I've just completed my first short season of my Adult Animated Comedy. Something I've been wanting to make since i was in high school 15 years ago!!
It wasn't until last year, when i was finally introduced to Graphic Tablets! that i was able to start producing content!!
I'm wondering how you guys got into Animation yourself, what level are you at (i'm completely amateur) and how did u build your audience?
this is the biggest hurdle i face. Building the audience, i dont know where to promote!
Over the past year, I started my full-time job as a mechanic. It's a tough 40 hour work week and it's often physically tasking on me. Through a lot of soul searching, I have found some sort of self-enlightenment that I should just give anything that makes me happy A TRY and see where it takes me. Naturally, that leads to a few failures but that just come with the territory of having such an epiphany. I know I've always wanted to be known and appreciated but I don't know if that stems from my desire to help and entertain others or from some deep-rooted inferiority complex but regardless I know that I wanted to entertain people.
Animation and entertainment have always been a huge part of my life growing up and to this day. In college, I acted in a few plays and always kept drawing. I am not sure what finally gave me the push to start animating over the past year but I feel it was through the self-enlightenment I was talking about and that my financial situation has gotten a lot better since starting work that I feel comfortable expanding on new horizons. But why did I not start animating in college? who knows I could have has 1 million followers on youtube by now? (I left college a few years ago) I think what happened was that I started to read a lot of books about animation and how to get into making your own art. I wanted to learn how I can take my ideas and make them into reality and with the financial situation, I could apply them. In college and after I forgot that drawing just for fun is very therapeutic for me and often incredibly fun. 'The Animators Survival Kit' by Richard Williams is a great book and I will attribute that to my resurgence in my interest in animation.
I think what I was looking for was some sort of stability in my life. A routine that I can make myself comfortable and then work on something on the side to put my passion into. I know this response is very personal and not the typical "Who inspired me?" and such but I feel this is very important. Be happy with yourself and your work will reflect it. I've always loved animation, I just needed to confidence to just give it a shot.
'Over-thinking, over-analyzing separates the body from the mind.'
I live by a towering conglomerate of rules, most of which contradict each other'
one of my favorites is the fact that " if other humans have done it, then it's possible." It doesn't always work, but it's what got me to try animation! I started after I saw the video where egoraptor goes through his old animations and, since then, i've stopped focusing on how overwhelmingly lonely life is as a hyperbolic teenager and have instead been able to focus and do my school work
also if I ever turn an animation in to any of my teachers it's practically an automatic A
You can do anything, as long as it's cool i guess
I had just moved to a new city where I didn't know anyone and I was bored. I googled zebra jokes on a whim because I only knew 2 zebra jokes, but they were both so bad they were hilarious. The search results were less than impressive. I wanted to find the best zebra joke website in the world. I couldn't and so I made it myself.
Zebra Humor in its infancy was just text jokes. No pictures. No videos. No games. A few people kept telling me to make videos, but I dismissed them because I didn't know how. Finally, I got so sick of it I thought if I made one it would get them off my back. All it was was scrolling text put to Maniac Mansion music that I put together in Windows Movie Maker. I put it on youtube, and then put it on Newgrounds thinking it would get blammed. For some reason it didn't. I thought I could do better than that so I made another...and another...and another.
Now I have 30 videos and 2 games. Hooray!
i got into animation in i think 2014. prior to that i had been making live action short films with my friends, but after college everyone moved to different states and it became impossible to keep making movies with them.
at some point i watched that south park documentary Six Days to Air and was like "hey these guys can do crappily animated 20 minute shows in a week, i bet i could do 2 minute crappy animated shows in a week."
and so i sent out lines to my friends and did most of the voice acting myself... the episodes were indeed crappily animated. but i posted a new one every week.
that built my audience from 0 to about 74 in two years lol (the first year was spotty with uploads but the second year was weekly). I've since removed the animation from my channel.
animation wasn't my forte tho, and i ended up switching from making animations to writing text adventure games, which apparently was more my strong suit. that bumped me from under 80 subscribers to over 400 in a little over a year.
i can only make guesses as to how to build an audience but i would say it came down to 3 things for me:
1. finding a style and topic that i could pour my whole self into and was excited to work on every day, which created a better product
2. post consistently. people follow creators who create. it's not worth following someone who only makes one video and then disappears for 2 years. animation is tough but find a way to post something every day- WIP, a blog entry, a short video documenting your day, etc. That'll give people a reason to follow
3. interact with people and don't be a dick! you gotta respond to EVERY comment you get. some comments are just random internet browsers who comment on everything, but your interaction could change them into a follower. especially comment on the negative comments- just ignore the hurtful tone and use it as an opportunity to crack a joke or invite the person to continue following. I've gotten a surprising number of follows from people who initially left unkind comments, and who (i assume) are generally ignored online because they act like complete asshats. but if you respond with kindness and show you care, you'll find that a lot of the time they just wanted to be heard, and the fact that you were listening and responding with kindness catches them off guard and sometimes wins them over to your side simply because you're the only one who paid attention to their silliness
that's all i got, hope there's something useful for ya
I remember when I was arround 10 years old I watched this tv show about crafts where there where a bunch 9-12 year olds making I stop motion films. So i thought to myself "They are young and stupid like me, If they can do that I can do it too". So I sgned up to a course about film making and learned about I stop motion animation and basic rigging stuff in this lod software called pivot if anyone heard of it?
For a couople years I made I stop motion cartoons and played arround which a bunch of opensource softwares on my computer like Pivot and Artoonix. but you couldn't really do anything too Advanced with it. When I was abot 14-15 I took a break from animation because didn't really have any acces to decent software to make cartoons with but when I was about 16 I discoverd this app called "flippa clip" where I could draw on a smartphone/tablet and I fell in love with animation again. But I wanted to be able to do more advanced stuff so I bought a cheap drawing tablet and ran 3 months worth out of trails on toon boom harmony to create my first serious Cartoon Housemates - Trip but I didn't really upload it until a while later. After that I moved to an older version of flash and just spent a huge quantity of my sparetime making cartoons for a bit more than a year now.
When I promote my stuff I usually advertise it on all my social media and try to find appropiate reddit links
What got me into animation was when I was 14 and took a course on it. I realized I wanted to build stuff for newgrounds for a long time.
