Bayou Bomber Contra Sam Hyde

Many of this blog’s readers will be aware of comedian Sam Hyde. He’s spent his career straddling the line between the rightward edge of the Overton window and the mainstream. He’s also something of a Jack of all trades, having crashed a TedX talk, had a now-cancelled show on Adult Swim, and emerged victorious from a pro boxing match.

These days, Sam has joined the ranks of influencers offering masculinity advice on YouTube. The other day I happened upon one of his videos, in which he answers an email from an aspiring animator looking for career advice.

Watch here:

Sam’s advice for artists to forgo animation and concentrate on graphic novels gave me pause. So I brought the above video to the attention of my valued Neopatrons. Our resident visual artist Bayou Bomber picked up the gauntlet Sam threw down in a recent post of his own.

This blog covers many topics, sometimes about faith, but usually about art. Today’s post is provoked by a recent post within a patron exclusive backroom belonging to a twitter mutual, Brian Niemeier. Quick plug, if you want to be a part of a community that aspires to further their written storytelling craft, you should sign up via Brian’s Patreon or SubscribeStar. Now off to the meat and potatoes of tonight’s topic.

Editor’s note: Many thanks to Bayou Bomber for the generous plug. Key excerpts from his response to Hyde’s video follow.

Sam’s professional opinion is that animation is a waste of time because consumers (consoomers) won’t support any form of video content unless it’s free. How does he support his case? If you forwent watching the video to humor my typed words, please revisit the video above and skip to time stamp 6:00. . . If this is what he considers animation I’ve got news for you, it’s not, it’s what we in the business call motion graphics, it’s not the same. If Sam wants to label these guys as “busy idiots” for pumping out this garbage and fooling is overly developed mind into thinking that is animation, that just makes Sam a plain ol’ idiot.

Animation is what we see in cinematic shorts, features, and videogames. It’s not in photobashing images together and making them move across a screen. Sam makes the conjecture that animation is high cost with low yield as in you’ll put all this time into making an animation with little to no return. “No one is buying tickets to see movies” he says, “people only will watch your animation if it’s free”. Won’t argue that fact, movie theatres are struggling, but he forgets there are other distribution channels like streaming services that place animations in front of millions of viewers. The low yield he speaks of is only true depending on where you’re at in the food chain, the higher up you go, the more you earn from the industry (more on that later).

Quick observation: Maybe I just missed it, but I’m not aware of any animated works Sam Hyde has created. Just sayin’.

So what’s Sam’s expert advice to correct course if one is pursuing animation (like myself)? Go make a comic or graphic novel. Yep. That’s it. Go do it. If you make one of those, it’ll get made into a film. That’s just how this game works. . . lol.

In one hand, we discourage artists from pursuing animation and with the other, we encourage the production of comics/GNs with the promise of a film adaptation. See a hole in logic here? Anime has taken the world by storm. There’s a huge market that thirsts for things like comics or GNs to be adapted into an animation. If anything, it’d be expected. The earliest cartoons in American history were adapted from comic strips. That set the expectation moving forward for everyone worldwide. No animators means no animated film adaptations, simple as. The other option is live action, but with the image comic cinema has created itself in recent times, do you really want that? Will your comic truly shine with the limitations of human actors and fake looking CG for special effects which break the immersion of the visual experience? I mean, it’s your funeral if you want it.

Bayou Bomber follows up with an examination of how much money is in the animation industry.

Again, I could be wrong, but that looks like definite real and projected growth.

Sam seems to think an animator’s only hope will be some big studio who can afford the expenses of an animation. That’s not true. To start, we’ve been talking about this in Brian Niemeier’s discord a lot lately, neopatronage is the way of the future. Creatives won’t need to “make it” by having 200,000 raving fans, instead it’s very real they’ll only need a fraction of that – depending on their financial goals of course, and that’s just to live a comfortable lifestyle.

Read his whole post here.

Business paradigms in the arts have shifted in the past decade – twice.

No one is immune to survivorship bias. A lot of creators are stuck one or two business models behind.

But the facts are what they are.

KDP is dead – at least as a standalone path to a living in newpub.

Waiting for someone to hand you a golden ticket to get you past the gatekeepers is deader than Dillinger.

Seeking out patrons to commission the entertainment they want from you is the future.

Neopatronage is here, and it’s not going anywhere for the medium to long term.

Get the inside track on the Neopatronage Revolution. My cherished Neopatrons get early access to the first draft this month, so don’t wait.

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