An Animation Entrepreneur
In case you missed it (or in case you don’t speak Mandarin), Animation Desk recently co-hosted an online livestream animation tutorial event with Bad Time Stories. Bad Time Stories is a local Taiwanese animator who runs several of his own animation social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as an online animation course. He shares his experience with us in this post about maintaining creative animation social media accounts and the passion behind starting a business based on animating.
Time to Get Social
Bad Time Stories did not receive much engagement from his audience starting out, as he only published his work on Instagram. He soon realized the importance of cross-promotion between social media channels. By using Facebook to launch a teaser trailer and redirecting his viewers to YouTube, Bad Time Stories started to gain significantly higher views, impressions, and engagements. He notes that the importance of probing out new ways to interact with an audience. Each artist is different, as is each viewer, so it is crucial to set up a trial-and-error phase that allows for mistakes here and there on the way towards discovering how to make impactful results.
“It all comes with hard work and sacrifice.”
Though social media is, more often than not, great for creators such as animators, it can sometimes be hindering. While it allows creators to reach wider audiences, algorithms sometimes can restrict people from reaching further and further. Artists are constantly evolving with social media to latch onto the latest trends, so sometimes it can seem too fast-paced to keep up with the ongoing updates.
The New Revenue Stream
Creating a successful small business around animation requires one to develop a steady revenue stream to sustain the business. Bad Time Stories shares that for him, this comes in the form of teaching online animation courses. This doesn’t happen overnight. It came about after conducting research and preparing the lessons.
He started with a marketing survey to figure out his target audience and exactly what they’re looking for in animation lessons. He found that many of them were students typically looking for time to learn within the scattered availability they have in between their busy class schedule. After finding out the “who” and the “when,” he knew he needed to coordinate exactly “what” he would be teaching. For Bad Time Stories, this was focused on a module-by-module approach, teaching only one subject per module and making sure that everyone was able to take something away from a specific lesson taught on a specific subject.
Bad Time Stories also notes that as the entrepreneur in this scenario, it’s imperative to do a lot of self-promotion. He found it difficult to gain the attention of new students based on the promotion techniques of online course platform providers.
Creation vs. Commercialization
Many artists and animators find themselves struggling between balancing pure art creation with commercial art and design. Artists often create because it’s their passion and they find themselves being quite good at it, but they also are human beings who need to make a living. Bad Time Stories suggests having a clear distinction between the two so you can focus on a life that is both liveable as an entrepreneur and enjoyable as a creative.
Better yet, he says it’s important to also try your best to find ways to incorporate the two together. He looks to pieces such as 2019’s Parasite, by Bong Joon-ho, and how they blend together millions from the box office with carefully crafted artistic themes that confound poetic reflections of society. It’s not easy, but the general idea is something he, as well as many other animators, strive for.
In Conclusion
At this point you are probably wondering what Bad Time Stories’ creations look like, so we would like to invite you to check out his YouTube Channel. You can check out all his latest animations on social media. If you want to embark on an online animation journey as well, you can get started with Animation Desk! Available on iOS, Android, and UWP, you can go from amateur animator to professional with practice and determination. Don’t miss out, get started now!