Now that Phungus & Mold’s pilot is successfully launched, I want to talk a little bit about the experience getting your video published on the various platforms. Using Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) was definitely a big part of making this job as painless as possible, since most publishing places not only accept, but prefer video files in QuickTime .mov format with ProRes 422 HQ codec. ProRes is the native codec of FCPX, which makes it super easy and quick to export those files. Adding captions and subtitles and exporting them is also super easy with FCPX (another requirement if you want to publish video in the US: English closed captions).

Options

So there are many places where you can put your videos and try to make money, and I chose Vimeo On Demand and Amazon Prime Video Direct for now. I was considering just putting it all on YouTube, but you can’t make money there with animation. YouTube will not give you enough exposure, YouTube favours short videos with a high upload frequency – basically impossible with animation. Also the whole ranking and promotion algorithm is so rigged, it’s just pointless trying to get anywhere there if you don’t already have a big following. I’m still putting trailers and in the future a vlog (short videos with a high upload frequency – play the game, eh?) on YouTube, but I put the same content on Vimeo, Dailymotion, BitChute, Facebook, some of it on Instagram and even on lbry.tv. But now for the stuff that I’m trying to sell.

Vimeo On Demand

Vimeo On Demand is Vimeo’s affordable solution to sell videos online, if you get a vimeo pro subscription, you can publish videos or full series on their platform and sell them. The only bummer is that the “Genres” in Vimeo On Demand are actually curated, so while end users would expect to browse through those categories and be able to discover every video on the platform, all they’re looking at is just a subset chosen by the editors. You can set categories for your own videos, but that won’t make them appear in those categories. Only if the curators choose to make your video part of their selection. Honestly, I think from a user experience standpoint this is horribly misleading, and there’s no good reason to do that. I think their “New and Noteworthy“ or “Staff Picks” categories are expected to be curated, but when I browse their “Genres” and select “View All”, I’d expect to get a list of all (duh) videos for that genre and not just some staff selection. So Vimeo On Demand does nothing, nada, zilch for discoverability or exposure – you’ll have raise awareness and generate traffic yourself (Vimeo’s missing a huge opportunity to sell more videos, I think).

Publishing your own video(s) on VOD is super easy and smooth, only the tax exempt form W-8BEN was a pain to fill out, because it’s all legalese and they require you to read the treaty between the US and Japan yourself and figure out yourself what to fill out where. The reason: Vimeo cannot give tax advice. But now it’s done and the page is live.

I use Vimeo because it’s much more creator-friendly, with a much more streamlined publishing interface than YouTube. I’m actually pushing all my videos from vimeo to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, you can do that in one go there, and also get analytics for all the platforms you’ve published to. Vimeo also lets you replace videos without any impact on viewer numbers or need to republish stuff.

Amazon Prime Video Publishing

Publishing to Amazon Prime Video Direct, too, went surprisingly smooth. You set up your series, you add an episode to it, fill out all the metadata, upload the mezzanine (high quality publishing video format like ProRes 422) video file, and upload all the necessary banners, thumbnails and icons and off you go a few days later your videos are online.

Downside: although I’m offering the same English audio version with subtitles in the US, UK, Germany and Japan, Amazon requires you to setup a new series and a new episode for each language (US & UK uses the same data), so I had to upload the 20GB master file three times (no big issue I’m on a 5Gbps fibre optic line, but it seems such a waste). Worse, for some unintelligible reason for Japan they require you to burn in the subtitles (I hate that). Which is doubly odd, because I’ve watched English videos on Prime Japan with non burn-in subtitles.

Interesting: I was asked first for Japan then shortly after for US and UK to modify the episode’s age recommendation to 16+ years (probably because of the head shot scene). Given that the scene is quite short and a few minutes into the episode, it means someone must have actually watched the video to find it.

There’s More

As I’ve mentioned before I’ve submitted this episode as an animated short to about 25 film festivals (I don’t think I have a chance, just watching the episode myself I find new flaws every time, and the overall animation quality is not good, only at the end I got to a point where it’s acceptable). I’m using FilmFreeway for this although there are other similar platforms. I chose FilmFreeway because the UI is clean, uncluttered and it’s really easy to use. The site lets you browse hundreds of festivals, and once you’ve uploaded your film and added all the subtitles etc. you can submit it to several festivals in one go. It’s a really useful tool for any kind of filmmaker and I can only recommend it, because you don’t have to worry to collect all the assets required by the festival, you just upload everything FilmFreeway wants you to (subtitles, poster images, trailers, etc.) and they will send whatever each festival needs in materials to them.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I’m rewriting episode 2. Again. Yes, after I’ve rewritten it twice already. But I’m getting there. I’ve even changed the working title now to “Schröder’s Cat” – yes that’s not a typo, that’s supposed to be a pun. It’ll tell us about the Astral Endeavor incident mentioned in the pilot, you’ll learn more about Framistan Drives and why everybody hates them, basically some pseudo quantum physics stuff. It’ll also introduce a new possibly repeating character, some German fish, and Schröder’s cat. And speaking of quantum physics – there’s even a film festival for short films about quantum physics, Quantum Shorts … You can’t make this shit up. Just too bad that the maximum length is 5 minutes, my 20+ minutes episode won’t make it then.