Nearly 10 years ago, in 2005, when Daniel Baxter and Tommy Watson came out of a theatre with an alternative ending to the movie they had just watched. A simple idea that could have struck any one of us was taken up as a challenge and converted into an animated spoof series on Hollywood movies. 10 years down the line, How It Should Have Ended (HISHE) has become a brand in itself giving rise to many mimicking their pattern.
The YouTube channel currently has close to five million subscribers and is inching closer to 1000 million views. Some of the popular animated spoofs include Lord of the Rings, Transformers, Avengers, Toy Story 3, Avatar, Twilight etc.
After the first video, How the Matrix should have ended, Tina Alexander got on board as producer and the trio is now full time creators of HISHE. AnimationXpress.com’s Vishaka Chakrapani caught up with Tina to get to know a little about the journey so far and how the team has managed to keep it relevant yet expand the business over the decade.
How many videos do you create in a month/year?
Our goal is to launch a video every week. Once a month it’s an original How It Should Have Ended (HISHE) parody, the rest of the month it might be a short joke, trailer parody, or a featured content from another creator we think deserves attention. We don’t always meet our goal of one video a week, but we try!
You don’t do many movies but concentrate on a few main ones. Why so?
We try to cover the movies that are the most popular and that we know our fans will love. Some movies we don’t plan on doing until we see them and think of something funny, but other times there are movies on our list that we know we will cover months before it comes out. And some movies just aren’t meant to have our touch on them!
How long does it take right from ideation to creation of the final product? What are the processes involved in it?
It takes at least three weeks from the time we see the movie, but sometimes longer, it just depends on the scope of the cartoon. If everything goes smoothly, for a two to three minute cartoon it takes around one week for us to write it, edit it and voice it. Then another week to create all of the art. And finally a week to animate it, find/write music for it and master a final.
How big is the creative team behind HISHE? Which departments/processes do they comprise?
Our office is comprised of four full time employees. We have two artists/animators, one producer/writer and a marketing manager. But a lot more people work on HISHE videos. For almost every video we get outside contractors to design background art, do voice-overs, and sometimes even help us write. The main creative team and scriptwriting though consists of two people, Daniel and I. We do the vast majority of the writing.
What is the average duration? How many times is the script rewritten?
The duration varies from one minute to almost seven – depends on the movie and the ideas. And the scripting really depends on the cartoon, sometimes dozens of times! often up until just a few days before we release it!
What is the deal with Starz Digital Media? Does it still exist? What all comprises it?
We partnered with Starz Digital Media in 2009 and they continue to control the licensing for all of the videos we made prior to March 2014. We’ve always maintained our trademark and creative control, but they helped distribute our content. We are currently independent.
Is everything done in house or something is outsourced?
We do outsource a few things like voice overs and the background art is done by Otis Frampton. Pretty much everything else is done in house. Daniel creates the art for the videos while both he and our animator help bring it all to life. We do a lot of voice work ourselves as well here in our studio.
We recently launched a new channel in January 2015 called “HISHE Kids” as part of YouTube’s new family entertainment push and their fantastic new app “YouTube Kids”. This new channel involves a lot more people, including an animation team in the Netherlands called Klomp! as well as several musicians and artists.
What softwares do you use for creating, editing, rendering and compositing?
Adobe loves us. We use Adobe Photoshop to create the art and then we use After Effects to animate it all, and finally Adobe Premiere to edit it all together. We’ve used Final Cut on many projects as well, but with the new Creative Cloud we are trying to incorporate everything into Adobe.
You have got into Hollywood movies and some games. Do you plan to venture into TV shows soon?
We’ve done LOST and the first season of Game of Thrones. We talk frequently about the possibility of a Walking Dead HISHE. But nothing is currently in the works.
How do you monetise your videos? What business model do you follow?
All of our videos are monetised on YouTube through its AdSense program. Other revenue comes from merchandising, but the bulk of our funding comes from the advertising on our YouTube videos.
Where did you get the initial funding? Where is the current funding coming from?
When we started, we were very low budget working from our homes and still working other jobs. As the demand of the business has grown, so have we. We now are funded by the ads that play on the videos themselves. We have been able to hire more people and that is why we can put out more content now.
Where are the views coming from today? Have you noticed any changes in viewership pattern since you initially started off?
Our audience is about 50 per cent from the US and 50 per cent the rest of the world. Our fans are predominantly male, around 75 per cent, however we have fans, both male and female, ranging in age from 13 years old to 65 years! We are also about 50:50 mobile to desktop and obviously that’s something that’s changed over time with the popularity of the smart phones.
How is the deal with Machinima going on?
The deal with Machinima was for them to write 12 video game episodes. It is not ongoing but we enjoyed branching out into that and love having those videos as part of our library!
You had earlier said that you would like to go into producing in other languages? Have you give any more thought to it?
Yes, we’ve actually dubbed one video into Spanish and are considering dubbing our entire library but it will take some extra funding.
It’s been nearly 10 years since you first started out and you’ve kept doing what you’ve loved. Where does the inspiration come from?
We love movies and they keep making them! Truthfully we love what we do and feel incredibly fortunate that our job is to see movies, talk about them together and then try to find something humorous to create for our fans. And creating something funny for our fans is what inspires us – knowing that people laughed and shared our videos is still incredibly exciting to us!
The fact that there is an Indian version of HISHE as ‘Shudh Desi Endings’ speaks about the reach of your concept. What do you have to say about it been taken into regional areas as a ‘format’?
We love that our concept is embraced by other cultures and countries! We’d love to be a part of those expansions someday ourselves.
How have you grown your business? Do you intend to get into any other alternative streams of revenue such as merchandising, licensing etc?
We do merchandise T-shirts and other things and hope to expand our store in the very near future. Our biggest expansion is the launch of our new kids channel and we’re excited to see where that takes us – ten years have passed since we started and a lot of our fans are now older and having little kids of their own.
We’d love to create something original some day (not parody), but it would have to be the perfect project and have the support of our fan base. But our biggest growth and excitement always lies in our main HISHE channel and continuing to give our fans quality content to laugh at.