able to blow past with ease, thanks to the success of my Hunicast animatics. People were thankful for reaching 50 subs, while I had over 2,000. People were struggling to reach 1,000 views, while I had three videos with over 100,000. Believe me, I was not laughing at these people for being "below" me. I was just basking in the weirdness that a shy nobody like me suddenly had something approaching online success.
But it's become clear to me now that no one cares. No one cares about your subscriber count, or your view count. In fact, if YouTubers like Dream and Logan Paul are any indication, you can start to reach a point where people start to fucking HATE you, at least if you're operating on the mindset that having a lot of subscribers automatically makes you a god or whatever. Pewdiepie literally has over 100,000,000 subscribers, but people don't hate him as much because he's more down to earth, and has less of an ego, at least in comparison to Logan Paul.
So, with this in mind, I would like to focus less on becoming a big YouTuber, and more on personal expression. I'll still try and upload to my channel whenever I have something worth showing off, but I've looked at what my channel actually is, rather than what I, for the longest time, thought that it was, and I've concluded that there is literally no reason that I need to upload once a week. There is no reason I need to upload "commentary" videos if they only exist to fill out an upload schedule. There is no reason I need to upload "music" content if it's going to be incredibly low-effort (*cough* Anodetoangeldust *cough*). There is no reason to treat myself as anything less than a living, breathing person with unique ideas that are worth expressing, and worth taking my time on.
So that brings us to Patreon. Oh lord, I've been conflicted on this mess of a Patreon page for the longest time.
I never really understood how to market myself. I barely understood who I was. And, to an extent, I still don't. It felt wrong to have a tier that charged 10 dollars for a sketch, and then have almost no one use it. It always felt like I was overvaluing and making a fool of myself. And then I'd look at artists that had WAY more patrons, more twitter followers, just more people in general that liked, nay, LOVED their work, and I would feel bad. I've always been pretty good at not succumbing to self-loathing, but there are some things that just get to you. Because I know that I'm just as good of an artist as those people who have far more followers than me. I mean, the only reason they have more attention is because they've been doing it for longer, and they've marketed themselves more.
Like I said, I have some projects I'm excited about. And those projects are fun to work on for their own sake. For instance, I'm able to derive plenty of emotional value from making a comic, even if I'm the only one who knows about it. And there have been countless times where I would spend days working on a single, three second animation, and then leave it on my hard-drive, maybe upload it to my phone and show some close family members, and then move on.
But I think these projects are not only worth sharing, but worth supporting me over. And if you think I've "sold out" or whatever, I would like to remind you that if you want to support me, you really only need to join my $5 tier, at most. The $10 and $20 tiers are for if you want me to draw for you, which might sound like a lot, but first of all, I value my art. Second of all, I've had a few instances where people have referred to me as "famous", so if you subscribe to those tiers, you'll be able to receive art from a "famous" artist, so take from that what you will (actually, please don't, I would rather not develop an ego if I can help it). And third, and most importantly, I can't change the cost of the tiers if people are already subscribed to them. But even if I could, I don't see the point. No one has complained. Yet.
I've felt guilty about not doing anything about the tumbleweeds that have been rolling across this page up until now. But there's only so many complaints that can arise when you can count your number of patrons on one hand, so I hadn't felt the need to do anything about it until now.
Right now, subscribers to my $5 tier have access to the project files of two of my recent drawings (in .psd format). These drawings are very sexy drawings. Please feel free to let yourself loose to these drawings, should you feel the urge. Yes, you can do that for free, but if you're subscribed to this tier you can "whack" it to a more scribbly version of Minerva Mink, if you have a thing for shaky, colorless women. Or if you LIKE IT ROUGH (goddamnit I should've just went with that one).
I also plan on releasing pages from my upcoming comic as I complete them. Shortly after this post goes up, I'll upload the first page. Spoiler: it has a cute animal girl in it! :3
The girl in question. Uwu~
Well, this post went on for a while. I don't know if I had to unload quite this much, but I've always wanted to tell people more about what's been going on with me. And I don't think I need to record my voice to do it. I've always felt more comfortable as a writer anyway. You get to become an abstract voice in people's minds, rather than some awkward 20 year old. Maybe I'll make more posts like this. :3
Thank you for reading this, and remember to stay cute! <3
