Reddit AMA Recap: Jason Steele talks Charlie the Unicorn finale

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You may remember a recent Kick List entry that featured a campaign coming from Jason Steele (Llamas with Hats) featuring a grand send-off for Charlie the Unicorn. The campaign has already scorched its goal, but the campaign is still open for a few more weeks so Jason did some promotion by way of dropping by Reddit and taking part in an AMA.

 

Jason Steele slams and I mean SLAMS Full Sail University

It seems impressive from the outside, but then when you actually go to the school you realize that the classes are essentially pretend and they exist entirely so that visiting students think there are actual classes happening.

Most of the teachers I had were ex-students who couldn’t get jobs in the industry. Many of my old classmates are now teaching there. It is not a school, it is a perpetual motion machine.

 

Jason is the latest to come out against pay scale decreases from Youtube for original content

The changes YouTube has made to their platform has completely made it unviable for animators. It’s not really possible to make a living from YouTube revenue alone anymore if you do cartoons or scripted videos. Patreon, and occasional big projects on Kickstarter are what keep things going for me these days.

YouTube was created as a place to share home videos and clips from TV shows. The changes they’ve made are to support commentary videos and Let’s Play.

 

On how Youtube’s switch to algorithmic favorites on front pages have affected videos

This is what I do too, but unfortunately almost no one else does this. Views on videos used to slowly curve off, dropping by 15% or so a day. After they made the change that deemphasized the subscription feed, after the second day the drop-off is around 95%.

The changes YouTube has made have been really bad for cartoons. I don’t know how non-animation channels are doing, but the animation channels I know are all struggling. It’s been going on long enough that I don’t expect YouTube to do anything to improve the situation.

 

Turns out, Newgrounds isn’t much better

I think a lot of people (myself included) left Newgrounds because of their lack of video support and revenue sharing, and by the time they finally added that stuff YouTube had taken over. And that sucks a lot because YouTube is run by people who do not care at all about animators, and Newgrounds is run by artists who care SO MUCH about other artists.

 

Can crowd sourcing alone help sustain this business?

I hope so! The YouTube platform changes has really negatively impacted animation channels, but luckily there are other ways of making money (Patreon, Kickstarter) that can keep things going for now. I’m really lucky in that I still have a lot of supporters willing to back my projects, so I’m okay for the time being, but it’s hard to predict what the future will be like in such a new industry.

 

Do any of Jason’s videos have a deeper meaning

Some of my cartoons (like the Ghost House series) are just goofy videos. Some of them are about things I care about, like The Loneliest Platypus.

Videos like Cupcake Pals have a definite inspiration, but there isn’t some super secret meaning behind it. I have some family members who used to run a Christian book store, and one time when I visited as a child there was a children’s cartoon playing about Jesus that ended with a man dying horribly for “abandoning Christ.” So Cupcake Pals is basically just my version of that weird Jesus cartoon I saw.

 

Yep, even Youtube producers get stalkers

I had a stalker once, I guess that counts. She worked at a company that wanted to do Charlie merchandise – I gave her my phone number to talk about it, and then after talking with her I decided it wasn’t a good deal. I then got weekly voicemails from her for YEARS (this was before you could block numbers on your cell phone without paying for a special blocking service.)

Believe it or not I’m still here replying 8 hours later! After a few weeks of voicemails I decided to answer her call again and told her I wasn’t interested, and to stop calling me. But the calls continued for years – inviting me to conventions, asking how my day had been, drunk dialing me because she was thinking about The Cloak and wanted to talk about it. It was really weird.

There’s plenty more Reddit AMA from Jason, and you can read them here.

About John Schwarz

John is the Chief Editor and Founder of Bubbleblabber.com. While at first a part-time project, Bubbleblabber quickly grew into a full-fledged operation and officially became a company in 2014. When John isn't running a business full-time, he likes to go to concerts with your mother.