From his $27,000 feature film debut with Clerks (financed almost entirely on credit cards) to his insanely popular speaking tours, Kevin Smith has been innovating his way to making a living in the indie film world for a long time. Over the past year there has been a lot of buzz about the DIY release strategy Kevin used to distribute his latest movie Red State, but also many detractors who have dismissed the success by claiming that “it only worked because it was Kevin Smith who made it”. Kevin recently participated in a Google+ hangout session where he described why he thinks this is nonsense and anyone can follow his example:

Anyone that tells you “oh he could do it because he’s Kevin Smith”—tell ‘em horseshit, man. That’s somebody who’s trying to tell you “don’t try, you can’t try, he did it, he can do it, you can’t do it.” Don’t listen to that shit man. Think of life and progress as a game—I always think of it in terms of a game of hockey. When you’re skating with the puck towards the net there’s always a motherfucker trying to hook you from behind, just to slow you up enough, ’cause nobody wants to see anybody succeed. So don’t listen to that. When you hear somebody go “well of course he could do it, he’s Kevin Smith”—those same assholes, before I did it, were like “it’s never gonna work, it’s dumb, he crazy”. And then when it worked, they didn’t go like “you know what? we were wrong”—instead they say “well only he could do it because he’s Kevin Smith” and I say horseshit. Kevin Smith wasn’t always Kevin Smith, nor was Kevin Smith the little kid that pulled the fucking sword from the stone.

(The relevant part of the video begins at approx. the 9:00 mark)

Via Boing Boing.

This is one of those amusing Xtranormal videos that seem to be everywhere lately. Although it’s ostensibly about hiring a clown, I think puppeteers will find most of this conversation sounds awfully familiar (and no, I’m not talking about the unnecessary dirty joke that’s in the beginning of the video).

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

A Life in Puppetry is a very frank and honest profile of renowned puppeteer Mak Wilson, who’s especially well-known for his work in animatronic puppetry (most famously with the Jim Henson Company). In it he very candidly discusses his career, his personal struggle with depression and some of the downsides of working in the film and television industry that don’t get discussed nearly enough.

There is still a huge stigma attached to depression and mental illness. I think Mak deserves a lot of kudos for being willing to discuss this so openly and honestly and also for pointing out the drawbacks of a career in the entertainment industry.

A lot of puppeteers – especially younger ones – are enthralled by the idea of working in film and television. And while working in film and TV can be lots of fun and very rewarding, many people go in to it blind to realities of long hours, extended absences from home and high divorce rates that may be awaiting them.

This is a subject that probably deserves more attention and discussion in the industry.

This is where I think Kickstarter can be an enormous help. Kickstarter is a website that helps you raise money for creative projects. You set a goal (the amount of money you want to raise) and people pledge an amount towards that goal. Funding is always all-or-nothing; a project has to reach or exceed its funding goal or no money changes hands and Kickstarter takes a 5% fee from funded projects in exchange for their service. A lot of really interesting projects have been funded using the service, including a Transylvania TV (see previous posts) Halloween special that will be broadcast on local television this fall (the Kickstarter Blog often other highlights noteworthy projects).

If you’re looking for funding for a puppet film or web series project and are interested in trying this yourself, check out How To Raise Money For a Web Series with Kickstarter, a recent article on Tubefilter that serves as a good guide to raising money using their service. You can also visit the Kickstarter web site for full details.

The 30 second pre-roll ad is almost universally hated. The web is a new medium that we’re still in early stages of exploring. The people who really “break through” and define it will be the ones who figure out new ways of telling stories and develop new (old?) ways of thinking about advertising and sponsorship.

Actually, I went to a special one-year program here in Toronto that incubates small businesses and trains them in entrepreneurship. While I was there, we frequently had business owners come in to do guest lectures. One of the lecturers was the owner of a rapidly expanding bakery who told us a story that I’ve thought about a lot lately.

The story was about the first few years of his business and how he barely made a living running a small shop selling his baked goods. One day, finally fed up with not having any money and with a baby on the way, he decided something had to change. He started trying new things, altered his business model and starting selling his products wholesale to supermarkets and other stores. This worked really well because the supermarkets and stores could sell a lot more of his products to the public than he ever could. As an additional bonus, because the stores and supermarkets now took care of most of the sales work he was able to focus on his real passion, making food.

Not long after he made the change he was out with his wife one night and they stopped at a supermarket to pick something up. He saw people buying his products and realized that he was making money right then and there even though he was out on a date with his wife!

In business there are two types of income – linear income and passive income. Most people make a linear income. If you have a job and work X number of hours to get paid X number of dollars or if you make something (like a puppet) and then sell it, you make a linear income. There’s nothing wrong with a linear income per se, but the difficulty with it is that in order to make more money you usually have to do more work. At a certain point you just can’t work any more hours so there’s a pretty firm ceiling on how much money you can earn from a linear income source.

By comparison, a passive income is money that you make with little to no effort. Advertising is a good example of a passive income source; it takes about the same amount of work to write a blog read by one million visitors as it does to write one read by ten people, but you can make a lot more money advertising to one million readers than ten. Other good examples of passive income would be selling merchandise through Cafepress or selling a puppet pattern that people can download from your online store. A passive income scales much better than a linear one does, so in theory you can make more and more money without having to do more and more work.

Selling baked goods wholesale probably isn’t a textbook example of a passive income source, but the underlying lesson of the bakery story – maximizing profit while minimizing effort – is what passive income is all about. It’s also something that I think all artists need to understand. After all, if you look at puppetry or just entertainment in general, the most successful companies all rely on passive income streams like licensing and advertising to make most of their profits.

I know his might seem really simple and an obvious thing to point out, but if it’s common sense then it’s not so common. Think about how many people you know who are struggling and make a linear income? Are you? Earning any kind of income – passive or linear – takes hard work, but the more I think about it, the more having a passive income seems like a better, smarter way to work.

I’ve been writing PuppetVision for years now. When you visit the site or read it in an RSS reader you see 8-10 of the most recent posts I’ve made here. That’s PuppetVision’s frontlist. You have to dig a little deeper to find the other 1,470 or so posts I’ve made over the years and they’re PuppetVision’s backlist. I’m always amazed that consistently, month after month, no matter what I write about, by far the most popular page on PuppetVision is this post about Topo Gigio that took me just twenty minutes to write three years ago.

About two weeks ago I went to TCAF and saw Scott McCloud, who had people lined up to see him laregly because of a book he published over 15 years ago. I’ve heard Elton John say in interviews that while he loves having a number one hit, it’s his catalog (one helluva backlist) that makes him a living. Popular web sites like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Hulu and iTunes? They’re all about backlists.

It’s really the Long Tail that we’re talking about here and Seth Godin suggests a very simple method for taking advantage of it:

1. Assemble a tribe, a group of true fans, followers, people who have given you permission. Give them all the frontlist they can handle. Make it easy for them to spread the word, to Digg you or bring a friend to your movie or buy your new book for their friends. If you create too much content for this crowd, then you’re publishing too much. They care, and they want to hear from you.
2. Promote your backlist. Invest significant time and money to make your backlist available, to recirculate it, to have it adopted as a textbook in English class or featured on Netflix or part of a retrospective on TV. Take all that money you waste in frontlist marketing and spend it on the backlist instead.
3. Repeat. Frontlist becomes backlist, backlist grows, fan base grows, it scales.

This may seem like obvious advice, but if that’s true why don’t more people do it?

My recent post about “Bad Puppetry” stirred up some interesting discussion and generated a lot of feedback. I’m still sorting through some of it, but one of the things that has been most surprising to me was how many puppeteers are actually hostile towards many of the pioneering shows out there and who still don’t grasp the potential the internet offers puppetry as an art form.

A discussion about the current state of puppetry on the web is a debate for another day, but to everybody out there doesn’t yet grasp puppetry’s potential online I have a two word rebuttal: Lucas Cruikshank.

You probably haven’t heard of Lucas before; I hadn’t either until a few months ago. He’s a 15 year old who posts short, improvised videos on YouTube in the guise of Fred, an annoying six year-old with a squeaky voice. Lucas has the number one most subscribed channel on YouTube and was the first YouTube user to have one million subscribers. He’s not even old enough to drive, but Lucas has already earned well in to six figures thanks to sponsorships and an advertising deal with Google. Sure, Fred is annoying to most adults, but Lucas doesn’t seem to care. He has a simple formula for success, he listens to and understands his audience and he’s created a character that they love and identify with.

The recession is hitting artists everywhere really hard. I know a bunch of puppeteers who are currently either unemployed or under-employed, myself included. I can’t help but notice though that the people who sound the most pessimistic are the ones who seem to be doing the least to embrace and experiment with new media. If you look at what Lucas has done – his videos have been viewed over 260 million times, he has more subscribers than most major media companies and tens of thousands of dollars in monthly income – he’s attracted a bigger audience and makes more money than just about every puppeteer I know of. There’s absolutely no reason why puppeteers can’t learn from new media pioneers like him and replicate that kind of success.

Of course most puppeteers won’t – either because that’s not what their work is about (which I respect) or more likely because it’s just a little too much work. That’s unfortunate though, because for the few that do make the effort I think there is bright, bright future ahead for them. As dark as the current economic clouds are, I don’t think there has ever been a better or more exciting time to be involved in puppetry.

I originally intended to write about this last month, when The New York Times reported that profits of the major American networks were in sharp decline. The situation has been much the same here in Canada, with CBC making steep cuts because of a funding shortfall, CTV on track to loose $100 million this year and the Global TV network teetering on the verge of bankruptcy (and those were just the headlines last month).

But you know what? I think all this is ultimately a very good thing.

Don’t get me wrong, if you make your living in television what’s going on right now is downright scary. No one wants to see companies losing millions, freezing wages and axing jobs, but that is what is going to happen. Because it needs to. The television industry has always been a big, fat, inefficient businesses. Andrew Baron (the creator of Rocketboom) did a really good blog post a little while ago about this, explaining his belief that the TV studios will die. And die they should, if that’s the price of having a new generation of talented, creative and dynamic people engaged in open, accessible media.

What does all this mean for puppeteers and puppetry? Well, if you’re entrepreneurial, creative and want to produce your own low-cost shows online there’s probably never been a better time for you than this. On the other hand, relatively high-paying unionized film and television puppetry gigs (which were already in decline) are going to be a thing of the past. The puppeteers/companies that are going to thrive are the ones that seize the moment instead of bemoaning that things aren’t the way they used to be.

Walt Disney once said that if it wasn’t for the Great Depression he never would have been able to build his studio; the combination of harsh economic conditions and Disney’s ability to offer a relatively steady pay cheque meant that he could have his pick of the best artists in America. It seems we’re entering a similar period in history now and that “creative destruction” is the order of the day. Sure there is a lot of bad news in the air, but as Disney himself put it, sometimes “a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.”

Chris Guillebeau is the author of The Art of Nonconformity, a blog about personal development, entrepreneurship and unconventional work. Last year Chris set himself the goal of becoming a full-time, self-employed writer and launched his blog. His “overnight success” took less than a year to achieve and he expects to have a (mostly) passive income of over $40,000 this year. And he’s done it without running ads on his site, posting on Digg or doing all the other things that the “experts” say you have to do to have a successful website. And no, it’s not some kind of gimmick or get-rich-quick scheme (the real secret is a lot of hard work, dedication and patience).

Chris has written a really interesting manifesto called 279 Days to Overnight Success that tells the story of his website, how he’s making his living and offers free advice on how to be successful with your own project if you’re an artist, entrepreneur or just a little unconventional. Also worth checking out is his World Domination Manifesto (also totally free). Both contain lots of good, unconventional advice about doing unconvenntional work in unconventional times.

Via Seth Godin.