Don't hug me, I'm scared. Has been hotel, hell of a boss, and smiling friends are all forms of entertainment for some. And entertainment is one of life's greatest desires. We're obsessed with it, we admire it. We work all week so we can have a little bit of it for a couple of days to then repeat the same cycle all over again. Unless you're unemployed.  Within the confines of life, we all find ways to entertain ourselves. It could be from sports to video games, TV shows, movies. It could even be as simple as grabbing a rock and throwing it into the ocean. You could find entertainment from anything, really. And from the perspective of the entertainee, that is an award, but you understand what I'm talking about. You, yes you, have multiple choices to choose from when it comes to entertainment. But on the other side, you have the cogs-and-lem machine that make everything run, and that's the entertainment industry, a.k.a. the mainstream. I gotta clarify that because when you talk about the mainstream media, everybody jumps to the conclusion that you're about to get political and start bashing news networks or... ...a group of people. You made graduation, you made graduation, you made graduation. Yo. What's up? Hey Gabe. Wanna watch a... Blade Runner? Yeah, let's watch it. Okay. Wait. You were just gonna watch it raw? If you lost your mind. Uh-oh, why is it bad to watch it raw? Because you gotta use a VPN, dawg. What VPN do I use? Well, you gotta use Surfshark VPN. So Surfshark is an app or browser extension that allows you to be anywhere in the world at any time digitally.  Wait, so you're telling me this VPN will keep me secure from hackers on the public Wi-Fi while also keeping me safe on an encryption between a device and internet? Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm telling you right now that a VPN will keep you secure from hackers on public Wi-Fi while also keeping you safe from encryption between a device and the internet. Also, trust me, I know Gabe, trust me, I know Gabe, I know that you love, love, love, smiling friends and don't hug me, I'm scared. But since you're American, you can't watch the Funny British Show that we're talking about today. So why don't you just change your location to where it's necessary and consume all the content you want in any region? You can do this other thing such as Netflix, HBO Max or any stuff to watch anything anywhere all at once. All right, where do I get it? It's available for both PCs, Macs, Linux, Android and iOS. They have 24-7 support that can help you at any time. They won't collect your data no matter what, and there's also a 30-day money-back guarantee. It's always important to feel safe on the internet, and while feeling safe, you could also have access to a ton of entertainment that you usually wouldn't have access to. Purchasing 24 months of Surfshark is seriously one of the best decisions you can make, and right now, Surfshark is having a great offer of 3 months extra and 83% off. Just scan the QR code on the screen or click the link in the description down below and use my promo code. Now, how about we use Surfshark VPN to watch Blade Runner 2049? The entertainment industry has existed since the dawn of time and has every avenue for every person. The movie business, theater business, music, sports, gaming... ...adult. Has it been 30 seconds yet? I don't want to get demonetized. And within every industry, there's a pecking order and a line to follow in regards to advancing in whatever career you're pursuing. Also within every industry, there's nepotism and ways to cut corners, but not everybody knows a guy who knows a guy or could tap into their inner salt goodman. So most stories within the entertainment industry begin to blend. A common belief for people pursuing a career in acting is that you have to drop everything and move to Los Angeles and do some work so you can meet somebody and become the next big star. But what you get most of the times are people who take that gamble and get nothing and then give up on their dreams to fall into the backdrop of reality. Sorry to get grim there, but the thing about the mainstream media is that everything is very saturated and very competitive. And to get success within the mainstream, you often have to do a lot of work that isn't involved with traditional routes. You can attend a film studies lecture to then graduate and become a coffee boy for another three years to then settle doing a minor job in the industry. Or you could do the less traditional option and take risks by making connections and being creative so that you could have the opportunity to pitch yourself or a product with the hope to get lucky with a higher up in an industry. Jonathan Larson was a playwright for two famous musicals titled Rent and Tick Tick Boom, which was also the name of the movie about him where Andrew Garfield, he played as him, Jonathan Larson attended a Delphi University as an acting major with a four-year scholarship where he got to star in multiple plays up until his graduation. And then after graduation, he worked at a rundown diner until he was 30 to survive while pursuing a Korean theater with a screenplay for a musical called Superbia that he was developing for six years. Within those six years, he put tons of effort building connections, funding it, surviving in a shitty apartment to chase his dream, only for the project to then die after its pitch because nobody wanted to give it a chance. The story of Jonathan Larson is one of failure. He dedicated everything he had to a passion project for no one to see it because it couldn't be funded or platformed. What potentially could have gone down in history as a great theater project heavily inspired by George Orwell's 1984 will never be seen because no one was willing to give it a chance. And for Jonathan, this was six years of effort and passion down the drain when it was originally intended to be his big break. But Jonathan Larson didn't give up and once again, he put his everything into another project called Rent that did find success and debuted it on Broadway on the 29th of April, 1996. But the sad part is that Jonathan never got to see or bathe in the glory of his hard work and victory because he died on January 25th, 1996, a couple months before he debuted it on Broadway. Jonathan Larson was specifically a musical theater playwright, but stories like these are everywhere in the entertainment industry. If you wanted to make an album and have it be played on radio stations, you had to get it approved by a label that would fund it and if they weren't willing to take a chance on the project, it would oftentimes never be made. If you wanted to make a film or show, you had to make connections through college or go down the pecking order of the entertainment industry for years and years to then pitch the idea for it to most likely get declined. Breaking Bad is declined by multiple studios because none of them saw the potential in the project due to it having a protagonist that was a meth cook and if Sony didn't finally budge, the project could have never been made and we wouldn't be talking about it to this day. Actually, the show was almost killed entirely. FX bought the script and changed their mind on making the show due to it being really mature and violent and they could have shelved it so that no competitor networks could possibly make it. But they eventually sold it to AMC, so now we have it. The entertainment industry is one of skepticism and extreme risk.  Everything is a gamble. And for the creatives pitching their passion project, it's also a dice roll on your project surviving to the next step or getting slaughtered and then try again until something works. You can make the best piece of art ever, but if you pitch it incorrectly or a studio is too scared, it will never see the light of day. Well, that was until the age of the internet. The internet is one of the greatest innovations to happen within the last 100 years. Because of it, everything could be everywhere all at once. And it has been one of the greatest gateways to the mainstream media. What the internet did was create accessibility for young talent to express themselves and get the same opportunity as somebody in an industry pecking order of bootlicking. Let's look at the music industry, for example, where you once had to travel to a certain part of the world to make connections and grind for a chance to prove yourself to other artists above you, to then get another sliver of chance to pitch a project to a record label like Def Jam, to then have your fate be in their hands. You can now instead be like Juice World, who made All Girls Are The Same on a homemade setup in his friend's room where he uploaded to SoundCloud for free, where he then did it again with his debut EP, 999, which had the song Lucid Dreams, where he also sat in his friend's room on a homemade setup to record it. This EP got him signed to Interscope Records. Lucid Dreams has 2,063,297,310 streams on Spotify as of scripting this video. And All Girls Are The Same has 1,112,31426 streams on Spotify as of scripting this video. And here's a bunch of other artists that started by posting their music on SoundCloud, and they all found success in the mainstream media. But let's now go to something that's more close to home, and that's YouTube. Making YouTube videos, Twitch streaming, and drawing on Twitter can all make you money. But this video is about internet creators that broke into the mainstream via internet creation. So while it's cool that independent creators can make money by being independent, I wanna focus on some of the most known and successful examples of people finding success by just being creative and expressing themselves without having to pander to a pecking order. So let's go in order and start with the first of the three examples. Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. On July 29th, 2011, a video was uploaded to YouTube titled Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. This video would then proceed to get 71 million views and change the lives of the three creators forever. But let's go backwards and see how this happened. The three creators, Becky Sloan, Joe Pelling, and Baker Terry, all met studying art at Kingston University. Joe and Baker were majoring in animation illustration while Becky was majoring in fine arts. After graduating from uni, they all got a studio together where they worked at day jobs that they all hated. And in between working these day jobs, they would make short films and art projects. And at some point, they all wanted to do something involving puppets. With their fine arts experience, Becky began making puppets and her first experiment eventually became what is now known as the Yellow Guy. And then soon after the three started to make a small set for the project that involved set puppets in a child-like environment. After this, the trio began to make a song similar to ones that you could find in kids' learning shows. They wanted to present a song but with the twist of the short getting dark and violent at the end in a way to subvert expectations. The video stars a red guy, a yellow guy, a duck and a notepad. The notepad is an inanimate object because Becky struggled to make a little girl puppet at the time. I'm assuming she learned since then, given the show. The set looks like something that could resemble the legacy of Jim Henson's creations like the Muppets, Frogal Rock or Sesame Street mixing puppets and animation together. In the short, the notepad sings a song about creativity until it all goes left field and they start playing with meats, hearts and more meats as they dance and drag meat everywhere while there's blood and more meat. I don't know, they like meat, I guess. This video was made over the course of a weekend and was very chaotic. It was shot under a railway arch posing as a studio and one of the cheap lights that they bought off eBay was set up incorrectly and began to melt the roof of the studio. So the fire department had to be called to the scene where they were surprised by a bunch of raw meat and scattered blood on a set that looks like a children's program. But if you were in the shoes of these three, then congrats, you did it.  Do you take it to short film festivals to then use it as a pitch for something else? But wait, how do you even get there? How do you even show anyone what you just made to get more opportunities because of it? Now we're caught up from where we started. The independent short film made in a weekend by three people got 71 million views. It went extremely viral. I'm pretty sure most of you watching this can remember when it first came out.  Pity. A year after the YouTube video, the short appeared at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival as the shortest film that Sundance ever endorsed. And from there it won many more accolades. It won best short film at the Leeds International Film Festival. It got an honorable mention at the Philadelphia Film Festival for Best Original Song and won the SXSW Grand Jury Award. Before this, the creators discussed making the original short into a full series but then decided that it wasn't possible since it had to be made by them independently with no budget. So it would have been extremely difficult and take like three years. But after the YouTube success in Sundance hype, they decided to go back to the idea in a UK broadcasting station named Channel 4 had a program called Random Max that was focused on funding short films, animation, and music videos for artistic talent in the UK. Channel 4's Random Max commissioned a second episode of Dohugmium Scared in 2013. And for that episode, they partnered with a production company named Blink Industries which helped them push the quality of Dohugmium Scared by not being solely DIY anymore. For example, they got proper studio space for the episode, which was an upgrade from the original, which was made in an apartment with cheap lights off eBay that lit the roof on fire. The second video titled Time got 45 million views. And after that video, the trio made the decision to make Dohugmium Scared into a full series independently. But to do this, they needed crowdfunding so they made a Kickstarter. They uploaded a YouTube video where the three main characters are tied down as hostages while the red guy pitches the Kickstarter. The goal of the Kickstarter was to raise 96,000 pounds so that 24,000 pounds could be spent on each of the four individual episodes. And the Kickstarter was very successful, raising over 100 grand for the web series. In episodes four through six, we're able to go through production and we're uploaded to YouTube from the span of late 2014 to early 2016. 30 million views, 33 million views, 24 million views and 26 million views. The whole series was a complete success. Dominating the internet every time a new episode was released, creating heaps of conversation, fan theories and external viewership from people making content about the show or speculating the themes in Easter eggs. The internet allowed these three friends to make something impactful in YouTube culture and they did it mostly independently with little assistance and no strings attached. And for the next step going forward, they wanted to break into the mainstream media.  It quickly went number one on trending and it was revealed that the episode was a teaser to the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared television series. In 2016, the show was picked up for a pilot episode by Conan O'Brien's production film, Conoco, alongside TBS's Super Deluxe Studios, which relaunched in 2015. And to help once again, Blink Industries were on board to make the pilot Wakey Wakey. The premise of the show was that the three friends own a house in a place called Clayhill and the show was inspired by projects like Soft Park. It featured animation, puppets and a bunch of new wacky fun characters. The pilot was completed and debuted at Sundance 2019 for people to watch for the first time. But given that the show didn't release until 2022, you can make the connection that things didn't go to plan. The creators got cold feet with the project and ended up scrapping the series after Super Deluxe Studios eventually went under. So the pilot was vaulted. It most likely got turned into a tax write-off. You ain't slick, Conan. Even though the show was never made, the miniseries still gave the creators an impressive portfolio, so they still did work within the mainstream. When the series first found success in 2011 and then 2012 through Sundance, Becky and Joseph made a music video for Tam and Paula and in 2013, they made a music video for Unknown Mortal Orchestra where the character does some naughty stuff. But with the miniseries wrapped in wakey-wakey going nowhere, they worked for Cartoon Network's Amazing World of Gumball. They worked on Gumball's Season 5 finale, The Puppets, which aired on Cartoon Network on the 6th of October, 2017. And it's one of my favorite episodes of The Amazing World of Gumball as the same amount of creativity and passion that you could find from the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared web series, but with the original characters from the Amazing World of Gumball episode having a mix of fine arts and animation. It even has an original song segment voiced by the same trio. Then everything came to a massive halt of not just the trio, but for everybody in the world. And that was due to the COVID-19 pandemic. During quarantine, it seemed that everybody had two ways of dealing with isolation. And that was to get consumed by boredom, getting lost as the days began to bleed into each other to the point where you couldn't tell the difference between a Friday or a Monday. A new series was written during the pandemic over Zoom calls. And the pandemic was weirdly helpful toward their writing, letting the creators get back to the roots of what they wanted with the original series. When the miniseries first found success, the trio ran into problems in regards to getting a good broadcaster to adapt the show to a TV style format. If they had interest in picking up the show, there's usually strings attached. But eventually they found the right fit and that was with Channel 4 once again. The team already had good history with the network since the Rhino Max division funded the web series' second episode, Time. Channel 4 understood the philosophy of what they wanted. They wanted the show to get bigger in ambition and quality, but still remained small and claustrophobic like the original series. On June 19th, 2022, a video titled Fly was uploaded to the YouTube channel revealing that a show was coming exclusively to Channel 4 Then the queen died. Pack watch. So they released another teaser to announce the show was coming out late September. The show released on the 23rd of September for streaming and was broadcasted through the network for television on the 30th of September and the show was amazing. Each episode is around 24 minutes long.  Going from 34 minutes to 144 minutes is a big jump, which meant there was a lot more content in the show in comparison to the miniseries with a larger budget and creative freedom. So it's a no-brainer that the show was as good as it is. It improved everything that was done in the miniseries. The characters are more fleshed out. There's actual plots, multiple changing of sets. Everything was a step up. It's a massive upgrade from the web series where the teacher sang a song and something went south within the six minute runtime. The TV show format is a much stronger format. It lets the premise be more creative and ambitious. And if you haven't seen it yet, please watch it. It's really good. And it's even more impressive when you look at where it originally came from. The show exists because of the internet. Don't hug me, I'm scared wouldn't exist if it didn't blow up on YouTube. The web series wouldn't exist if it didn't get crowdfunded through Kickstarter, which means that the channel four series wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the internet allowing a couple of creative friends to make something over the span of a weekend. To then share it to millions of people where not only impacted the creators' lives but the viewers as well. The pilot for Has been Hotel was uploaded to YouTube on October 28th, 2019 and currently sits at 82 million views. The pilot for Hell of a Boss was uploaded to YouTube on November 25th, 2019 and currently sits at 52 million views with episodes still releasing as a self-funded project. Some might see these two projects as amazing intricate works of imagination while others might see them as pure cringe enjoyed solely by degenerates. But something that's undeniable is how impressive it is that these two projects were thought into existence by one person who's been working on the world building and characters for them even before elementary school. Following the theme of this video, Has been Hotel and Hell of a Boss are created independently until one of them got picked up by a mainstream studio which in this case was Has been Hotel by A24 to release under A24 studios in the future.  And by a glance at the view count, it's very, very successful. All the passion, hate, loyal team praise around these two projects is because of one person who decided to bring these projects to life and that person was Vivian Marie Medrano who was well-known on the internet as Vivzi Pop. Vivian began drawing and making her worlds from a young age like most creatives who decide to pursue further in arts. Her first solid project was a web comic about a mystical land rain by animals and anthropomorphic creatures titled Zephobia. She started the project from the beginning of middle school to the end of high school. But when she got to college is where she began to really invest time into the Zephobia web comic for public viewing. She made a website to host the web comic but as the web comic got more popular, the more bandwidth Vivian needed to invest to keep the website up to host it.  So she unplugged the site and moved the comic to Tumblr and at some point Tumblr had a massive purge of content and sadly Zephobia was the victim to this purge. Vivian still has the Zephobia pages archived in a hard drive collecting dust somewhere but she eventually ventured out to new stuff and began to move forward from Zephobia. It wasn't gone forever though, it was just shelved. In the future a short was made for Zephobia on September 30th, 2020 but Vivian has commented since that she didn't like the outcome of the project and has once again shelved it until further notice. But she also states that some characters from both Hasbin Hotel and Hell of a Boss originated in the world of Zephobia and were yanked out to be original characters in the world that they currently are in now. So the time spent on the world of Zephobia wasn't a waste of time at all since a lot of it would be recontextualized later. But as I stated earlier, Vivian was in college specifically SVA which is the School of Visual Arts in New York City and in college she would mostly work on Zephobia but as she was heading toward graduation she had to begin work on Arthesis. Originally she wanted to be really ambitious and have Arthesis be a full on animated musical but that wasn't really realistic since she didn't have the connections or the resources that she has now. So she load her ambition but kept some of the same principles. The project was named Timber. It was a musical with no dialogue and it was her first time outsourcing help to work on a project. It was actually uploaded to YouTube in 2014 and it's still public if you wanna watch it for yourself. While the short was challenging for Vivian she wanted to outdo herself. After graduation she wanted to make a more ambitious project than Timber which would be a musical with dialogue and vocal performances. So to dip her toe in the water she practiced animation around vocal performances by making an animated short to her favorite song. And while it was for fun it led her to her first big bang on the internet. On October 30th, 2014 she uploaded a fan animated music video to Kesha's song, Die Young. Once again, opinions aside of how you feel about it it has 73 million views and was her first intended original video online that wasn't re-uploads of school projects. Yeah, it went viral. It's actually a very similar story to the origins of Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. Get talent and small connections through education apply it to the internet and get opportunities through that work on the internet. In the short did legit change her life. Throughout blowing up she began to meet a bunch of up and coming new grand artists where she then got invited to be on a panel with them. And some of these new grand artists are people I'll be talking about a little bit since some are involved with Sleepy Cabin or Oni Plays so I'll save that for the smiling friends part. Back on topic though the short was her introduction to indie animation and in the space she began to feel accepted for her talents and made some of the best friends that she still has today. So with the community and a new sense of passion she chose to pursue YouTube as a career. And because of the success of the Die Young video she started getting animation commissions as well as other opportunities. But through these opportunities she also suffered from reality checks and growing pains. To anyone who is a digital artist or in transition to becoming one at some point you're gonna get scammed or taken advantage of. It happens to everybody in every field and through it you learn to never let it happen again. Vivian was not excluded from this. At some point she made a four minute music video for a month and a half and was never paid for it. And when she wasn't flat out scammed she did work for very cheap which led to waste of energy that could have been put elsewhere. But then Vivian eventually moved to Los Angeles, California to live with some of the friends that she met through indie animation. And for her first two years in LA she was doing a bunch of animation tests for different companies and projects. She would put a lot of energy and time into pitches and boards to find out that some of them were only formality tests. Which means an animation team already picked out who they needed but just had people doing it for formality. So a lot of the tests were for nothing since she wasn't getting paid for them. And it doesn't get better from here either. So let's go back in time a little bit before Vivian moved to Los Angeles. A minute ago we talked about how Vivian wanted to make a musical with vocal performances and Broadway talent after her college thesis project Timber. She already had some experience running a team because of Timber and Da Young since she hired outside help for animation. So to start this project, Vivian met someone who claimed to be producer that wanted to help her with her short. So she entered an agreement with his company where they did nothing over the course of a year and melted her out of $20,000. Vivian wasn't the person she is today. This was all her savings. It wasn't even an investment because nothing came out of it. And because of the scam, she could no longer afford to make this musical so it got shelved. And that project is still shelved today because of the success of Vivian's other projects and heavy workload. Yeah, you know, we'll get to that. Vivian was naive because she was new to everything, was learning as she went. And the situation was a big low blow to her drive and spirit. And she just had to accept that it was a learning lesson that was tough to swallow. So to cope with her being robbed out of her savings and years worth of time, she went back to square one and restarted a new original project with old characters she previously made. And that project was Has been Hotel. So now we're caught up to present time. She began riding the pilot for Has been Hotel and during this time is when she moved to LA and did the freelance stuff we talked about earlier. Has been was in a very early stage where she got to take her time and make it the way she wanted since Vivian was okay financially due to her saving money as well as doing freelance work on the side. But after two years of being in LA she stopped doing freelance work and chose to instead work full time on the pilot of Has been Hotel. She started her own production team named Spindle Horse and went full steam on the pilot of Has been Hotel. The pilot was completely independent but had a lot of people with industry experience helped make it. Vivian stated that she wanted Has been Hotel to be a full series which meant multiple 30 minute long episodes. So her plan was to pitch the show to multiple networks and see who would want to pick it up. And if Horse came to worse she would start a Kickstarter and continue the project independently. But after two years the pilot was released and received high amount of praise. Even if it wasn't to everyone's liking the project was extremely ambitious and it was also extremely important to the world of indie animation. If Has been Hotel was to get a mainstream studio to release the series that would be revolutionary for online animators. Vivian received many offers and chose to go with one of the best studios that anybody would want which is A24. I've made a video on some of A24's horror films. I love the studio but to give a brief explanation A24 is a studio that allows a ton of creative freedom. So much so that it's made some of the catalog extremely weird and graphic either it be over sexualization or just straight up weird imagery and it could turn off some but it's just, it's creative expression. A24 has funded amazing indie pieces from horror to drama introspective to feel good films and shows. Has been Hotel will be the first animated project under A24. And given that A24 has built a reputation by giving artists creative expression and freedom it makes total sense that they would take the gamble of having their first independent show be from somebody who came from the online world. Has been Hotel is not a corporate soul-sucking show. The pilot proved that if someone was so passionate and dedicated to a project that they would put their own blood, sweat and money to a pilot that had no guarantee of getting picked up it shows that this isn't just another animation cash grab but instead a passion project.  As of right now Has been Hotel is in development for an entire season under A24 and Vivian's new animation team, Spindle Horse is now working with a larger veteran studio named Bento Box. That has worked on projects under Michael Q. Sack including him and Zach Hale's show Smiling Friends which I'm gonna be talking about in a minute. And if you look at the recent updates and sneak peeks on the Has been Hotel Twitter you could see that the animation has improved drastically since the pilot. Colliding the Spindle Horse art style with the Bento Box quality control, it looks good. But since Has been Hotel is also now an official project it's behind closed doors and NDAs which means only slivers of info released at a time about what is happening. So to combat this Vivian made his show in the same universe as completely independent and fan funded through the old Has been Patreon titled Hell of a Boss. The story of Michael and Zach... The story of Michael... Wanna eat any louder? The story of Michael and Zach are different from the two previous stories I discussed thus far. Michael Q. Sack and Zach Hader are the only two people in this video that didn't pursue a higher education after high school. They both came... Hey. They both came up on the internet and through said internet they both made connections in the mainstream industry which eventually led to their collaborative show Adult Swim named Smiling Friends. Along with Michael's two other shows, Yellow Crystal Fantasy and the newly released Hulu Exclusive Koala Man. But let's start with Zach first. Zach Hader, also known on the internet as Sidekick Pebbles began his animation journey on the website New Grounds in 2008. I like to tell him the true story or true of it. This is for you totally okay. You really can't heal you. And like many other New Grounds artists at the time he made a YouTube channel to host his animations and it was from YouTube that he found a majority success. And through that YouTube channel Zach would start to accumulate a fan base from his edgy exaggerated animations on current trends. Much like what you'd see in the current day on a channel like Meek Canyon. For example, a day after the death of Osama bin Laden Zach would make an animation of a literal Navy Seal killing him. Yeah, okay, you get what I'm saying. But then he made a video that blew up which got the ball rolling. And if you paid attention to what I've been saying this whole video then you understand that everything begins with a big bang. And for Zach it was an animation about the video game Skyrim. If you're not 12 years old you might remember an internet meme from early YouTube about an MPC that took an arrow to the knee.  And I took an arrow to the knee. It's old and if you hear anyone recite it today they're most likely a Discord goblin or someone who shouldn't be near children. But back in the day people found humor like this hysterical. So Zach made an animation around the meme and it blew up and got him hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Whoa!  And with the new found success Zach continued to make animations on his YouTube channel while also making tons of connections. And then he decided to use that momentum to take a crack at the mainstream media. Through Zach's journey he met many other people in indie animation who were just like him. Making weird grotesque videos in their bedroom and one of those people ended up being Chris O'Neill aka O-N-E-N-G. For the sake of length and presentation in this video I chose three main subjects. And Zach's current partner is not Chris but I should talk about him for a second since he also has a project coming out soon. During the run on Newgrounds animated shorts Chris was one of the largest channels. He was even larger than Zach. Chris was on a hot streak of luck. Leo and Satan, Harry Potter shorts and many other shorts were exploding. Zach and Chris were good friends that would help each other out with a lot of animations. Either it'd be voiceovers or assisting with animation itself. And they had a lot of comments since they both had new found YouTube success and they related to a lot of their upbringings. Hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up! You did it, Zach.   So they came together and made a collaborator show titled Hellbenders which followed the two main characters named after themselves Chris and Zach doing weird little miscellaneous task every episode. Like something you would see in SpongeBob but with the adult twist of gore and randomness. The three animated shorts were put on Zach's channel and saw success quickly. And through that success, they started to pitch the show around until it got the attention of adult swim. I'm moving to America to work on Hellbenders for three years. So they ordered a pilot from the duo on an extremely tight budget of $20,000. That might seem like a lot of money to some but animation is very expensive. For reference, the pilot for Family Guy costed $50,000 for 15 minutes. Later I'll reveal what it cost today to make an episode but yeah, at the time animation was around $10,000 per minute. So now with a $20,000 budget, Zach and Chris, alongside help from some friends had to animate 15 minutes with a budget of two minutes. It was a difficult task that never saw completion because while in development, it was scrapped by adult swim since they turned down Hellbenders altogether. They turned the project down before its pilot because of the name and premise. Adult swim already accepted two pilots for two different shows. Those being Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell and Mr. Pickles. And they didn't want another show related to Hell on their network. And because of this, Chris and Zach scrapped Hellbenders. The pilot could be publicly seen now due to Zach's network at some point getting hacked and a bunch of unlisted and private videos were made public and the pilot for Hellbenders was one of them. You could find it on YouTube and watch the completed project for yourself if you like. Hellbenders wasn't a useless journey though. Due to the failure of the project, Chris and Zach both made a lot of connections at Adult Swim and later Zach saw success at Adult Swim so it was just another part of the journey. And for Chris, he's now currently working on his own video game, Bow Blow, The Quest for Bing Bing. I know that sounds extremely racist but it's a game coming soon made by Chris. And while we don't know if the game is gonna be a success or failure as of now, at least he's making strides. After Hellbenders, Zach would continue to grow his brand. Sleepy Cabin was formed alongside Oni Plays by Chris and both elevated Zach's status. Why wake up? You gotta wake up please.  He also then started to work on projects with Jon Tron who at the time was also on a hot streak. From 2012 to 2014, indie animation was at a peak for these new groundspeople. And while everybody was bathing in the glory, someone was watching from the sidelines wanting to get in. Enter Michael Cusack. Michael Cusack is someone who is very overlooked. To even find out information about him requires wanting to seek it out specifically. Whereas with Zach, you could find bits and pieces about him all over the internet due to his popularity. So let's talk about Michael's journey. Michael started his journey at the age of 19. He didn't care about making animations yet because at the time he wanted to be a filmmaker.  Michael despised the idea of film school and looked up to ambitious creatives that built their careers by simply starting while learning as they went. At the time, Michael was also extremely broke and had nothing on his portfolio besides old YouTube videos. So he saved up money while working at Subway and got a loan for the bank for 15 grand to make a short film titled All Night Gaming. And the short took a long time to make. They shot 80% of the film in 2011 but Michael ran out of money and had to revisit it years later. So it released in 2014. The short sucked. It was his first project and it was very homemade but that's expected since he was new. After this, Michael was 21 and had to get a dishwashing job to make up the money that he spent on the short film. Working 11 hour shifts at one point for 14 days straight. During this time, he saw a colleague of his named Sam Hunter make an upload and animated short to Vimeo named Hot Dog Hustle. The short got 50,000 views and Michael got inspired. He saw that you can make outlandish projects that didn't require a lot of money since you can just animate the cast and crew that you would normally pay for in a live action set. Michael also saw animators like Eagle Raptor, Oni NG and Psychic Pebbles exploding. And being a fan of them, he questioned why couldn't he be doing the exact same thing? So he taught himself how to use Adobe Flash and made his first animation titled Gabe Newell at E3. And it did well, which encouraged him to keep at it. He then eventually made his second bang which was a short named YOLO. While he wasn't seeing the views that these new ground guys were getting, he was still getting millions of views regardless. Then on February 11th, 2014, Michael had his biggest bang yet. He uploaded the first episode to a new series named Demo and Darren titled Siggie Butt Brain. And as of right now, that short almost has 10 million views. Through that, Michael started to catch traction in Australian animation and was commissioned to make a Demo and Darren short for ABC. So he had the two characters interact with another character named Koala Man which would later get his own show. Also through Demo and Darren is when Michael started to make connections with Adult Swim. When Justin Roiland wasn't beating his girlfriend or talking to fans, he would keep tabs on small animators and became a fan of Demo and Darren when Siggie Butt Brain popped off. And Justin had an idea for an April Fool's spoof. He wanted Michael to make a bootleg Australian Rick and Morty adventure for Adult Swim to debut alongside season three of Rick and Morty on April Fool's Day in 2018. Michael at first was intimidated and scared. It was a massive opportunity that would be seen by a lot of people and could make a break his career going forward in the entertainment industry. But all went well. It was an amazing parody and Adult Swim loved it. They loved it so much that they wanted to make a whole show around it with the same style but original characters. So Michael used the characters that he already had from the yellow short. Thus began the making of Yellow Crystal Fantasy. All this happened because Michael got spotted by Justin Roiland. The creator of the most successful Adult Swim show, Rick and Morty, from his Demo and Darren series and made such a good impression with his Adult Swim short that he got his own show. Michael was now making valuable connections in Australian media as well as Adult Swim. For most, this is already enough for a success story but it continues from here. After Bush World, Michael began to talk to someone he was once a fan of, Zach Hadle. After establishing friendship and having a lot in common, history began to repeat itself and Zach wanted another crack at the mainstream. At some point, YouTube changed their monetization system to favor watch time over view count and this pretty much killed animation on YouTube. Animators could no longer make a living off of animated shorts due to the favor of watch time and this began to affect the mindset of Zach. A year before Bush World in 2017, Zach would make his most popular YouTube video, Get Out of My Car, based around a trending video. And the video went extremely viral, getting almost 60 million views and Zach only made around $2,000 in total from it. Whereas before the change, he could have potentially got over 40 grand or even more. Zach would look at the landscape and see video game-based channels like Markiplier, Key Martin and Corey Kenshin pump out long let's pay videos frugally alongside commentary channels like Leafy, Pyrocynical, and way more. They're making simple, easy videos with a lot of gain while animators would put months into two-minute shorts with no gain. He began to feel demotivated with YouTube and found more joy being in other side projects like Oni Plays, Podcasts, Jon Tron videos, and many other things. He still liked animation but felt trapped and felt that the only way to use his full potential would be having a long project that he could be passionate about. Michael knew about the failure of Hellbenders and he knew the potential of Zach. He was much bigger in status, worked on a storyboard episode of SpongeBob. He had Michael Q. Zach who was huge in Australian cartoons and just got his own show on Adult Swim. Michael had studio experience and connections but he also had talent. Not as much as Zach but enough to the point that when they put their heads together they blend really well. So they came up with the concept and got really high at their agent's department and wrote the pilot for Smiling Friends. The pilot was Greenlit and Studio Yatta was brought to help with the animation. Studio Yatta is an animation studio that is co-owned by Joshua Tomar who was a new ground artist and friend of both Zach and Michael featuring a lot on OniPlays. His wife is also a 2D animator for the studio so that was a connection that paid off. The pilot of Smiling Friends adapted YouTube humor in a mainstream format. They even used a lot of YouTube connections for the show. The character Desmond was voiced by Mike from Red Letter Media. The guy on the wall was voiced by Finn Wolfhard who was a fan of Zach even appearing on his podcast at some point. Even OniNG made the outro song. It was like a big collaboration project because everybody wanted to see the project win. It was important for the show to get picked up. The pilot was made public by Adult Swim on April 1st, 2020 alongside Michael's show, Yellow Crystal Fantasy and Smiling Friends did so well that it got picked up for a full season. So what was the budget for Smiling Friends? The whole season costs around $2 million. I know that seems like a lot but earlier I teased something about Family Guy. The cost of one episode of Family Guy is $2 million. A whole season of Smiling Friends had the budget of one Family Guy episode. But an episode of Family Guy doesn't cost $2 million. Zach has complained a lot about how the animation industry will find every way to not pay animators. But since Zach and Michael are used to short form with little pay, a small budget wasn't a make or break. Instead of unnecessary meetings, they worked on Discord. Instead of outsourcing a ton, Zach uses previous internet connections and Michael used his as well. Princess Bento Studio under Bento Box, the same studio that's working on Hasbin Hotel, assisted in animating Yellow Crystal Fantasy and Koala Man. So with the Michael connection, they worked on Smiling Friends. And like I said for Hasbin, Bento is good at polishing the art styles of other people. Sony and G once again helped by providing 3D models like 3D Squilton and the Devil. They also had a lot of friends do voice work. Michael and Zach did a bunch of voice work themselves. The small budget didn't matter. These two have always been DIY. So for the last 35 minutes, I had just been in your face giving you the origins of these three projects at rapid pace. And now you know about these show runners and their humble beginnings. But this isn't a video about the show's plots, flaws or whatever opinions I or you might have. The reason I made this video is because I find this stuff really important. While all the journeys here have different origins and different reasons of why they did stuff, the one thing they all have in common is that they all did something. They carved a path for themselves on the internet and they all seen mainstream success. And that's important because at one point online creation wasn't taken seriously at all. Everyone can be creative. And the best thing you could do to start your journey is just simply start your journey. Even if you only have a phone or some type of mobile device, that's something. Just do something, make experiences, be cringey because all of it starts to stack up over time and you will start to see your art improve alongside you. There's a lot of independent online talent but I chose these three specifically because they are now seeing success and all they had to do was just be persistent and believe in themselves. And that's why online creation is important. You shouldn't have to be required to go to art school, film school or have all around nepotism to succeed. You should be able to be yourself somewhere and get opportunities because of it. But something else that these people had in common was that they all failed but got back up. It sounds corny but failure is always a part of the process and you just have to get up and try again. With that though, I'm Dr. Skipper. Hey, you know, subscribe, it's free. Be creative people. I'll see you soon.