Thursday Update
Hey, everybody! Wells here with kind of a long Thursday update that marks the kickoff of the revised website.
We’ve been kind of spotty in our communication recently. The unfortunate product of needing to do kind of a major overhaul of the studio’s plans and being but two people. But the overhaul is complete, so let me fill you in.
Who We Are
I’m Wilson Wells, communications and audio lead here at Two Broke Artists. Maisie West is the visual lead and creator of both Mocha the Samoyed and our current project Girl’s Night.
What We’re Making and Why
We’re making Girl’s Night, a short-form animated series with original music. How we got here is kind of interesting.
Maisie and I put so much work into Mocha the Samoyed. Over two years of comics! And while Mocha and her hijinks were exciting to people when they found them, we noticed that Maisie’s incredible work wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.
So we made a plan.
It started as a one-off comic. “Wouldn’t it be cute if Mocha had some friends over for a girl’s night?” Maisie asked me. It was a brilliant idea, so I went to work on drafting ideas for a series of comics as Maisie started work on the first one.
As we took the idea further and further, we realized that we wanted original music, we wanted to tell bigger stories and we wanted to reach more people.
We wanted an animated series.
So we took the work that we’d already done and started restructuring it into what would become Girl’s Night. Maisie’s handling the visual side of things and I’m handling the audio. We write the story and direct the episodes together. We are the voice actors. And this website and what we publish here will serve as what I feel is a no holds barred look into what running a genuinely small studio is really like.
What Can You Expect from Us?
With our systems in place and our overhauls complete, this is roughly what our content schedule looks like.
We’ll be updating you three times a week. There’ll be weekly updates like this one and also behind the scenes about my work and Maisie’s. You’ll see our works in progress. You’ll be part of the journey.
We’ll be publishing a weekly podcast where we can talk more about the business of art and how we’re managing as a small studio. We’ll be giving a look behind view counts and revenue and . . . everything, really. We’ll offer our perspective on industry happenings that we find relevant. You’ll get to know us a little better.
Next year, we’ll be putting out the first episode. To keep things flying along as fast as we can, we’ll be publishing each episode in parts. You can expect episode parts to be anywhere between 1 and 4 minutes long. There will be gut-busting short shorts, too! It’s exciting.
How Can You Help
The best way to help us is to click Go Backstage at the top of the website (you’ll have to click the menu to see it if you’re on a phone). For our subscribers on Patreon, we’re so glad that you’re helping! And we’ll do our best to keep everything as updated there as possible. But Patreon and other platforms don’t let us keep as much of the dollars that you contribute as you or we would like. On twobrokeartists.com, roughly 97% of your donation goes to us. On Patreon, that number ranges from 92% all the way down to 60%. Other platforms can be even worse. That’s why we prefer your patronage here. We can offer you everything we do for less money and with a better experience.
What will you get when you grab your backstage pass? Everything. Everything we do will be here on twobrokeartists.com before it’s up anywhere else (at least one week, we’re targeting two) and it’ll be the best way to view it. Other platforms don’t have the bandwidth to show off our original intent, but we do.
It really is just me and Maisie running this place. So know that when you go backstage, you’re on the bleeding edge of supporting independent media.
What’s Next
What’s next after you’ve grabbed your backstage pass is to check out the podcast, and keep coming back for more updates about what we’re doing. We have stories to tell! We have processes to share! We have music to listen to and full-fledged short animations on the way! And we want you to be a part of every step.
Till next week,
Wells