There is a hard truth I must face every day with Shamoozal.com and in particular, the Flash animated series that the site is built upon. It isn’t that I’m doing the work for “free.” The “starving artist” does this stuff because they enjoy the work, right? Exactly. The problem is that it pains me to see that people are making money off of our work. That is the problem for us Flash animators, many times we’re handing our work away for free, and in return we hope for a handful of hits back to our site. Does it really pay off? It depends on what you want to get out of it. The following is an account of the experience I have had with getting exposure and the price it cost.
In the year and a half Shamoozal has been around I have done some serious whoring of the material. The fact of the matter is that there aren’t any “guides” to making a successful cartoon series without selling your soul. By this point, I kind of know what works and what doesn’t work. Flash portal sites like Newgrounds.com, and the cleverly titled FlashPortal.com do exactly what they say. They allow you to upload your work and have it viewed by potential hundreds, thousands, even millions within days. What you’re doing however, is handing them the SWF file, and with that they’re able to do whatever they like with it. When you click that little agreement box, you’re basically allowing these sites to own your material. Because of this, I picked and chose the websites I uploaded to very carefully. Newgrounds is an obvious choice, and the most popular Flash portal in town. You upload to them and you will have a couple hundred views to your short within hours. I won’t lie, but I get a little giddy whenever I upload something to that site. It’s fun to read the “reviews” even though they refer to animation with terms like “smooth” (it’s called timing) and site owner Tom Fulp has been genuinely nice to me. Though it must be said it is a little maddening when something you worked on for weeks, sometimes months, gets brushed to the side by something that was clearly done in a night.
The key here is that you’re giving your SWF to these sites. You’re handing them the keys to your car and trusting them to bring it home safely. Well, we’ve all watched Ferris Bueler’s Day Off, and we know these people like to drive off hills in slow motion with the Star Wars theme playing. The problem with a cartoon that does well on these sites is that they seem to “appear” onto other sites, and before you know it the thing has spread like wild fire. What do I mean? Well, let’s type “Shamoozal Ninja” into Google and see what pops up.
