The Problem with DDCs

[Jojishi]

Normal people don't use forums.

Yeah, I can definitely confirm I'm not normal.

[Raymond]

Lets face it guys, pivot just isn't as popular as it used to be. That's why we create these videos, in order to advertise what people could potentially do with pivot, encouraging them to try it. Also your all talking as if this place is professional. Everyone who joins this forum, joins it in the hopes of having fun, most of the people being under 20 years old. This isn't a company that requires you to hand in a finished animation or you get fired. We do it so that people can have their animations displayed on a channel that usually would have a lot of subscribers (it doesn't now since it's fresh and new). I mean that is what encouraged me to try and reach intermediate so I could be in a DDC. So that I could have my animation displayed with other really good animators on a channel that had a lot of subscribers. The fact that our new channel has what, maybe 45 subscribers now? That doesn't give people a lot of incentive to join the new DDC's and that's why we want to create more content for our youtube channel. That's the way I see it.

[Lord]

I'm a little bit confused as to which channel is the channel we're using now so can someone tell me what's the name of the new one so I can be sure I'm subscribed to the right one ;)
Also to add, I got pivot because I wanted to show people what I'm thinking and share my creativity. I would have bought flash except I don't care about it enough to spend lots of money on it. That's the reason I started pivot. :)

[Jojishi]

I'm a little bit confused as to which channel is the channel we're using now so can someone tell me what's the name of the new one so I can be sure I'm subscribed to the right one ;)

TDDchannel

And I agree that it sucks the popularity's dropped but there's not much we can do other than animate. We sit here complaining about this but don't actually animate much, which would draw attention to Pivot. So we mainly need to focus on animating more and show-casing our work on YouTube. There are so many people here who don't put their animations on YouTube when it used to be a weekly thing at the very least. I remember because I was subscribed to so many Pivot animators on YouTube and there'd be a new video every week. I know YouTube is seen in an amateur light but I feel it hurts us in the long run that so many of us don't put much of a presence there.

In the end I'm not too worried about the popularity. The popularity for stick-figure animation in general has died off and it's my personal belief that this is more of a generational thing. The stimulation kids are bombarded with these days is insane and that surely has to affect their imagination. That coupled with the insane expectations on sites like these and it puts off a lot of people...

I was also considering the use of a counter system for the next DDC. I think that would work terrifically. I could give everyone a year and they'd hand their entries to me through-out the year until the 31st of December arrives (or another date in December). Then I put together what I have into one video. It would be worth a shot. If this doesn't work out I could just put together the best Pivot animations that were released over the year into one video and call it the DDC13. The obvious issue with this is that the animations would have already been viewed. The animations would also have to be 16:9 aspect ratio.

[Lord]

I was also considering the use of a counter system for the next DDC. I think that would work terrifically. I could give everyone a year and they'd hand their entries to me through-out the year until the 31st of December arrives (or another date in December). Then I put together what I have into one video. It would be worth a shot. If this doesn't work out I could just put together the best Pivot animations that were released over the year into one video and call it the DDC13. The obvious issue with this is that the animations would have already been viewed. The animations would also have to be 16:9 aspect ratio.

What happened in DDC's before? Was it not the same as this?
Also, all this talk about animating makes me want to animate. :D

[Krustalien]

DDCs are a huge effort for little reward. I don't buy that people do it for the luv, they want to get seen. On Darkdemon you can't get seen. You have to have a vested interested in Pivot to search for forums (weird thing to do in 2014) for it, by which time you've turned off 1,000 people who gave a bit less of a shit.

The reason YouTube (this applies to almost every popular website) is so huge is because there are two main ways to be involved. You have content creators and viewers. A forum is just the content creators, who are immensely outnumbered by the potential viewers. Viewers are the normal people in this quote:

Normal people don't use forums.

There are two ways to reach people - attract them to here, or go to where they are - and nobody is actively doing either.

Find two members in opposing timezones who are good at being professional and unbiased and have them control a social media presence. Popular animations, Pivot updates, forum changes, staff changes, podcast updates, popular members, activity statistics, etc. I tried to do this with Artangle but I was a pleb and left it far too late and had nothing like enough content to sustain a page. You guys do, just, but you won't in another few months.

People want and always will want to see cool shit, that hasn't changed between 2005 and now, it's just now you find cool shit by stumbling across cool pages on Facebook. You won't reach out to more people unless you have an easy way to be viewed by the world, and forums/close-to-home YT channels don't cut it anymore.


tl;dr
do the internet better and get people seeing ya shit and then peeps here will be more up for doing even more shit then u get awesome collabs

[Shad Shadson]

Lets face it guys, pivot just isn't as popular as it used to be. That's why we create these videos, in order to advertise what people could potentially do with pivot, encouraging them to try it. Also your all talking as if this place is professional. Everyone who joins this forum, joins it in the hopes of having fun, most of the people being under 20 years old. This isn't a company that requires you to hand in a finished animation or you get fired. We do it so that people can have their animations displayed on a channel that usually would have a lot of subscribers (it doesn't now since it's fresh and new). I mean that is what encouraged me to try and reach intermediate so I could be in a DDC. So that I could have my animation displayed with other really good animators on a channel that had a lot of subscribers. The fact that our new channel has what, maybe 45 subscribers now? That doesn't give people a lot of incentive to join the new DDC's and that's why we want to create more content for our youtube channel. That's the way I see it.

Hope doesn't always equate to reality. Part of the reason I stopped animating, even way back when, was because people took this shit WAY too seriously. It's one thing to have movements look reasonable enough to differentiate them from one another, it's completely different to be anal as fuck about it, and that's kind of what it's become. I actually started animating in freestyle for a bit when that came out, because I wanted to animate stupid ideas, and show them off, no matter how shit they were PERCEIVED TO BE (but even that got boring/somewhat serious). No one person is to blame, but with advancement in technique comes higher standards, and generally that's made easier with tools also advancing, but one's advanced past another and certain things are just tedious to do. Peter's trying his damnedest though, I'll give him that.

DDCs are a huge effort for little reward. I don't buy that people do it for the luv, they want to get seen. On Darkdemon you can't get seen. You have to have a vested interested in Pivot to search for forums (weird thing to do in 2014) for it, by which time you've turned off 1,000 people who gave a bit less of a shit.

Normal people don't use forums.

There are two ways to reach people - attract them to here, or go to where they are - and nobody is actively doing either.

tl;dr
do the internet better and get people seeing ya shit and then peeps here will be more up for doing even more shit then u get awesome collabs

This is probably another big point. We keep moping about the times changing, but we haven't adapted. Adapt or be removed. If you want to get popular, you have two choices:

1. Get lucky via word of mouth (doubt it's gonna happen)
2. GET IT OUT THERE USING EVERY SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLET YOU CAN FIND

The second one is the obvious answer. It's why so many things have things like marketing coordinators and public sales representatives and all of them use things like social media to sell their idea and bludgeon the damn thing into their heads. Meanwhile we're too worried about perfection when the average joe doesn't want perfection, he just wants to watch something fun that looks good. The two are related, in a sense.

[MCToast]

Can't deal with this fucking stupid community.

[Lord]

Can't deal with this fucking stupid community.

Yeah, it seems you and me are the only like-minded people here. :)

I'm just messing if you really can't tell.

I'm thinking of a Facebook account to make to try and make my Youtube channel more popular.
Maybe we could do the same for TDD?

[Raymond]

Can't deal with this fucking stupid community.

Where did this even come from? It's alright if you feel that way, but then why do you even comment around here? You obviously enjoy posting here a little, because I doubt you would if you didn't.

Also Shad and Krust are right, we need to start spreading our collaboration and joint videos to every form of social media we can think of. At least the videos that stand out from all the others like the DDC12 or the veteran/elite joint, or even the intermediates joint.

People are lazy though and it's hard to think of a system that works at an efficient pace. For example, we can give people a week to work on their part of a joint, but when someone procrastinates and doesn't add anything, then we just wasted a weeks time. I wish we could come up with an idea that would work around that. At least for joints, since other collaborations seem to work a lot better.

One good example of this is the doors tribute collab, or even Yogurt's new box collaboration. You give the people who enter a template to work with and have requirements that make it easy to sync up the animations together, like "make sure you have your stick figure leave the stage before you end your part". This way everyone can work on their part and have plenty of time to do so and if they don't make anything, it doesn't waste anyone's time.

Joints are probably the most difficult things to organize because it requires everyone to be motivated. It's also tough sometimes when people sign up for a joint, but when it comes time to make their part, either they are lazy or they have real life problems to take care of and don't get anything done. That's why I prefer collaborations like the doors tribute. They usually turn out more successful.

[MCToast]

All these threads that lead to nothing, will anything happen after people bitch here?
DDC didn't have enough entries, but run tribute was done and still wasn't flashed for months.

[Jon]

Can't deal with this fucking stupid community.

Then fuck off you sad cunt

[MCToast]

If I leave it's the same after a year, same people and nothing new.

[Chris]

Oooh.

[Stickid]

Yup.

Yup.

Oooh.

please stop

jeeze you guys are making me depressed, this is going nowhere