Well, I think everyone want feedback on something they worked so hard to create, but they shouldn't change the art in order to get more feedback or money. That defeats the purpose of art, Vincet Van Gough didn't do traditional art beacuse that's what people wanted, he painted what he saw fit. Flattery is a dangerous thing too, the more you get of it, the more you crave it. It can make you do dumb things (like making MARVEL brickfilms ).

The same goes for Hollywood films too. They just keep making re-makes, squeals, spin-offs, etc. because that's what sells. I think people need to remind themselves why they started making films or brick films in the first place.

My suggestion to people is that you should make what YOU want to make first, and then worry about how many people watch after its uploaded. As long as its enjoyable, there will still be people who want to watch your work.

EDIT: Also, no offense to people who make MARVEL brickfilms.

Last edited by PushOverProductions (June 9, 2014 (11:02am))

Oh gee, thanks.

To be honest, I'd be lying if I said I didn't want any recognition, and in truth anyone who says they don't harbour a dream of being successful is also lying. Yes, a lot of us do this purely because it's fun, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't want your animation to be a success. Getting a mere 17 views on a video can be really disheartening.

There's a difference between that and setting out to be successful, which rarely works. I think that's a dangerous way to produce brickfilms, as you will find you put less of an emphasis on creativity, and will end up regurgitating something else. The only reason I did my past two Avengers Tower animations as straight-up fight scenes was as glorified animation tests for something larger (having not animated a proper fight for years). I also try to balance every licensed IP brickfilm I do with an original one, so while I work on Ultron Ascending I'll also be doing an original animation about a hyperactive genie. Just wanted to throw that in case some people think my comments here are a bit hypocritical.

However, the mass audience that is YouTube does have a lot of upsides:

Designed for ease of use
It's designed to be easy to use; the interface is pretty simple and inviting, and it's easy to upload videos. Brickshelf was a total faff. Back when I first started out brickfilming, I wasn't allowed a YouTube account, so I had to make my videos really tiny in size and put them on Brickshelf, which took forever. It also meant they weren't public, and you had to use a specific link for other people to see them. Until recently, BZpower (a BIONICLE forum) banned YouTube links, so I had to upload many of my animations to Brickshelf for that purpose as well. I know a lot of people would be turned off by the amount of effort that goes into compressing a file and uploading it to Brickshelf super-slowly, so YouTube's ease of use is something of a blessing. Like I said, it's inviting. This is a good thing.

Connectivity
Personally, I really enjoy having a Facebook and Twitter page specifically for my brickfilms. Yeah, it's great to try to build an audience, but it's also quite fun pretending I'm a real studio, and trying to make the pages look somewhat professional can be surprisingly enjoyable.

It's also another platform for additional material, something that was difficult to do in the pre-YouTube era. You can take your video's URL, but it in a Facebook post, along with behind-the-scenes pictures and additional canon. You can do this on blogs too, but Facebook's more accessible for people these days. Overall, when used correctly, this can enhance the viewing experience.

Also, the people who tend to make Facebook and Twitter feeds for their brickfilms are usually the kind of people who are serious about the hobby, rather than - and tell me I'm wrong, but there are a lot of these - ten year olds putting six frames together at 3fps and never touching the hobby again, so this use of the the YouTube connectivity schtick isn't oversaturated. Ish.

Like/dislikes, playlists and favourites
It's become easier to keep track of your favourite brickfilms. Pre-YouTube, you had to create Word docs with URLs to all the places where your favourites were on display, but now you just click a button and it's saved to a playlist, so you can easily access it whenever you like. That's awesome, and I wish I'd been allowed YouTube sooner as it would have saved me the hassle of the Word doc thing.

More importantly, the like/dislike system can encourage good work. By clicking like, you're showing support for the creator - you've specifically clicked a button that says "I really liked your brickfilm. Keep up the great work!" Equally, however, the dislike button can wreck a person's confidence.

All that said, there are some negatives to YouTube:

Luck of the draw
No matter how much you try to make a film that will appease a wide audience (if that's what you've set out to do, which I don't recommend) unless you already have a fanbase, a lot of it's down to luck. Luck that word of mouth will spread about your film. Luck that it might get on the front page of YouTube. Luck that it might get tweeted by someone with a lot of followers. Luck

And a lot of the time, bad videos get lucky. Mass Text. Friday. Justin Bieber was first 'discovered' on YouTube. Seeing things that don't necessarily 'deserve' to be viral become so can be disheartening, especially for younger brickfilmers whose motivation may well come from wanting to show the world something cool they made last Saturday (there's no problem with that).

Content to 'get famous'
Like I've said, it's not healthy to animate something simply to see it go viral, because you'll be horribly disappointed. I'd like to point out here that making a licensed IP brickfilm is not always, or even mostly done to 'go viral', and making a fanfilm is not a "dumb thing" to do. It's part of a learning process; learning to write character development, animation and vfx training, amongst other things. But making a licensed IP brickfilm to get famous isn't a good idea, but neither is making any brickfilm to get famous. If that's all that's on your mind, then you're not thinking about the more important elements of making a brickfilm: set design (not just simply building a set), good writing, good cinematography, characterisation, lighting...going viral would be cool, not gunna' lie, but it should be thought of as an added bonus, and one that you have as much chance of receiving as you do winning the lottery on your first ticket.

So there's my long-winded, rambly view on this.

Sorry, but some taken. Don't tar everyone with the same stick, dude. And I'd like to point out that three years ago I made a Green Lantern video for fun, with no intention of any return, simply because I wanted to make it (just as I do with the Avengers today), and I was rewarded with 200,000 views and £150 in revenue, plus I became a Partner. The punchline? I haven't made a Green Lantern video since.

"Nothing goes down 'less I'm involved. No nuggets. No onion rings. No nothin'. A cheeseburger gets sold in the park, I want in! You got fat while we starved on the streets...now it's my turn!" -Harley Morenstein

I'd like to remind everyone that if you are interested in discussing the use of IPs such as Marvel in brickfilms, please see this topic instead. I understand there will be overlap in discussions, but I would like to avoid a repeat of last week's derailment of the discussion topic.

YouTube | Twitter | Brickfilm Archival Project
Brickfilms Wiki | BiM: The Documentary

Sorry for derailing the topic a bit, guys. I've had a long day of two exams, and having spent the last week organising a Marvel brickfilm crossover, and the last few months writing one Marvel brickfilm, that comment was not what I needed to see, but sorry if I came across as rude.

Nice to know you keep up with the series PushOver

"Nothing goes down 'less I'm involved. No nuggets. No onion rings. No nothin'. A cheeseburger gets sold in the park, I want in! You got fat while we starved on the streets...now it's my turn!" -Harley Morenstein

I find the user-created promos at the end of a video both annoying and helpful.

On the one hand, today's content creators lack retrospect when they add these "Like and Subscribe" or "Click here to see more" segments to the end of their video.  Not everyone turns on annotations, not everyone views on desktop (I have Chromecast and watch on mobile, for example).  Also, years from now, when someone looks back at your work, will those annotation still work?  Will it still be a Like or Thumbs Up Button?  Will you still have a Kickstarter?  A Facebook/Twitter account?  Did you hit your 1000 subscriber by then? Look at some of the early videos that did these promo segments under a previous YouTube layout, when Myspace was popular and HQ setting was still an option.  How dated those video look now.

On the other hand, without some of these promo segments, I may not have found other interest clips from the user, or even videos that I missed because I didn't see it appear in my subscriptions.  The suggested videos on the side are still images.  The promo segments at the end fo a video can be videos.

I believe content should be separate from promotion, i.e. let your story stand by itself, ask for subscription separately.  Your PSAs and call-to-arms content can be changed, updated and adapted to each iteration of the YouTube layout or whatever video host you use.  Your animation, your story, your work of art, should not be affected by the platform you're putting it on. 

Unfortunately, not everyone can hold on to such principles in a competitive environment.  You do what you got to do.

During my stint with Blip.tv, I'd upload Preview videos to YouTube for content I've uploaded to Blip.tv.  Nathan here put up a trailer leading up to his Five Years Later release.  While this clips did not ask people to Like/Comment/Subscribe, they also didn't affect the content.  The promo and the content are two standalone entities.  One is not attached to the other on one file.  To me, this is a better approach than asking for feedback at the end of every video.  Imagine TV shows and Movies doing that.  This is not a culture I want to take part of (and I have considered it from time to time).  Maybe links to other videos or social media pages, but not to ask for Likes and subscriptions.

Yes!!!!!! We need some thing like that like you must be 15+ to join and you videos must be filmed at 15 fps
or higher.

I find it hard to find good vids on Youtube - it is over-saturated and audience too fickle.  I got more traffic from Reddit than BiM - and it's rating system is used far more often than Youtube which provides better feedback on how you're doing.

You don't get feedback at all on Youtube or Reddit.  For that, you need BiM. 

This is a good question with so many intersecting topics and themes. You could literally write a book on this topic. However, I’d like to (try to) focus on the second part of the question: Have the quality or content of brickfilms been affected? (specifically the ‘quality’ part of the question)

You can’t really answer this question without addressing the change in the number of people who make brickfilms. Due to a number of different factors, such as YouTube, easy access to brickfilming tools, advances in technology and growth of the Lego brand, you have a lot more people making brickfilms. Echoing some of my comments from the thread on licensed themes, many of these people are young and inexperienced. In general, the works of a novice brickfilmer will not be as polished as those of an experienced brickfilmer. Thus it is my opinion that, strictly from a mathematical perspective, the percentage of quality brickfilms has decreased dramatically from the total number of brickfilms produced. However, I feel that the number of quality brickfilms has increased. The exposure provided by YouTube has attracted more and more people to take up brickfilming. I don’t believe the number of quality brickfilmers is a finite number. Thus, when the overall talent pool is bigger, you will get more quality brickfilms.

The down side is that there is a lot more garbage to wade through to find the quality films.  It’s easy to point at a 5 fps brickfilm with a ton of lightflicker and set bumps and say “See, the quality is going downhill. It was never like this back in the day…” However, I don’t think the problem is that there are too many people making weak brickfilms, the problem is that there is no recognized stratification system for brickfilmers.

If you’ll forgive the American-centric example, I feel that the current state of brickfilms is like baseball. In the U.S., there are approximately 5,000,000 kids playing little league baseball. That number drops to approximately 400,000 when you count the number of players in High School. It drops even further when you count the number of players in the minor leagues. Ultimately, it drops to about 800 individuals when you get to the highest level, Major League Baseball (MLB). Obviously, the difference between a little leaguer and a MLB player is like night and day. Fortunately, there are established leagues and organizations that clearly delineate the experienced professionals from the amateurs. For the casual YouTube browser, there is no such stratification for brickfilmers. You can watch an expertly crafted FancyPants video and at the end a link to a 5 fps hack job could appear as a ‘related video’ suggestion.

You’ve got many people producing brickfilms, most are lower quality due to age and experience level. Many of these people will drop the hobby and move on to different things. It’s not a bad thing that they tried their hand at brickfilming, nor should we dissuade them from trying or admonish them for making something of lower quality. However, it does present a problem for the community as a whole since no obvious lines exist between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’. YouTube’s search algorithms and suggestion engines try to offer up results that are popular; in terms of views, likes and comments. However, ‘popular’ does not always mean ‘quality’. Thus, YouTube can give poor quality brickfilms equal, if not more, exposure, than it does to quality brickfilms.

Again, for the tl/dr crowd:
- Growing number of content producers increases the number of quality films
- Downside is a lot more low quality films produced as well that can drown out the quality films
- No easy way to separate good and bad quality brickfilms on YouTube

Has it affected us as brickfilmers? I can't see how it wouldn't. YouTube and other video sharing sites really changed how the entire internet worked, so it seems logical that we would be caught up in the changing waves. I see it doing a couple of things. The first, is that brickfilming is much better known. Almost everyone has now come in contact with SOME form of our wonderful art form thingy. Personally, I love it when my work gets recognized, knowing you have an audience really is an encouragement.

I also know that getting a lot of views, likes, and subs doesn't necessary mean that the work I, or someone else has done is actually any good. That is where BiM and other film sites and groups come in. I value a well thought out suggestion on here much more then a random 'I likez these animationz, whatz cameraz did ya uz?' comment on YT.

Has the quality of brickfilms been affected? Visibly, yes. With the onslaught of new animators, and the easiness of uploading a clip to YT it is quite easy to lose good quality work in the flood of newb attempts. This is both good and bad. The good, is that many new people are trying out our hobby. The bad, is that many new people are trying out our hobby. This can cause us to kind of lose high quality films in the cloud of uploads, which can leave an animator discouraged.