Mike: Your first one minute thing, it’s gonna suck. I don’t care how talented you are, it’s gonna suck. 

Spencer: It is whether we like it or not. It’s AI is like in uh it’s everywhere. Just do the work. 

Mike: Do the work, you will get better, you will get better, you will get better. 

Spencer: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Creators Uncut. Like always, I’m super excited for another episode. We’ve got a great guest for you today. His name is Mike Blum. 

He has a YouTube channel called Barkster Kids Songs, but he also has an animation studio called Pipsqueak Animation. Mike, thanks for being on the show. 

Mike: Hey, thanks for having me. 

Spencer: Like always, we want our viewers to get to know you and kind of what you do. So uh, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your YouTube channel? Um, and then we can kind of dive into the animation stuff a little bit later. 

Mike: Sure, sure, sure. So um, so I have been uh in the animation industry for over 30 years. Uh I started my career at uh Disney feature animation. Oh wow. Um I have a kind of a weird background. Um, and I I like to sort of talk about this a little bit because um, you know, the thing with the kind of creative arts generally is that no one really cares what your background is as long as you make stuff that people find interesting. Uh so I have a super technical background. Um I have uh like an undergraduate degree in electrical and computer engineering and a graduate degree in computer science. Uh, and I started at Disney feature animation on the technology side, um, coding and then uh designing systems, and then um sort of uh supervising a whole team of software engineers and ultimately moved over to production, um, kind of one of those sort of like four sort of main supervisors on our features. But uh while I was there, um, over a period of 10 years, I sort of did these uh series of officially unofficial um CG animated shorts that eventually got uh sort of like you know, really good. 

Uh, you know, I got my first paper and I got my first offer to direct professionally, and I was able to leave Disney and sort of start a whole second career, which uh seems, you know, in hindsight in some sense a world apart from where I started. But um from my perspective, it seems like a sort of perfectly natural evolution. Um and so I, you know, I I like to just sort of remind people that it really doesn’t matter what you do during your day, um, uh as long as you sort of like work hard and have aspirations and you know, sort of can learn from your mistakes, uh, you know, you two can uh um uh can can produce creative work, um, whether that’s you know, sort of live action or animated or or whatever, it doesn’t make a difference. 

Yeah. Um so anyway, um the the sort of quick story is uh I you know I left Disney, I did this first series for Comedy Central, ended up getting nominated for an Emmy for that. Um It supposed to be just uh it was actually designed to be one of the OG um sort of digital short series. So it’s called The Adventures of Baxter McGuire. Um it was created by uh um Michael Whitehorn and Nick Biquet, um, who are really big folks in um in Hollywood. Uh Michael Whitehorn’s created like six network shows, including like King of Queens, uh Nick Piquet is like a big uh a big writer, he does TV, does movies, stuff. 

They’ve just done a stuff, ton of stuff. Um and so I was expecting that just to be in uh you know on the internet, live on the internet. And this is like 2006. Um I think something like that. 

So it’s like a really long time ago. But it turned out the the um the episodes turned out so well that they ended up putting them all on TV. So awesome. It was great, uh super exciting. You know, I went to Sundance and Annecy um with uh with that, and um I thought my career would sort of take off, right? Like, you know, nominate for an Emmy, all this, you know, an agent and this and that and the other thing, and it just man, it just doesn’t really work like that. 

I just didn’t get any heat at all off of any of that. And um kind of um ended up producing a a live action feature. Uh and uh which was great, uh a lot of work, um, and not a great business model because uh independent uh feature world is uh, you know, you raise the money, you make the thing, and then you pray that you can sell it afterwards. 

Um And it’s just, you know, it’s just not a way of making a living. Uh so I went back and uh people were like, hey, why don’t you do some more of that like you know funny animated stuff? Um and um I was oh yeah, yeah, I can do that. And so kind of refocused, uh started developing um some original shows, and kind of within I don’t know, a few months of that, we sold our first uh series, and it turned out to be uh a series for uh for YouTube. Uh and they basically just gave me a chunk of money, not a ton of money, but it was a real chunk of money. Um this was um this was again a long time ago, but uh it was around the time when YouTube had sort of set up this hundred million dollar um fund to sort of produce content uh for YouTube. Um and so we ended up selling a show to uh basically Smosh, um, which is a big YouTube channel. Um, and um and they gave me the money, and I thought that I was just gonna outsource the animation. I knew a lot of overseas animation studios. 

Um I kind of um, you know, sort of on and off do some overseas travel as a kind of quote unquote animation expert. And I just assumed that you know, in one of these studios I knew in Nepal or India Um would come in with a bid that would be you know super cheap and we just go with them. The bids came in and they were like, not that great. Um, and I knew how to do a schedule and a budget, and I made what uh at the time just sort of felt like a tactical decision to buy a bunch of machines and software and set up a little shop and kind of just do it in-house. Um And that series was super fun and successful, and we got it done in the budget, you know, under budget, on time. Um, and then we started selling some other YouTube series to places like DreamWorks TV. Uh, and I had I had the you know mechanism to sort of do more of this. And then people started coming to us and asking us if we could do uh animation service work, and um we’re like, oh sure, yeah, yeah, of course. Uh and it’s not an exaggeration to say that sort of just like some number of years later, you wake up and you’re like, I guess I own an animation studio. 

But that was that was just like never the plan at all. Um I I think that just sort of speaks to just sort of like being open to opportunities and sort of taking the opportunities where where and when you can. Um and so we’ve been in business for you know like 15 years, and we do uh work for hire, you know, that kind of keeps the lights on, but we are always developing things. 

Um and Barksturk to kind of get back to I think the focus of this. So even though we have done like we literally have done uh internet series, like YouTube internet series for like 20 years. We’ve always sold them to a bigger entity who owned them, you know. Um the creator, uh, but we’ve never really had insight into sort of like the back end, uh posting the videos, how to build an audience, uh, et cetera, et cetera. Um but for years I’ve sort of been trying to figure out how we could um sort of fund a series that we would own outright. Um, but it’s always been challenging because uh YouTube needs a lot of content to uh sort of feed the algorithm. 

It’s just like I think it’s a misnomer that uh people have that oh, I’m gonna put up like one three-minute video and it’s gonna take off, and then I’m gonna be rich, or I’m gonna be able to make a career, like I mean, like maybe one in a billion people do that, but like generally that’s just not the way it works. You just have to keep grinding, grinding, grinding. So we have been figured out trying to figure out for years like how do we um how do we set up a pipeline that we can produce a ton of content um with an incredibly small amount of money? Um and it really took years. It was um only when we got hired to um basically create a um host, uh um a host essentially for this Hulu cooking show called Secret Chef. So the idea was that this is this big expensive sort of shiny floor cooking show on Hulu a few years ago, uh, and it was supposed to uh have no host at all. But they realized they still needed some kind of kind of quote unquote entity or host to sort of like drive the narrative forward to interact with the contestants, and they had this idea of creating a sort of like 90s-esque uh sort of Nintendo-ish talking chef hat to um to sort of yeah, like be on set and guide the contestants through. 

And just you know, by the nature of what they needed production-wise and also just the budget, we realized that none of our pipelines were really going to work. Um, and so we looked for a um a motion capture solution and ended up uh uh sort of focusing on Adobe’s character animator, which is sort of a very underused piece of the Adobe Suite. Um and we had a lot of success with that show. They were thrilled, and that was sort of like the sort of the missing piece uh that sort of sort of set my mind in motion. I said, oh, what if we use this 2D motion capture to produce uh kids animated content? And from there, um the idea for Barkstar Kidsong, not just the idea, really, it was sort of like the mechanism by which I could sort of imagine how we could create just a ton of content really inexpensively. Um and from there, it became uh, okay, uh, I I I can I can basically now produce animated content at basically five times the speed um that our sort of lowest price animation pipeline could produce content. So we use Flash or Animate as it’s called now as our sort of like low-end solution. 

We can produce uh animation like five times faster than that, but they’re still a matter of cost. Um and so um again, feel free to interject here if any of this gets boring, but just to sort of like try to keep in mind the the the uh uh your uh your initial question here. The the key thing that uh I still had to figure out was like how are we gonna still afford to produce just tons and tons of content, even if it’s cheap, that still adds up when you’re talking about what we realized was going to be hours of content that we would need in order to really uh try to establish this channel. Um and the way Hollywood works is um when you sell a show, whether it’s a YouTube show or a show for Cartoon Network, and we’ve experienced doing all this stuff or Disney. When you when you set up a deal with them, you’re basically selling them 100% of your IP. They own it. And they do nothing with it, even if it goes nowhere, you no longer own it. 

Um that’s just the way it works. So my idea was taking this pipeline, which is this really inexpensive pipeline, and then inverting the business. Uh, instead of going like, hey, I’m gonna sell basically 100% of this IP before we even get started. I said, you know what, let me find a um a score set of creative team that uh I would give a very large percentage of the IP to. 

So um, you know, much like Hollywood, I’d still be able to keep a good chunk as well. And everyone would have sort of skin in the game. That they no one would sort of be paid up front, just like we’re not paid up front. Um, we’d all be producing this content um uh, you know, just with our own labor. And that was a way that we could produce a lot of content over a long period of time with uh sort of minimal expense. Now, it’s not free because my part of the equation is still um, it still costs money. I still have to hire a board artists and we have people to design the characters and props, et cetera, et cetera. But it drastically reduced the um uh amount of labor that I needed to pay for to sort of keep this um uh this channel going. 

Spencer: Yeah, yeah. So I guess just to kind of briefly sum that up. Um so you started as like a coding engineer and then moved through like your animation studio, which in turn led you to kind of innovate some ideas to make costs cheaper, and that’s kind of how you started the Barkster Kids song channel. Yeah. Is that like a pretty brief summary? 

Mike: Yeah, that’s that that’s a that’s a good brief summary, exactly. Um so again, even though we’ve literally been making content for YouTube for 20 years, um, this is the first time that we’ve like owned the product of our labor, so to speak. 

Um gotcha. That’s uh, you know, that’s exciting for us. Um now the the flip side of that is that we we at this point we think of Barstor Kidsong as uh kidsongs as really just a development project for us. So we have development projects that sort of span the gamut from um this sort of like preschool. 

So Barstor Kidsong is a preschool social emotional learning song-based channel. So we we we go all the way from there to um TV shows that we develop for um preschool, um, bridge, which is considered like kids age four to seven, um older kids, six to eleven, um uh bridge again, sort of like young, sort of 11 to 14, uh family and adult shows, and also feature films. And so we have projects that sort of span the gamut. Um, and most of those are sort of being developed. 

Well, it’s actually not true. We have a variety of different ways that we develop these shows, but a lot of them are still uh developed the way we would, you know, 15 years ago, you know, designed to sort of uh either sell to a studio or go into a co-production with a sort of other entity to sort of get the show funded. It’s a much bigger budget. 

Um it’s um it’s also much harder to sort of get set up more so now than ever with um with all the problems that Hollywood is seeing and sort of the streamers have wrought with kind of overproduction and not being able to sustain a business model. Um but um but we still do that because we want to spread our risk around. And we think of Barks or Kidsongs as just another one of our development projects where the end result, the end product is not just a script, um a pitch deck, maybe a teaser trailer, which is sort of the sort of final output of a typical development project, and instead the final output is final animation. Um and um and and we don’t have any gatekeepers. So we don’t have to like wait for uh studios to take a pitch and go through a development process, which is endless and and really fraught. We’re just doing it. 

Um and we’re keeping our fingers crossed that with persistence and with the skill of our whole team that we can build this development project into um you know, a real brand that will become a business in and of itself. 

Spencer: Gotcha. Okay. That that makes sense. Um I I want to ask a question kind of about animation, and maybe risky because I don’t know that much about animation. Uh, but before I do, do you do you do you like oversee all of this or are you like in the nitty-gritty, like you’re animating as well? 

Mike: I am not animating, um, but I am I am not animating. I I am in the nitty-gritty. I’m I am the producer. Um I for if you’re talking specifically of Barks or Kid Songs. So the way the way it sort of works is uh for that particular project is we have sort of like a management team, um, the sort of like core stakeholders um who all own the piece of the IP and we kind of make decisions together. I’m sort of like the you know, the um I’m I’m the one that’s sort of like the the sort of I don’t know, happy wrangler or something, you know. I’m sort of always sort of pushing things forward, um, trying to get consensus on whatever we do. It’s a great, like an amazing group of people. We’ve like never had one argument or disagreement. 

We’re we’re now like three years into doing this. Um so it’s just a super fun group of people. I look forward to, you know, talking to them every week. Um, but my role for that project is um I’m the sort of chief cheerleader. Uh I’m the one that’s sort of like coming up with strategy. Uh I’m producing all of the uh shorts and I’m directing all of them. Um, but we have a composer and a lyricist uh and an animator um and board artists and artists. So it’s uh you know, it’s a fairly small team, um, but we each do our um, you know, our jobs, our sort of separate jobs. There’s yeah, um pretty pretty good delineation there. 

Spencer: Gotcha. Okay. So if I asked you a specific question about animation, would you know like maybe how to answer it? Or I don’t know. 

Mike: So yeah, So yeah, I can answer, I can answer anything you can throw at me. 

Spencer: Okay, okay. So you mentioned you had a coding background, and I’m curious, is there any um coding involved in animation? Because I I dabble in after effects, and I know there’s like I guess expressions. I don’t know if it’s considered coding, but there’s expressions you can do to kind of animate certain objects a certain way. Sure. And I’m wondering if is there like coding involved for like large scale like TV shows or animation bits. 

Um I I think that would be helpful, like if you could just like copy and paste like some code for some basic stuff. But I don’t know. Is that a thing? 

Mike: It it is. It depends on sort of what kind of production you’re doing and what kind of uh you know what you want the code to do. Um but you know, certainly like at Disney Future Animation, we had a a team of, you know, uh there are probably 75 or 100 people um in the technology group that were all writing various pieces of software to help animators um uh produce the content. Um some of those, uh some of those features actually Disney ended up sort of selling back to some of the big vendors, and they’ve become part of um like core animation packages that everyone in the industry uses. 

And some they sort of kept internal, um, some they kept internal until there was a third-party package that did something that was better. Um and some of that are source standalone programs, some of that is sort of like integrated into the tools themselves via various kinds of scripts. Um, but um, and then there’s all kinds of external tools to sort of help production management to sort of like um manage the flow of data itself. And the bigger studios can afford to bring in either engineers or they call technical directors um who sort of help to sort of you know write the tools or pieces of glue um that sort of uh allow all of these various applications and tools to work together. Smaller studios are generally not uh employing those kinds of people. We, for instance, I’ve never hired um a technical person to sort of write anything. Most of the stuff that we keep in-house um is uh relatively sort of simple pipelines. We do 2D and 3D, uh, but we do a lot more 2D in house. 

And uh there’s just no reason to write any tools. Um there uh like everything that we need to do is sort of encapsulated in these sort of like big third party packages that um that we use day in and day out. But to answer your question, yeah, people use there are technical people that are involved in many ways in all kinds of um animation pipelines. Uh, but they tend to be sort of more mid-size and and large corporations rather than uh small independent studios. Gotcha. 

Spencer: Okay. Okay. I I was just curious, and uh yeah, I don’t know that much about animation, so I can’t really ask much further questions beyond that. But uh, you know, this episode, hopefully, maybe someone who’s interested in animation might be this this information might be helpful. So for you, say someone wanted to start an animation channel. Um is there like tools that you would recommend or strategies you would recommend uh for someone who might be interested in starting their own YouTube channel? 

Mike: Yeah, for sure. Um so again, I think the key is especially for like you know, you’re small, you’re independent, you’re trying to sort of figure this out. The same rules that I just sort of laid out are gonna apply to you as well. You need to be able to produce a lot of animation in order to sort of uh um yeah, build an audience. Um but things do not have to be perfect looking. 

Like we do not try the stuff that we make for our channel, it’s not our best animation work by any means. We’re trying to make, we’re we’re trying to make like we’re trying to put the effort into making these songs that are like really great songs, um, and then a message, this sort of social emotional learning message that is really gonna resonate not just with kids but with uh with parents as well. Like we really are trying to build trust. Um we’re trying to like you know, sort of put good in the world. 

So we put a lot of energy into that. We don’t like obsess with um tons of um of uh of things that I would be obsessed with if it was like higher budget, um uh yeah, for a client or just sort of like our um our sort of more expensive projects. We we let a lot more stuff go through creatively because it’s just not important when you’re sort of trying to appeal to a two to four year old. Um and that’s partly why we chose um the kind of channel that we did is um from like a visual standpoint, simple is good. Um and so I guess like my uh my advice would be like pick pick a pick a it doesn’t have to be kids, but pick a sort of like visual style that can be implemented uh inexpensively. Um where like the sort of like quality, quote unquote quality of animation can be simple and it does not distract from what it is you’re trying to get across. And I’ve seen adult shows as well as kid shows use these kinds of ideas in different ways. Uh, in terms of tools, um, you know, I I’m a bit I’m a big fan of character animator. 

I’m a big fan of Unreal. Um, you know, a a friend of someone who’s actually become a friend who I think you interviewed recently, Corey. Um, you know, his Silly Crocodile channel, like he was really inspiration for us in figuring out like, well, yeah, we can do this. 

We can actually, if Corey can do it with him by himself, we with a small team can figure out how to do it as well. So Unreal, um, character animator, uh, I think are two really great tools that are um are pretty simple to learn um and allow an individual or very small team to produce a lot of animation quickly and like good animation. Yeah. Uh so I I think both of those are uh are really interesting things to look at. Um there are certainly other tools. I just think that they require sort of more work. Um I have very mixed feelings about AI. Obviously, there’s a ton of people who are using Gen AI to generate. I have very um mixed and subtle feelings about this. Uh I’m not a fan of generative AI that is using um scrape data sets to train their models. 

Um I feel like that really is just kind of ripping off uh other artists. There are a lot of tools that use ethically trained and I’m gonna put ethically trained in quotes because they do it in a variety of ways that some are more you know more good than others. But the idea there is that the data sets, they are licensing them. Uh-huh. And I feel completely different about uh generative AI that’s been trained on uh data that has been um properly licensed. 

That makes sense. So yeah, so I I think you know, um everyone can make their own decisions. My own personal decision is we’re not really interested in uh in AI unless and until uh these sort of ethically trained AI models are um are available and are also um uh the the sort of pipelines around them have sort of um steadied out enough where we can put together a team around them, know what our costs are and know how long it’s gonna take. 

And I’ll be honest, like I’d be surprised for like us personally, uh, for the kinds of things that we’re doing, whether AI we could do AI um shorts or um videos that are faster or cheaper, our our production costs are so low right now. Um, yeah, it’d be kind of hard to imagine. Yeah. 

Um but but you know, whatever. Everyone has different skill sets. I I don’t want to I don’t want to say that there aren’t not other ways of doing it, and certainly I’m seeing lots of stuff that people are creating uh with AI that um, yeah, I mean, like visually is pretty cool. Um if if you can figure out how to like direct it. 

Spencer: Yeah, yeah. I’m I’m glad you brought up AI. Um, I also have mixed feelings about it. I don’t know if this is the same with animation, but I’ve tried you know, some generative AI for like regular video because I’m a video editor and that’s kind of what I do. So occasionally I’ll need like a shot that like they don’t have any B-roll for or anything like that. 

But the problem I have right now, and this could change in the future really quickly, is it just doesn’t like feel right? It’s like not 100% accurate. Um it like looks AI. So I don’t know, is is that kind of the same with animation? Like, does it feel and look kind of like AI made? Or is it more subtle because it’s it’s an animation? 

Mike: I think it depends. Um it’s certainly all these models are getting better and better, like you know, sometimes week over week, um, certainly month over month. And so I I think it’s um I think it’s risky to make like absolute statements based on where things are right now because they’re almost certainly going to change. Uh and I’ve certainly seen um both live action and animation that is uh is compelling visually that I’d say most people are not gonna be able to distinguish. I think for me it’s a question of uh a few things. 

Um if you’re moving beyond just the sort of ethics of the models that are ethically trained versus not, like let’s put that aside for a second. I think there are uh are issues about like um uh how directable it is. Um, and we have just not fine found an animation that it’s very directable. I have an idea in my head, and it’s very hard to get the computer to um you know these models to actually give you what’s in my head, even when you give them a sketch of what you want. Um uh, I think it is near impossible right now if you’re trying to produce something that’s actually unique looking to get these models to do what you want without sort of doing a second layer of it’s called sort of LoRa L-O-R-A or R-R-A, um, uh basically training, taking all of your sort of creative work and um sort of doing a second level of training on the AI models with your look. Without doing that, um it’s nearly impossible to um to get a new look out of any of these AI models. And in order to do this Laura training, you need uh both uh sort of certain level of um technical expertise and time and money to to make it work. 

And um we personally have just not invested uh that time and and and money at this point. Um yeah, uh for a whole variety of reasons. So I I think that you run into problems if you do not put enough time and energy and really rethink your whole pipeline. Like the way that you generate AI footage is just different from a pipeline perspective than what you would do um with sort of more traditional techniques, And the same thing applies, like whether it’s animation or live action. Like, you know, anyone that’s used to sort of like how you would create uh a live action short, it’s the same exact thing. 

It’s a it’s it’s just different. The process by which you sort of generate, you know, sort of AI live action is just a completely different process. Um so you know, you have to you have to sort of and and and and honestly, like the the processes themselves are still being worked out. So sort of like where we are personally speaking, is we are what I call being situationally aware. We’re sort of like really keeping on top of what these various models are are doing, how they’re working, um, doing some just like preliminary investigations. But because we are like a really a small company, we’re really probably not going to invest much time and energy until these tools um are sort of integrated into sort of third-party packages that our artists know. 

Um because I still I don’t really have the the inclination to you know invent or reinvent or learn wherever the AI pipelines are developing. I’d rather much rather have those tools be integrated into tools that we’re already using. In the same way, like you know, um like for for editing. I don’t know if you edit in Premiere, but you know, you see these AI tools that are being uh integrated into Premiere. Well, now that they’re there, you already know Premiere. Now it’s just like another widget that you’re learning. 

Yeah. It makes it much easier for you to sort of like incrementally figure out how to incorporate AI into your workflow. And by the way, uh Adobe has Firefly, so it is a sort of um, while it’s not like the best ethically trained model, it is a licensed model. Um, and so that’s the that’s sort of what we’re waiting for. We’re waiting for these tools to sort of be integrated into more and more into um these third-party packages that we use day in and day out, and then sort of take advantage of them incrementally as as that happens. And and that yeah, that that’s kind of how we’re viewing it. 

Spencer: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I like how you said situationally aware, like I’m also aware of like like the different models and stuff. Um, but I also find it super frustrating, like when you have a an image in your head and it just doesn’t quite get it. 

Mike: Um on the flip side, on the flip side, we have found it incredibly useful for like kind of brainstorming ideas or doing some like early visual development where we’re not like it’s really just to sort of get other people excited about our ideas. There I find AI to be uh sort of a shortcut that we just wouldn’t really be able to afford to do using traditional tools. So like you know, very specifically um doing sort of 3D uh pre-visualization is a very expensive process if you kind of go through the traditional steps. There’s just like a lot of very highly paid people that you need to have work for a long time to develop anything, but we have been using it as a a shortcut to um take our own sort of 2D artwork and sort of sort of upscale it to feel CG-ish that just gives a flavor to people so they kind of understand, oh this is kind of what it would look like uh in 3D, without saying this is exactly what it’s gonna look like. And I think you see more and more of those kinds of uses in Hollywood um uh taking place of um like both in live action and animation, you do uh in live action, you would very often put together um these reels, which were basically just like um pulling clips from other TV shows or movies to try to give a vibe of what your idea for your for your film is. Um a lot of those are getting replaced with these sort of like AI-ish enhanced um uh sort of 

Spencer: reels that 

Mike: interesting again, sort of can still give you the vibe, but maybe it’s a little bit more more closely aligned with what the creators are thinking about um without saying like, oh, this is literally what the show is gonna look like. Yeah. Anyway, we’re getting a little off topic of YouTube itself, but 

Spencer: uh just no, I think it’s good to talk about this kind of stuff because it is whether we like it or not. It AI is like in our it’s everywhere. 

Mike: It is it is here. I think it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle, but I do think it’s important for artists to push back and kind of real, at least be making um decisions based on what’s what’s real out there. And I think putting your head in the sand and just sort of saying, well, it’s here, so I’m just gonna use everything. I mean, you know, again, I I don’t make any people can do what they want. 

My own personal line is like let’s be careful how how we do that because um uh you know, it’s a lot for me, it’s a little bit like early days. If you remember like Napster, it’s a long time ago, but like Napster was this original sort of song file sharing site where basically they just stole songs, stuck them up on the web and allow people to download them. And that the Napster got shut down. Like it was declared, you know, stealing. 

Uh, but from that, um, you know, services like Rhapsody and iTunes and then Spotify sort of spouted up, sprouted up that um uh essentially in various ways licensed that um those songs, whether they were you know with the artist directly or you know, really more through their their publishers, um, and it allowed for artists to actually make some money back for people listening to those songs. So, likewise, I feel like as an artist uh and someone who hires artists, like I don’t want to be shooting myself um or all of my friends and colleagues in you know in the head by saying, Oh, yeah, it’s fine to just go and like steal all this stuff without compensating uh the folks who actually you know came up with all these original designs and and artwork. So that’s that’s a kind of like it’s a sort of nuanced take that doesn’t work very well uh on the internet, but um that’s kind of where I’m at. 

Spencer: No, I think that totally makes sense, especially with animation. And I just want to add one more thing, and then we can kind of move on from AI. But you mentioned earlier that it’s kind of hard to get a unique look with these AI models, like they all kind of look the same. Um, and so I would just like anyone who’s listening who’s you know, thinking about using AI for their YouTube channel, that’s something to consider. 

Like if everyone used AI, then everything would look the same. Um and it also, you know, I feel like it kind of skips the learning steps, you know. Like I went to school for video editing, like I learned how to like the proper ways to cut for a story and pacing and that kind of stuff. And I feel like if you just jump straight to video editing, you don’t learn the basics. And if it doesn’t work with the AI, then like you don’t know how to fix it. 

Mike: That’s 100% true. Yeah, I think you still need I’m I’m very like I’m able to sort of I feel like I’m able to use AI uh pretty effectively because I know a lot of stuff. And so when it’s wrong, yeah, or it gives me sort of bad results, I’m able to sort of like push back and be like, you’re being stupid. Like, no. 

Spencer: Yeah, like the general person doesn’t know that. 

Mike: Yeah, it doesn’t know that. They just accept it. And that’s that’s across the board, whether you’re talking about the create, you know, creative uses of um these AIs, or just you know, you know, got all these kids who are you know thinking that they’re learning to write by having Chat GPT write an essay, but they’re not learning anything. Yeah, they’re not learning to write without actually having like you know, using your brain to go and construct uh let’s let’s bring it back to the creative arts, like a story, you know, how a three R structure works, how to know when it is and when it isn’t, like without actually going through and doing it yourself without the help of this crutch, um, you’re never gonna learn. Um, you’re never gonna know what’s good from what’s bad. 

Um so I feel like these AIs are much more helpful when you actually already have the experience to know what’s working and what’s not um that’s being spat back at you. 

Spencer: Definitely, I completely agree. So awesome. Well, thanks, Mike. This episode has been awesome. Um, I’ve got one more question for you, and we kind of asked this to all of our guests. Um, but has there been a mistake you’ve made along your career or journey that you’ve learned from that might be beneficial to our listeners and watchers. 

Mike: I made a lot of mistakes. But let me see if I could uh uh if I could isolate it down, I think that would be relevant to your audience. I would say that like when I first started making my like my first short, uh be honest, like if I’m looking back, I was scared. Like I didn’t know, I had never I had never done, I’ve never directed anything, I never written anything. 

I was scared to sort of make that first step. And so I obsessed over details that were just not that important. So um uh the first short that I did, and I’ll I can give you very specifically, like it had an olive oil bottle in it. And in my head, I’m like, oh, I remember growing up there was this bottle of olive oil. Um that that you know, it needs to look like that. 

But I couldn’t, you know, I’m not an artist and I couldn’t remember exactly. And I spent I probably spent six months going to like every um uh sort of flea market and antique store in Burbank, like all the time, obsessed, I’m gonna find it. I got because it’s critical that I find that particular bottle, blah, blah, blah. And after six months, I’m like, I never found it. I was like, stupid. 

Like, just design something, just design something that’s going to work for the story. And it really once I once I sort of like realized that, there were lots of other things that I kind of realized. I’m like, don’t obsess about details that are not important. It’s more much more important to sort of make decisions and move forward than to sort of convince yourself that like this particular thing is the most critical. 

I think that’s even more so for YouTube. Like people who are obsessed about like, you know, getting their first one minute thing perfect, missing the point. Your first one minute thing, it’s gonna suck. 

I don’t care how talented you are, it’s gonna suck. Put it out, do better the next time. Do better the next time after that. 

Do better the next time after that. And I I’ll be honest, like you actually do hear this kind of um uh uh advice when you you know look around YouTube of basically, you know, you’ll you hear this advice like make each video one percent better. I think that’s basically good advice. I think early on, you can do a lot more. Like if you’ve never made anything before, your each success of video is probably 10, 20, 30% better. Just concentrate on making, you know, putting stuff out there, um, you know, uh developing a sense of taste and improving time after time after time, not getting obsessed about every little detail. It’s just like um, I feel like people always ask me, like, oh, are you an artist? I’m like, I’m always feel like like I’m really, you know, I don’t really quite know how to answer that. 

Cause like I’m a crappy drafts person. Uh, but I write, I produce, I direct, uh, whatever it is that I am, uh, I um I’m a creative person. Uh and I just think that it is uh creative people, even ones that are super talented, it is muscle memory. It is you you get better by actually doing. And so whatever you call yourself, you will get better by just doing the thing over and over and over again. 

Um, and I am whatever you call me now, I am much better than when I started uh, you know, probably 30 years ago. Um, and and I just try to keep that in mind, you know, each and every day. Just do the work. Do the work, you will get better, you will get better, you will get better. There are always going to be people who are above you who are like you can look at and they’re like, man, they’re better at me than doing X, Y, and Z, or they’re more successful, or whatever. And they’re always, if you keep doing it, they’re also going to be people who are like kind of below you on the sort of ladder of um of like um success or um uh uh uh um like artistic um skill. But by just you’ll just be surprised if you just keep doing, you keep climbing that ladder. And like I said, you will always have people above you, uh, and you and as you do it, you’re also gonna be able to look back and you’re gonna be able to go like, hey man, there’s a lot of people who can’t do it as well as I can. And you just gotta keep climbing. You have to be like accept where you are right now, try to keep climbing up to get better and better. And that’s how I think people become successful or give themselves a chance to be really successful. Um yeah, so I don’t know if that answered your question, but no, that definitely did. 

Spencer: I really like that. That is uh solid advice, and I hope our uh listeners and watchers remember that. 

Mike: Yeah, and and again, I say very very specifically like you could always go to go like like just a closing statement. Like, you can always say, Oh man, I wish I would start a YouTube channel. 

Go start a YouTube channel. Like the earlier you plant that tree, the more time you give it to grow. So, you know, you can always lament like I should have done it six months ago or a year ago or five years ago. 

All right, time that time is past. Plant your tree, start growing your tree, start watering it by like making stuff. Um, and yeah, that’s what I sort of encourage everyone to do, and then just use their own skills to figure out everyone brings a different set of skills to the uh to the table. 

They’re not gonna be mine, they’re not gonna be yours, they’re gonna be some combination of a bunch of different things. Know what your strengths are, surround yourself with people who um can complement those strengths, um, work as a team, might be a team of one, might be more, but concentrate and just uh find a way of making uh a lot of content uh as quickly as you can, improving each time that you do it. 

Spencer: Very well said. Thank you for sharing that, Mike, and thanks for being on this episode. If people want to reach out to you specifically, what’s the best way for them to do that? 

Mike: Man, I’m an open book. Uh you can email me uh or email the studio um uh you know, info at pipsqueakanimation.com. It’s pretty easy. I am all over the the interwebs. Uh you can you know go to our website, Pipsqueakanimation.com. You can uh find us on YouTube at Barkster Kidsongs, B A B A R K S as in Sam, T-E-R Kidsongs, plural. 

Um, yeah, uh, if you search for Mike Blum animation, you will find me. Uh and uh yeah, if people have questions, um, yeah, feel free to reach out. I’m gonna open book. Awesome. 

Spencer: Well, thanks again, Mike, for being on this show, and thanks to our listeners and watchers for checking out this episode. Make sure to like and subscribe for more content like this where we talk to real people about real content. And just a plug for ourselves: if you need help making your videos on YouTube, check us out at creatorluxe.com and we will see you in the next one.