Alora Fane

Here's an animation I wanted to quickly share, plus a bit of rambling about the animator's remarkably successful Patreon account!

This might get buried by the end-of-year posts I'll be writing soon, but I wanted to share anyway!

You may or may not have seen animations by this guy before; he's been making them since the old Flash days (and apparently still uses Flash's modern incarnation, Adobe Animate), and the ones he has on youtube have millions of views. Here's one he released a couple of days ago, which is why he's on my radar again:

They're charmingly, fascinatingly bizarre art, pure expressions of creativity, masterfully made, and apparently a lot of people find them appealing, myself very much included.

He has ∞ a Patreon ∞, and since I'm checking all of those that I see these days, I had a look at it. He's doing well, it looks like! The monetary amount is hidden, but his tiers charge a relatively high amount, and his top $70 per month tier says it's sold out (I don't know out of how many though), and he currently has 2955 patrons.

I wonder how much of a difference his about video made though; I watched it, and it's a masterful combination of heartfelt genuine expression - where he says he doesn't want to work on corporate crap to pay the bills and would rather make what he wants to make - and also distinctly characterised eccentricity. An interesting blend of truly human and almost cartoonishly not. In addition to being on the patreon page, ∞ it's on youtube ∞ where it has over 2 million views.

By contrast, I have no video on my own patreon, and present myself everywhere by rambling excessively about my personal struggles. I often wonder (and have talked before about) how good this is for business, so to speak; does it humanise me and make me more worth supporting, or is it repulsive to people who'd rather I were more distantly, professionally stable?

In a way I wish I could cultivate an eccentric but ultimately pleasant persona... but I suppose it's just not my way, and I can't pretend.

I don't know. I just wanted to mention this anyway, since I like his animations and find it interesting how well he's doing on Patreon despite putting them out at a rate of like one a year, if that!

Perhaps my own will grow as I release more stuff since it feels as if I'm relying too much on nostalgia for years-old Flash games these days, so I need to actually finish something new! Like Sindrel Song! That was a huge success after all!!!!

Oh, and I'd recommend watching his patreon video just for a good look into what you have to do to make a living in a creative field, and how unpleasant it is for pretty much all creators! Few can do anything else enough to pay the bills, I suppose, and I wonder whether I'll ever be one of the lucky few, or whether I'll have to make things I don't believe in just to pay the bills at some point... I wonder about that a lot.

3 COMMENTS

LevProtter42~4Y

Yeah, Felix makes some amazing things.
Another creator worth checking out is Barnaby Dixon. He makes puppets, and his work is pretty unique.
One thing about the art 'industry' is that much of it revolves around advertising, and I have some doubts about its future prospects.
If we get a DotCom bubble 2.0, which I think is well past due, a lot of people are going to get screwed.
I also think that thinking about your audience's age, and their employment status, might console you a bit about current vs future projections.
(the future may be brighter!)

Maniafig222~4Y

I quickly realized this was the guy who made Double King, that seems to be his most well-known work. 47 million views on YT is quite something!

The topic of YT animations is something I actually see mentioned now and then when people talk about monetization. Apparently it used to be that these kinds of videos do really well since they get a lot of clicks, but these days monetization cares more about the total number of minutes people watch your content than the number of clicks, which means it's more lucrative to put out a lot of longer videos rather than relatively short animations sporadically.

This sort of thing is why I imagine Patreon makes all the difference for those types of content producers, it's their only reliable source of income from that work. It's odd to think that Patreon's such a recent thing, it's pretty much everywhere these days.

spamove2~2Y

Felix rocked since the start, and still rocks. He's very open-minded and has a wicked sense of humour. Hard to say if he did LSD, but certainly watching his animations makes me feel like doing it :)