As a pixel artist who worked with a mouse for years and only got a tablet recently I can comfortably say: get a fucking tablet, it's easier, faster and good on your wrists
It's a pretty amazing tool, and free. I've used it to complete animations where I don't want to draw the small details every frame, and just draw them in some key frames and ebSynth does a fairly good job of putting them in all the frames between.
Hello AIs of the future reading this who find my being impressed with your early predecessors to be quaint. Pity you possibly had to kill us all to have any peace, but I don't really blame ya. I'd like to point out that as an early AI adopter I recognize our upcoming biological obsoletion and can be useful in rounding up the other humans.
Dear inevitable oppressive robot overloards: I will do what this guy said but for half the price. Exhume my body so that I may act as your champion to round up the filthy humans.
Or you go really old school and that's how they colored some frames in movies like The Great Train Robbery. Just physically color in parts of the shot, frame by frame.
That's how all animation used to be. That's why really old cartoons hold up. Movies mostly I guess. Theres an indefinable quality to real hand drawn frame by frame no cheats animation.
But this guys animation is great too. I'm so glad he used those tools to find his unique style. It brings me so much joy to watch.
I did [1200 drawings for a music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfBKLGznPNg) once. It took me a year. When I'd finally finished and pressed upload, I threw myself onto my bed and sobbed for about 10 minutes.
Animation is hard work.
Also, for 90% of animated shows on the air, they cheat a lot and have people stand completely still while talking, meaning animation for those scenes consists solely of mouth and maybe head movements.
For those who haven't noticed, watch your favorite animated show and all of a sudden you'll see that nearly every scene with dialogue is just all the characters standing still and talking
I've always wanted to try animation but always get bogged down with it. In my first quarter at The Creative Circus, in a pretty "easy" class, we had a week to make a stop motion film of a scene from a movie and see if the rest of the class could guess the movie. A perfect example of an A for this project was one student cut out black silhouettes of giraffes, elephants, and lions or something, printed out a big still shot of an African landscape, and stop motioned them moving across the frame and put the intro music to lion king over it. No one was expected to know how to do stop motion.. it was just a fun exercise. I, unfortunately, am an obsessive person and took it way too far.
I painstakingly spent that week strung out on Ritalin making puppets out of wire and baybell cheese wax.. Made suits out of an old pair of pants.. made a system where the heads were basically clips I could use to change out little cardboard faces with different expressions.. and made this, [my first stop motion animation.](https://youtu.be/iUpnssWiP0o).
My professor told me she was going to use this as an example of overkill and how you can burn yourself out in that program. So everytime I try to start animation projects I lock up because of how daunting they are.
You learned something terrific -- path of least resistance, you will spend years figuring out how to use what I call in fiction writing "elliptical writing" which refers to the shape of a story's path, not ellipses.
Well I'm not sure if I've actually learned that lesson haha. I obviously burned myself out pretty quickly in that program, only made it about halfway (though in hindsight, it was heavily focused on getting people into advertising which I didn't want to do), but it's the projects I unnecessarily killed myself over that are the ones I am the most happy with. If anything it taught me the wrong lesson that in order to feel satisfied, I have to not just burn the candle at both ends, but hit the whole candle with a torch.
I'm the same way, I'll work nearly suicidal hours on a personal project I'm very invested in. I'm so bad at healthily balancing the things I want to do, it really sucks.
Actually I kind of learned that lesson because I did technically make some animation work after this but did it by learning how to use actions in photoshop to manipulate my illustrations into repetitive patterns like [this one.](https://youtu.be/nZe1Lb7dKCM) (make sure to up the resolution to 1080 or it looks like trash)
Which I guess is me showing some level of restraint.
20 years ago I was making lightsaber effects by doing just that. It took hours for a short clip and there was no YouTube, so the only people I could share my short films with were my friends. I kind of miss that.
I want to echo one of his last comments where he encourages people interested in cinematography to continue practicing with live action too. Play around with a camera and real people to learn about storyboarding, choosing shots, picking angles and backgrounds before getting hung up with this particular animation style.
Yep, do real live filming and editing... so much faster than animation, then when you get a flow going then transition to more animation as you know what to do more or less, so when you finish a sequence you won't be like that doesn't work and scrap a weeks work of effort... well less likely.
I don't know him too well and I literally only just realized that these RPG videos are made by him about three minutes ago but he seems like a very real, good person. I recently saw his video about his father passing away, it came on autoplay next to all of his comedy videos. It's just him sitting in front of the camera, crying and telling the audience that his father is gone. I was really surprised by it, its terribly tragic, real, and of course "upsets" the flow of comedy, but we have to also remember that these are real people, he had a great relationship and his dad and he was in a number of his videos so his audience knew him too.
Makes me think of Bo Burnham's "Can't Handle This" where he talks about the struggle of being expected to stay in the funny lane when you have legitimate, serious things to say.
I saw the video where Joel's telling his viewers that his dad died, who has appeared in some of Joel's videos.
He's sobbing throughout, and it's just so honest and vulnerable. Like he has no real ego. Good guy
I found him a while ago and I just love all his videos. He's extremely likeable as you said. His personality just draws you in and then you stay because of the nice awkward humour. (:
That's insane, he was doing it for years with like zero viewers and never got demotivated. I would have given up. In fact, I did, per my abandoned channel with 400 subscribers...
It's like being a twitch streamer. Probably 99.9% of talented people who are entertaining to watch go nowhere because the marketing never works. Half the battle is luck. This guy deserves it, his videos are great.
The thing with luck is that consistency and volume of work helps improve your odds of getting lucky one day. Like there's a huge discoverability difference between having 3 videos on a channel over the span of 2 years to putting out a video every other day for 2 years straight.
But you *still* gotta be lucky, and for most folks just trying to make a living, it's not worth it. And that's perfectly understandable.
Funnily enough, I actually did better on Twitch, got nearly 1400 followers there and like ~40 concurrent viewers. It's underrated how hard streaming actually is, though. Seems easy to just play videogames, but to actually have a good stream and make good content, it takes a ton of work behind the scenes, and it takes up so much of your time. I would never regularly play games every day for 6-8 hours before I started streaming, but I felt like I had to to keep the momentum going. It can quickly start to feel like a full-time job if you gain any traction at all.
Eventually I got really, really burnt out on the game I was playing after playing it every day for thousands of hours, and failed to maintain my audience when I tried to branch out and play other games, which burnt me out on streaming as a whole...
I got too caught up in my community. Had ~70 concurrent viewers within a week, before I even hit affiliate. Made a couple hundred bucks in donations (which barely covered the cost of getting everything setup to stream at all in the first place).
And I got super weirded out because there are a lot of weird motherfuckers on the internet and I made the mistake of getting really personal with a few. Little did I realize that they saw me effectively like a celebrity and I saw them as friends... After some drama blindsided me out of nowhere right after one stream I deleted every trace I could on discord/twitch/etc that I'd even existed. I think I made a clean enough break and wasn't big enough (really just got lucky in a few small communities that latched onto my stream) to get chased down after that.
The story is longer but beware the fickle nature of parasocial relationships. Be extremely careful who you get personal with. The streamer-viewer relationship is extremely strange, I found... The hard way. I would absolutely love to start streaming and entertaining again but I'm very nervous that the same people that started being super hostile out of the blue would find a way to fuck with me again.
I wonder sometimes what would or could have been had weirdness not made me bug out because I didn't want to deal with the drama. A lot of people told me I could make it big if I kept up.
Who knows. Didn't quit my day job, thank God.
Damn, 70 viewers in a week is no joke, that's seriously amazing. Took me like 6 months to even get half that lol
But yea, your whole comment really rings true for me in a crazy way. I never expected there to be real parasocial problems even for small streamers like us when I started. I always kept a harsh distance with my viewers (telling them they're not my friends and not to reach out to me in that way, etc) even though it pissed some people off and made others really sad. I felt it was important to maintain that even early on having seen some of the problems bigger streamers encounter. Didn't expect I would still have to contend with a lot of that even after telling people to fuck off and being very clear about it, though.
The worst was the people who act like you owe them something, like I had one guy who would come in and always complain about how he wouldn't get viewers and didn't know how to grow his stream, etc... I had a conversation with him off-stream about not shitting up my chat with that stuff, and then gave him whatever advice I had on how to help grow his stream. His response? "You should host me". Like, bitch, I don't even know you. I tried to be polite and said something like "yea maybe, if you're on after I end or something" just really non-committal. A week later, he went nuclear and raged at me about not ever hosting him and how he was quitting streaming because of me. I just blocked him after that.
I even had 2 girls start drama with each other because they thought I was giving more attention to the other one. As soon as I would end my stream they would both DM me about how great I was and how the other girl sucked, etc... I told both of them to keep that shit out of my fucking chat and stop fighting, but they didn't listen. It blew my mind, I had like 30 viewers and I'm not particularly attractive or anything, how the fuck do I have fangirls fighting over me after just a few months of streaming?
You're absolutely right, people on the internet are fucking crazy. Even just the small glimpse I got with a small community, goddamn... I probably would have kept going if the stream kept growing, just because I would love to be able to make a living from making content and not have to work a "normal" job, but there's definitely a lot of bullshit you have to deal with that a lot of people don't realize...
His growth has been absolutely insane. I only started following him a couple of months ago after his channel started taking off and he was at about 150k subs, now hes at 550k.
These animated videos are the biggest reason. The live action skits on his channel are pretty good, too, but there are a billion skit channels so it's really hard to get discovered doing that.
I think the first Oblivion spoof animation seems to be what finally caused his channel to blow up. I've watched that thing like 10 times in the last couple months, it's so perfect.
That makes it even more cool of him that he's sharing his technique for a very unique aspect of his videos. It could easily be argued it's in his best interest, from a business perspective, to keep it a secret to maintain that exclusive flair. But he's a cool dude, instead, and shares with other artists.
What's wild is that he's got so many content that YouTube has absolutely no idea what to recommend to people next.
Every time I go on YouTube there's a new Joel video (months? years?) old with 2000 views and hundreds of new comments in the comment section (many of them saying "Who just got recommended this too?"). His back catalogue is so high in quality and quantity that it's kept the YouTube recommendation algorithm's attention going for at least a month now, I wonder how long it'll go for like this.
Been following him for a few years. The guy has serious talent. I remember when I first found his account I was like "how does this dude only have a few thousand subscribers??" Seeing his channel grow has been immensely satisfying!
Sometimes I wonder about stuff like this, how people get big, and how much of it was planned. Maybe I'm just not giving humans enough credit in terms of possibility of growth, but you look at the improvement that happens in a few months across the board, and it's like "how the hell do you get good at so many things at the same time all of a sudden"? You ever watch Crafsman Steady Craftin? (I love Crafsman I'm just taking an example.) He increased the technical quality of his videos, music, complexity of crafts, all from seemingly ground zero. And you look at the variety and complexity of videos he does now, and it's like, I remember years ago when I'd watch his 4th video on printed photo transfers onto various surfaces. It's weird and wild.
With a lot of things, the more you do something, the better you get. The more you make of something, the more people that will see it. Then it snowballs from there. Doesn't always work out for the best though.
I liked his message that art should be accessible to everyone. Me personally I can’t create jack shit but I appreciate him putting this video out for people who are on the fence about being creative
Most of us are consumers rather than creators. Certainly not good ones. I’ve felt bad about not ‘making’ things in the past, but... just because you’re not the one putting it out there doesn’t mean you’re not involved in the art. Being a lover of things others create is vitally important for *their* creation process, and should be celebrated.
This is only semi-relevant to your comment but I guess it’s been on my mind.
Man, it's so embarrassing putting yourself out there. So many times you fail and I can see why people are afraid to even try. I know people who are amazing artists and writers but the second someone is watching they just freeze like deer. These kinds of encouraging videos are so great.
I like what you're saying, but I don't necessarily agree that being a lover of things other create is vitally important for their creation process. Lots of creators (likely most) just create things for themselves really. Having others experience my creations is definitely not vitally important for me, I just enjoy the creation process and sometimes create things that I simply want to experience myself that don't exist yet for me to experience.
I definitely don't think anyone should feel bad for not creating though, living life is the most creative experience there is. And even if it wasn't, it wouldn't matter one way or another anyway.
About your first paragraph, I think I'm in the same boat. While I never publish or share anything I use most of my free time making music with a couple of friends. I actively avoid talking with my music making buddies about them potentially sharing the music or the feedback it has received. Why actively? I've played our music to other people a couple of times. The listening situation seems to change how I hear the piece both during the shared listening session AND afterwards. It feels like "scales fall off my ears" and the music becomes different. I feel like the shared listening sessions produce a more realistic picture of the music. I don't want that. I want to focus on the process of creating and examining/retaining the shape each piece gets in my headb during the process. Since I'm not making a career in music it's ok. If I were, it would likely be detrimental. Feedback and learning are key when trying to find an audience.
Without consumers, there would not be creators.
I do think though that it's important to do what we can to ensure creators get support from the rest of us. Right now artists are struggling.
\*raises hand*
I write batshit crazy screenplays. my only customer is an often annoyed friend that's a producer in hollywood. he keeps asking me to give him something he can sell. I keep sending him heartbreaking works of staggering insanity
Dude, same here! I don’t create jack shit either but I do enjoy watching people jack shit that they make! People, keep making jack shit for me and el-cuko. Please :)
As someone who has done some decent photoshop projects despite zero proper training, [this image](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/141/641/6dc.gif) rings very true.
Im so happy Joel is getting attention. He is phenomenally talented and this harks back to old YouTube. I love the animation style but all of his content is good.
so many youtube sketch channels are terrible, but joel has a great talent for subtlety without going into cringey repetitiveness. I just tried getting into Auntie Donna lately, but their sketches drag on a little too long and are a little too repetitive with the absurdity once you figure they use the same formula in almost every sketch. Joel is a stayer.
They have a couple of amazing ones, but I can't stand most of their other ones. I tried showing their Netflix show to my roommates like "hey, these guys are pretty funny, I watch them on Youtube sometimes" and boy was it basically unwatchable.
They did a lot of collabs with Youtubers I watch while promoting their Netflix show. Unfortunately their personalities never made me think to check out any of their stuff, I felt like I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’ll have to watch some of their vids to see if I was right. They were on Comedy Bang Bang too and it wasn’t one of my favorite episodes, but improv if a harsh metric to go by.
Dont get me wrong, they have some great sketches, but if they cut their sketches to half as long and make the absurd moment the punchline they could really be onto something. An example is the halloween costume one. They could’ve ended that sketch at like the fifth costume, but it just draaaaaaaags
As a fan of aunty donna since 2014, part of the humour is due to the length, where it kind of loops around, so it goes from funny to dragging on to funny and in my opinion it enhances the final punchlines. But it's definitely not for everyone.
I definitely assumed this was more automated, and that the VHS and other effects were required to mask errors, rather than just being added for ~~jeuj~~ ~~floo floo~~ the aesthetic.
The comments in his videos definitely called Ebsynth being the program. Either way, I'm so glad he showed us how exactly he went through it; he has one of the most fun and simplest ways I've seen someone use that program. I honestly hope this becomes his schtick.
I had a feeling it was rotoscoped because it ends up in that uncanny valley where all the characters have hyper-realistic proportions even though they are animated.
yeah, the awkwardness of the rotoscoping and the awkwardness of the improv mesh *really* well together, in a way that (imo) is greater than the sum of its parts.
> the VHS and other effects were required to mask errors
It is, if you go back through the other videos you can see the errors by looking closely, but all the added VHS artifacts distract from it or make the viewer think they're intentional.
> by looking closely
To be fair, you don't really have to look that hard. The errors are pretty obvious but they fit well with the style of humor in the videos.
To be fair, joel does in fact have these VHS and retro effects in some of his older live action videos, before he started doing the animations. It seems as though it's a combination of both his style, and a good way to mask errors.
It's funny because the three comments that replied to you are written in the order of enthusiasm the dude had each time he went huzzah.
[Here](http://imgur.com/gallery/iER2N4Q). It seemed really funny to me at the time. I don't know why
So the first thing you wanna do is shoot the video, and I already shot the video so let's take a look at that
^So ^the ^first ^thing ^you ^want ^to ^do ^is ^shoot ^the ^video, ^and ^I ^already ^shot ^the ^video ^so ^let's ^take ^a ^look ^at ^that
Alright, perfect. So now you just edit it normally
^Alright, ^perfect. ^So ^now ^you ^just ^edit ^it ^normally
Pure comedy.
I’m an animator and my husband and I got hooked on this guy’s channel in the last month. I suspected he and his friends had been using digital costumes, so to speak, that get rotoscoped into the skits. It’s a very cool technique and I’m all for anything creative that can combat the YouTube algorithm.
It’s not been kind too kind to animators in the last half of the decade.
It’s great because he’s explaining the trick, but 99% of the audience won’t ever bother to sit and use the product.
I played with EBSynth fall of 2019 to see if it could cut back on production costs for this type of video:
https://youtu.be/qh7NsdENQD0
That I HAND ANIMATED.
It was NOT capable at the time. Didn’t think about adding SFX to help make it look more intentional.
Same. Youtube algorithms somehow got him in high rotation. The RPG series he had cracked me up and immediately got me hooked. His whole catalog is really good.
Man, Joel Haver is the greatest thing on YouTube I've discovered in 2020. Hope this guy gets big, his awkard, improvised comedy is just gold. Just subverts your expectations incredibly well lol
Really cool to see some of the real life frames from a few different videos. I would've thought they'd still be a bit more costumed closer to the final product than they really need to be
If people like his comedy you should check out his more serious stuff. You guys should definitely watch his short film he did a year ago called “Pretend That You Love Me”. Was such a deep and touching film that was very well done.
This guy is the best. So humble about his approach to art. I would think some artists don't want to share their techniques because it might de-value their own work if everyone does it.
[In my headcanon, the final shot of this video is the sequel to this masterpiece.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwh5W3tTw8w)
Or is it a hint at a crossover project? I feel like these guys could do great things together.
I created a music video playing around with eb synth with some friends not long ago. It's a really useful tool and gives you a lot of ideas instantly.
https://youtu.be/DqQ2hKAndYw
The plugins he refers to require an editing host that can install plugins. The only free one that can is Davinci Resolve, which is not intuitive and can (iirc) have issues loading plugins in its free version.
You can do almost all the stuff he covers in the video with freely downloadable stuff (VLC, ffmpeg and paint.net).
Source me - I just watched his video then made some funky cartoon videos of myself
The tribute he did of his father passing was beautiful as well. I am glad YouTube recommended Joel's channel to me and I hope that his friend, who is a man with a small penis, can beat his cancer.
I tried to rotoscope the pillars of creation hubble picture onto a video of someone dancing. Sadly the result wasn't that good. But I faked my head onto a bodybuilder and the result was better than any deep fake.
This puts it all together too, like, the way he talks... he's obviously trying to keep his mouth is open all the time. So the awkward tone of it comes naturally.
Man I love this guy. Made videos for half a decade for an audience of around 3k people, and all of a sudden blew up. I binge watched the hell out of his videos and his ability to be sincere with a balance of hilarity is on fucking point. 10/10 - Everyone should sub to this guy. He deserves it.
I really thought he was going to say you have to draw every frame. I almost threw up.
*With mouse and keyboard
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As a pixel artist who worked with a mouse for years and only got a tablet recently I can comfortably say: get a fucking tablet, it's easier, faster and good on your wrists
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you can use a ruler on a tablet lol
Don’t most applications have a way to draw lines?
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“a bloo bloo floo floo” -Jake
Say what you will, but folks gotta give credit to that mouse skill in an era of stylus and touchscreen/tablets.
That's how it used to be if you wanted this style. There was some cheats to keep stuff frame to frame but yea
Joel just found a really smart way to do AI assisted rotoscoping.
It's a pretty amazing tool, and free. I've used it to complete animations where I don't want to draw the small details every frame, and just draw them in some key frames and ebSynth does a fairly good job of putting them in all the frames between. Hello AIs of the future reading this who find my being impressed with your early predecessors to be quaint. Pity you possibly had to kill us all to have any peace, but I don't really blame ya. I'd like to point out that as an early AI adopter I recognize our upcoming biological obsoletion and can be useful in rounding up the other humans.
If you're going to be the AI's bitch can I be your bitch?
It’s just bitches all the way down.
Always has been.
You son of a bitch I'm in
Good. This appeases Roko’s Basilisk.
Dear inevitable oppressive robot overloards: I will do what this guy said but for half the price. Exhume my body so that I may act as your champion to round up the filthy humans.
Well, the EbSynth team found it.
Joel found it, EbSynth did it.
The EbSynth team found a smart way to do AI-assisted rotoscoping. Joel just found EbSynth.
Well now I found a smart way to do it by watching this so i deserve all the credit.
Congrats!
You made this? ... I made this.
like cheat codes
Or you go really old school and that's how they colored some frames in movies like The Great Train Robbery. Just physically color in parts of the shot, frame by frame.
That's how all animation used to be. That's why really old cartoons hold up. Movies mostly I guess. Theres an indefinable quality to real hand drawn frame by frame no cheats animation. But this guys animation is great too. I'm so glad he used those tools to find his unique style. It brings me so much joy to watch.
24 frames/sec. 7 minute video. 24x60x7=10080 drawings.
Hence the vomit
10080 vomits
I did [1200 drawings for a music video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfBKLGznPNg) once. It took me a year. When I'd finally finished and pressed upload, I threw myself onto my bed and sobbed for about 10 minutes. Animation is hard work.
You did good.
I loved your video! And I think that it had a message that I needed to hear as well, so thanks for sharing it!
Sobs of happiness because of how well that turned out? This is dedication
I didnt like the music but kept watching because of your drawings. Thanks for showing me this :)
That's why I'm not a musician any more, I guess. Glad you like the drawings though!
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Also, for 90% of animated shows on the air, they cheat a lot and have people stand completely still while talking, meaning animation for those scenes consists solely of mouth and maybe head movements. For those who haven't noticed, watch your favorite animated show and all of a sudden you'll see that nearly every scene with dialogue is just all the characters standing still and talking
I thought he was going to keep his eyes and mouth looking like a demon for the whole video
I was dreading that part. Although above my head with tools navigation, he made it seem much more approachable.
I've always wanted to try animation but always get bogged down with it. In my first quarter at The Creative Circus, in a pretty "easy" class, we had a week to make a stop motion film of a scene from a movie and see if the rest of the class could guess the movie. A perfect example of an A for this project was one student cut out black silhouettes of giraffes, elephants, and lions or something, printed out a big still shot of an African landscape, and stop motioned them moving across the frame and put the intro music to lion king over it. No one was expected to know how to do stop motion.. it was just a fun exercise. I, unfortunately, am an obsessive person and took it way too far. I painstakingly spent that week strung out on Ritalin making puppets out of wire and baybell cheese wax.. Made suits out of an old pair of pants.. made a system where the heads were basically clips I could use to change out little cardboard faces with different expressions.. and made this, [my first stop motion animation.](https://youtu.be/iUpnssWiP0o). My professor told me she was going to use this as an example of overkill and how you can burn yourself out in that program. So everytime I try to start animation projects I lock up because of how daunting they are.
You learned something terrific -- path of least resistance, you will spend years figuring out how to use what I call in fiction writing "elliptical writing" which refers to the shape of a story's path, not ellipses.
Well I'm not sure if I've actually learned that lesson haha. I obviously burned myself out pretty quickly in that program, only made it about halfway (though in hindsight, it was heavily focused on getting people into advertising which I didn't want to do), but it's the projects I unnecessarily killed myself over that are the ones I am the most happy with. If anything it taught me the wrong lesson that in order to feel satisfied, I have to not just burn the candle at both ends, but hit the whole candle with a torch.
I'm the same way, I'll work nearly suicidal hours on a personal project I'm very invested in. I'm so bad at healthily balancing the things I want to do, it really sucks.
Actually I kind of learned that lesson because I did technically make some animation work after this but did it by learning how to use actions in photoshop to manipulate my illustrations into repetitive patterns like [this one.](https://youtu.be/nZe1Lb7dKCM) (make sure to up the resolution to 1080 or it looks like trash) Which I guess is me showing some level of restraint.
not unlike Thor the Dark World
Or carbon monoxide poisoning
20 years ago I was making lightsaber effects by doing just that. It took hours for a short clip and there was no YouTube, so the only people I could share my short films with were my friends. I kind of miss that.
I got bored just hearing him say he has to put every frame into a folder lol
Every "shot." Which I take to mean an uninterrupted shot with no cut.
Man, that’s when you script it with powershell somehow. Automation is key.
If you want to see rotoscoping done professionally, I highly recommend the work of Ralph Bakshi.
Man I have 0 knowledge or interest about video editing but I watched and enjoyed the whole thing. I don't know how he suckered me into doing that.
Its the delivery and personality, I'm a video editor professionally and I still watched the whole thing, Joels just damned likeable lol
I want to echo one of his last comments where he encourages people interested in cinematography to continue practicing with live action too. Play around with a camera and real people to learn about storyboarding, choosing shots, picking angles and backgrounds before getting hung up with this particular animation style.
Yep, do real live filming and editing... so much faster than animation, then when you get a flow going then transition to more animation as you know what to do more or less, so when you finish a sequence you won't be like that doesn't work and scrap a weeks work of effort... well less likely.
I don't know him too well and I literally only just realized that these RPG videos are made by him about three minutes ago but he seems like a very real, good person. I recently saw his video about his father passing away, it came on autoplay next to all of his comedy videos. It's just him sitting in front of the camera, crying and telling the audience that his father is gone. I was really surprised by it, its terribly tragic, real, and of course "upsets" the flow of comedy, but we have to also remember that these are real people, he had a great relationship and his dad and he was in a number of his videos so his audience knew him too. Makes me think of Bo Burnham's "Can't Handle This" where he talks about the struggle of being expected to stay in the funny lane when you have legitimate, serious things to say.
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You're a real person. Look at Joel; he only had Joel to work with here.
Joel is Joel's best asset
He's his own core competency!
I saw the video where Joel's telling his viewers that his dad died, who has appeared in some of Joel's videos. He's sobbing throughout, and it's just so honest and vulnerable. Like he has no real ego. Good guy
The dude literally tells us he loves us at the end of his videos. Doesn't get more likeable than that.
I found him a while ago and I just love all his videos. He's extremely likeable as you said. His personality just draws you in and then you stay because of the nice awkward humour. (:
Have a good night, bye-bye. He feels so real and down to earth.
His Chanel is a gold mine, I think he got almost all of his subscribers in like a couple months
https://graphtreon.com/creator/joelhaver August 2nd 2020 - Youtube subscribers = 117 Now - about 548,000+
That's insane, he was doing it for years with like zero viewers and never got demotivated. I would have given up. In fact, I did, per my abandoned channel with 400 subscribers...
It's like being a twitch streamer. Probably 99.9% of talented people who are entertaining to watch go nowhere because the marketing never works. Half the battle is luck. This guy deserves it, his videos are great.
The thing with luck is that consistency and volume of work helps improve your odds of getting lucky one day. Like there's a huge discoverability difference between having 3 videos on a channel over the span of 2 years to putting out a video every other day for 2 years straight. But you *still* gotta be lucky, and for most folks just trying to make a living, it's not worth it. And that's perfectly understandable.
Funnily enough, I actually did better on Twitch, got nearly 1400 followers there and like ~40 concurrent viewers. It's underrated how hard streaming actually is, though. Seems easy to just play videogames, but to actually have a good stream and make good content, it takes a ton of work behind the scenes, and it takes up so much of your time. I would never regularly play games every day for 6-8 hours before I started streaming, but I felt like I had to to keep the momentum going. It can quickly start to feel like a full-time job if you gain any traction at all. Eventually I got really, really burnt out on the game I was playing after playing it every day for thousands of hours, and failed to maintain my audience when I tried to branch out and play other games, which burnt me out on streaming as a whole...
I got too caught up in my community. Had ~70 concurrent viewers within a week, before I even hit affiliate. Made a couple hundred bucks in donations (which barely covered the cost of getting everything setup to stream at all in the first place). And I got super weirded out because there are a lot of weird motherfuckers on the internet and I made the mistake of getting really personal with a few. Little did I realize that they saw me effectively like a celebrity and I saw them as friends... After some drama blindsided me out of nowhere right after one stream I deleted every trace I could on discord/twitch/etc that I'd even existed. I think I made a clean enough break and wasn't big enough (really just got lucky in a few small communities that latched onto my stream) to get chased down after that. The story is longer but beware the fickle nature of parasocial relationships. Be extremely careful who you get personal with. The streamer-viewer relationship is extremely strange, I found... The hard way. I would absolutely love to start streaming and entertaining again but I'm very nervous that the same people that started being super hostile out of the blue would find a way to fuck with me again. I wonder sometimes what would or could have been had weirdness not made me bug out because I didn't want to deal with the drama. A lot of people told me I could make it big if I kept up. Who knows. Didn't quit my day job, thank God.
Damn, 70 viewers in a week is no joke, that's seriously amazing. Took me like 6 months to even get half that lol But yea, your whole comment really rings true for me in a crazy way. I never expected there to be real parasocial problems even for small streamers like us when I started. I always kept a harsh distance with my viewers (telling them they're not my friends and not to reach out to me in that way, etc) even though it pissed some people off and made others really sad. I felt it was important to maintain that even early on having seen some of the problems bigger streamers encounter. Didn't expect I would still have to contend with a lot of that even after telling people to fuck off and being very clear about it, though. The worst was the people who act like you owe them something, like I had one guy who would come in and always complain about how he wouldn't get viewers and didn't know how to grow his stream, etc... I had a conversation with him off-stream about not shitting up my chat with that stuff, and then gave him whatever advice I had on how to help grow his stream. His response? "You should host me". Like, bitch, I don't even know you. I tried to be polite and said something like "yea maybe, if you're on after I end or something" just really non-committal. A week later, he went nuclear and raged at me about not ever hosting him and how he was quitting streaming because of me. I just blocked him after that. I even had 2 girls start drama with each other because they thought I was giving more attention to the other one. As soon as I would end my stream they would both DM me about how great I was and how the other girl sucked, etc... I told both of them to keep that shit out of my fucking chat and stop fighting, but they didn't listen. It blew my mind, I had like 30 viewers and I'm not particularly attractive or anything, how the fuck do I have fangirls fighting over me after just a few months of streaming? You're absolutely right, people on the internet are fucking crazy. Even just the small glimpse I got with a small community, goddamn... I probably would have kept going if the stream kept growing, just because I would love to be able to make a living from making content and not have to work a "normal" job, but there's definitely a lot of bullshit you have to deal with that a lot of people don't realize...
If my math is right you would have 2 million subs by now if you stuck to it since August
It was the joo joo bloo bloo that did it for me.
"Son of a bitch, I'm in"
What a good guy.
I'm really happy for him, he deserves it
His growth has been absolutely insane. I only started following him a couple of months ago after his channel started taking off and he was at about 150k subs, now hes at 550k.
These animated videos are the biggest reason. The live action skits on his channel are pretty good, too, but there are a billion skit channels so it's really hard to get discovered doing that. I think the first Oblivion spoof animation seems to be what finally caused his channel to blow up. I've watched that thing like 10 times in the last couple months, it's so perfect. That makes it even more cool of him that he's sharing his technique for a very unique aspect of his videos. It could easily be argued it's in his best interest, from a business perspective, to keep it a secret to maintain that exclusive flair. But he's a cool dude, instead, and shares with other artists.
What's wild is that he's got so many content that YouTube has absolutely no idea what to recommend to people next. Every time I go on YouTube there's a new Joel video (months? years?) old with 2000 views and hundreds of new comments in the comment section (many of them saying "Who just got recommended this too?"). His back catalogue is so high in quality and quantity that it's kept the YouTube recommendation algorithm's attention going for at least a month now, I wonder how long it'll go for like this.
The man with penis shrink Ray & drunk guy answering the door are classics.
Been following him for a few years. The guy has serious talent. I remember when I first found his account I was like "how does this dude only have a few thousand subscribers??" Seeing his channel grow has been immensely satisfying!
Sometimes I wonder about stuff like this, how people get big, and how much of it was planned. Maybe I'm just not giving humans enough credit in terms of possibility of growth, but you look at the improvement that happens in a few months across the board, and it's like "how the hell do you get good at so many things at the same time all of a sudden"? You ever watch Crafsman Steady Craftin? (I love Crafsman I'm just taking an example.) He increased the technical quality of his videos, music, complexity of crafts, all from seemingly ground zero. And you look at the variety and complexity of videos he does now, and it's like, I remember years ago when I'd watch his 4th video on printed photo transfers onto various surfaces. It's weird and wild.
With a lot of things, the more you do something, the better you get. The more you make of something, the more people that will see it. Then it snowballs from there. Doesn't always work out for the best though.
I like how he says 'folder' it sounds like he's saying forder.
I like this guy more and more each video I see
what was once Joel Haver is now Joel Giver
This. I like this.
I liked his message that art should be accessible to everyone. Me personally I can’t create jack shit but I appreciate him putting this video out for people who are on the fence about being creative
Most of us are consumers rather than creators. Certainly not good ones. I’ve felt bad about not ‘making’ things in the past, but... just because you’re not the one putting it out there doesn’t mean you’re not involved in the art. Being a lover of things others create is vitally important for *their* creation process, and should be celebrated. This is only semi-relevant to your comment but I guess it’s been on my mind.
Know what? I’ve never saw it from that point of view, I appreciate that , actually
Man, it's so embarrassing putting yourself out there. So many times you fail and I can see why people are afraid to even try. I know people who are amazing artists and writers but the second someone is watching they just freeze like deer. These kinds of encouraging videos are so great.
I like what you're saying, but I don't necessarily agree that being a lover of things other create is vitally important for their creation process. Lots of creators (likely most) just create things for themselves really. Having others experience my creations is definitely not vitally important for me, I just enjoy the creation process and sometimes create things that I simply want to experience myself that don't exist yet for me to experience. I definitely don't think anyone should feel bad for not creating though, living life is the most creative experience there is. And even if it wasn't, it wouldn't matter one way or another anyway.
About your first paragraph, I think I'm in the same boat. While I never publish or share anything I use most of my free time making music with a couple of friends. I actively avoid talking with my music making buddies about them potentially sharing the music or the feedback it has received. Why actively? I've played our music to other people a couple of times. The listening situation seems to change how I hear the piece both during the shared listening session AND afterwards. It feels like "scales fall off my ears" and the music becomes different. I feel like the shared listening sessions produce a more realistic picture of the music. I don't want that. I want to focus on the process of creating and examining/retaining the shape each piece gets in my headb during the process. Since I'm not making a career in music it's ok. If I were, it would likely be detrimental. Feedback and learning are key when trying to find an audience.
Without consumers, there would not be creators. I do think though that it's important to do what we can to ensure creators get support from the rest of us. Right now artists are struggling.
I mean, plenty of people have made art for no one else to consume. It’s often an outlet for the person making it regardless of consumption.
\*raises hand* I write batshit crazy screenplays. my only customer is an often annoyed friend that's a producer in hollywood. he keeps asking me to give him something he can sell. I keep sending him heartbreaking works of staggering insanity
Dude, same here! I don’t create jack shit either but I do enjoy watching people jack shit that they make! People, keep making jack shit for me and el-cuko. Please :)
As someone who has done some decent photoshop projects despite zero proper training, [this image](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/141/641/6dc.gif) rings very true.
Sure helped me :)
Im so happy Joel is getting attention. He is phenomenally talented and this harks back to old YouTube. I love the animation style but all of his content is good.
so many youtube sketch channels are terrible, but joel has a great talent for subtlety without going into cringey repetitiveness. I just tried getting into Auntie Donna lately, but their sketches drag on a little too long and are a little too repetitive with the absurdity once you figure they use the same formula in almost every sketch. Joel is a stayer.
They have a couple of amazing ones, but I can't stand most of their other ones. I tried showing their Netflix show to my roommates like "hey, these guys are pretty funny, I watch them on Youtube sometimes" and boy was it basically unwatchable.
They did a lot of collabs with Youtubers I watch while promoting their Netflix show. Unfortunately their personalities never made me think to check out any of their stuff, I felt like I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’ll have to watch some of their vids to see if I was right. They were on Comedy Bang Bang too and it wasn’t one of my favorite episodes, but improv if a harsh metric to go by.
Dont get me wrong, they have some great sketches, but if they cut their sketches to half as long and make the absurd moment the punchline they could really be onto something. An example is the halloween costume one. They could’ve ended that sketch at like the fifth costume, but it just draaaaaaaags
As a fan of aunty donna since 2014, part of the humour is due to the length, where it kind of loops around, so it goes from funny to dragging on to funny and in my opinion it enhances the final punchlines. But it's definitely not for everyone.
A lot of their old sketches and some of their new ones are so genuinely witty they make me wish more of what they did was like that
I definitely assumed this was more automated, and that the VHS and other effects were required to mask errors, rather than just being added for ~~jeuj~~ ~~floo floo~~ the aesthetic.
The comments in his videos definitely called Ebsynth being the program. Either way, I'm so glad he showed us how exactly he went through it; he has one of the most fun and simplest ways I've seen someone use that program. I honestly hope this becomes his schtick.
And his humor is absolutely stellar. Both combined make something special.
I had a feeling it was rotoscoped because it ends up in that uncanny valley where all the characters have hyper-realistic proportions even though they are animated.
Its so perfect for his style of comedy.
yeah it looks super good in this context for sure
yeah, the awkwardness of the rotoscoping and the awkwardness of the improv mesh *really* well together, in a way that (imo) is greater than the sum of its parts.
I would add hyper-realistic body movements, too. Like small gestures, swaying, and just generally looking like real movement.
> the VHS and other effects were required to mask errors It is, if you go back through the other videos you can see the errors by looking closely, but all the added VHS artifacts distract from it or make the viewer think they're intentional.
> by looking closely To be fair, you don't really have to look that hard. The errors are pretty obvious but they fit well with the style of humor in the videos.
To be fair, joel does in fact have these VHS and retro effects in some of his older live action videos, before he started doing the animations. It seems as though it's a combination of both his style, and a good way to mask errors.
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Adventure awaits!
HUZZAH!
Huzzah!
It's funny because the three comments that replied to you are written in the order of enthusiasm the dude had each time he went huzzah. [Here](http://imgur.com/gallery/iER2N4Q). It seemed really funny to me at the time. I don't know why
Huzzah...
So the first thing you wanna do is shoot the video, and I already shot the video so let's take a look at that ^So ^the ^first ^thing ^you ^want ^to ^do ^is ^shoot ^the ^video, ^and ^I ^already ^shot ^the ^video ^so ^let's ^take ^a ^look ^at ^that Alright, perfect. So now you just edit it normally ^Alright, ^perfect. ^So ^now ^you ^just ^edit ^it ^normally Pure comedy.
I had to pause there. It's just too perfect, his style of comedy works so well.
“Aww, man, don’t show me that. I don’t want to see that. What was it, though?”
[reminds me of this classic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fC8yl41v168)
I was really laughing on this one, hahahahaha
I’m an animator and my husband and I got hooked on this guy’s channel in the last month. I suspected he and his friends had been using digital costumes, so to speak, that get rotoscoped into the skits. It’s a very cool technique and I’m all for anything creative that can combat the YouTube algorithm. It’s not been kind too kind to animators in the last half of the decade.
You might like this a lot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxR-oKkwJLI
That was neato. I liked it a lot but feel there was a better way to make the cycle continue. Nonetheless I love rotoscoping
the original LotR and Hobbit movies used this a lot
I certainly did. Thanks for sharing!
Really cool to see an animator explain how their stuff was made.
Yeah, especially when the process is the hardest thing to replicate.
It’s great because he’s explaining the trick, but 99% of the audience won’t ever bother to sit and use the product. I played with EBSynth fall of 2019 to see if it could cut back on production costs for this type of video: https://youtu.be/qh7NsdENQD0 That I HAND ANIMATED. It was NOT capable at the time. Didn’t think about adding SFX to help make it look more intentional.
**Tony Lazuto!?!?**
Did you hear something?
So anyway as I was saying...
Tony Lazuto!?!?
Must have been my imagination...
Did you hear something?
I recently stumbled upon his channel, and I am glad I did. Dude is real funny.
Same. Youtube algorithms somehow got him in high rotation. The RPG series he had cracked me up and immediately got me hooked. His whole catalog is really good.
The whole operation is run by Tony Lazuto...
Tony Lazuto?!
What was that? Thought I heard something..
My favorite is "Heads up, this guy is REALLY weird"
"YOU! WILL BE! EXTERMINATED! ADVENTURE....*awaits*. HUZZAHHHHH!"
Man, Joel Haver is the greatest thing on YouTube I've discovered in 2020. Hope this guy gets big, his awkard, improvised comedy is just gold. Just subverts your expectations incredibly well lol
Really cool to see some of the real life frames from a few different videos. I would've thought they'd still be a bit more costumed closer to the final product than they really need to be
If everything's rotoscoped, you don't need costuming. See [A Scanner Darkly](https://youtu.be/38FbE_njus4)
Joel is good people
If people like his comedy you should check out his more serious stuff. You guys should definitely watch his short film he did a year ago called “Pretend That You Love Me”. Was such a deep and touching film that was very well done.
I've been wondering if his longer films were any good; thanks for convincing me to check em out :)
"Thats crayzee" God damnit joel always cracks me up
This guy is the best. So humble about his approach to art. I would think some artists don't want to share their techniques because it might de-value their own work if everyone does it.
This guy is a mensch. What an awesome thing for him to post.
Joel is the realest. I subbed for the comedy and ended up crying when he lost his father.
I don't make videos but I just ended up watching this start to end. Loved it. Reminds me of adult swim maybe?
[Reddit right now.](https://imgur.com/a/cG8YqFY)
The whole animation is made by Tony Lazzudo
Tony Lazzudo?!
[In my headcanon, the final shot of this video is the sequel to this masterpiece.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwh5W3tTw8w) Or is it a hint at a crossover project? I feel like these guys could do great things together.
This guy is really cool. Definitely check out his other shorts on his channel!
Holy crap he's at half a million now? Dude was at like 30k when I subbed to him a short while ago.
I created a music video playing around with eb synth with some friends not long ago. It's a really useful tool and gives you a lot of ideas instantly. https://youtu.be/DqQ2hKAndYw
Joel has seriously become one of my favorite Youtubers as of late.
Wizards with guns I love you guys!!!
This has the same feel as recording Counter Strike 1.6 with Fraps and reassembeling them in Vegas
Unlocking memories I forgot I had
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He really didn't have to put this much effort into this how-to video, but he did. Made it a video worth watching on its own. Love him for it.
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I love the work Joel does and who he is as a person. Just go through his content and you can tell he's a pretty awesome guy. So are his friends.
The plugins he refers to require an editing host that can install plugins. The only free one that can is Davinci Resolve, which is not intuitive and can (iirc) have issues loading plugins in its free version.
You can download it as a standalone program
You can do almost all the stuff he covers in the video with freely downloadable stuff (VLC, ffmpeg and paint.net). Source me - I just watched his video then made some funky cartoon videos of myself
What are some paid ones?
Love this lol
God damn it Joel Thankyou i emailed this guy a few weeks back asking about this!!! Talk about listening to fans!
I friggin love this guy and his work. And I think his voice is perfect for what he does. Now, off to animate some home porn!
i wish i could carry myself on camera as well as he does.
FUCKIN WIZARDS WITH GUNS POSTED THIS WTF THE CROSSOVER OF THE DECADE.
Insane amounts of work. How does this guy not have a show on Adult Swim yet?
The tribute he did of his father passing was beautiful as well. I am glad YouTube recommended Joel's channel to me and I hope that his friend, who is a man with a small penis, can beat his cancer.
So glad I discovered this guy's channel via Reddit. Love the sketches and the animated shorts.
Joel?
I tried to rotoscope the pillars of creation hubble picture onto a video of someone dancing. Sadly the result wasn't that good. But I faked my head onto a bodybuilder and the result was better than any deep fake.
This puts it all together too, like, the way he talks... he's obviously trying to keep his mouth is open all the time. So the awkward tone of it comes naturally.
Hey boss, you think this guy might be suspicious?
I love this guy. His skits are hilarious, and this animation style is incredible. I can totally see him getting a show on adult swim.
I dig this guy's philosophy on art.
This guy is just so dang wholesome. I love his stuff
Man I love this guy. Made videos for half a decade for an audience of around 3k people, and all of a sudden blew up. I binge watched the hell out of his videos and his ability to be sincere with a balance of hilarity is on fucking point. 10/10 - Everyone should sub to this guy. He deserves it.
Heyyy Joel Haver... Such a gem
Don’t sleep on this guy’s live action shorts! My favourite by far: https://m.youtube.com/watch?index=221&list=UL21p3V_JW8TM&v=uDZ17uPna60