Fathomas

I lost most of my possessions, and my job, when hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans (where I was living at the time.) My mom's birthday was coming up, and I was completely out of money, but I still wanted to get her something. Knowing this, she said that instead of a gift I could make a cartoon for her about unicorns. So I made "Charlie the Unicorn." More than ten years later she still brings up the fact that her birthday present launched my career, hah.

I alternate between "this feels good because I am good at what I do" and "this feels bad because I'm a terrible artist and a fraud" pretty much every hour.

Originally there was only going to be five episodes, but after the forth one came out everyone guessed what the fifth would be. Carl isn't funny if he can't surprise you. My partner Scuffy disliked the series, and suggested that the llamas should just "blow up." This sparked an idea for a legitimately surprising fifth episode: Carl's depressing descent into madness and eventual suicide. The only way to end Llamas with Hats in a legitimately funny way was to end it as sadly as possible.

Honestly, I don't think she was very impressed, hah. I mean... she liked that I made it for her, but it took a few years before the humor in it started making sense.

In 2011 they removed the front page, which used to have spots like "Top Favorited" that would reward higher-quality videos by giving them increased exposure. Then in 2013 they deemphasized the subscription feed, replacing it with an algorithm-based list. And the algorithm rewards watch-time over all else, so a one hour "Let's Play" is seen by the system as more valuable than a five minute animation.

The result of this is that YouTube doesn't promote animations anymore, and most of my (and other animators) subscribers aren't notified when a new video comes out. The only way to make money on YouTube is with frequent, lengthy uploads, and that's not possible if you're one person doing cartoons.