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<\/a><\/h1>\nKeeping Willy Grunch alive – A local company\u2019s viral hit and a novel plan to revive it<\/span><\/h3>\n![\"AR-160429970.jpg&MaxW=840&q=90\"](\"http:\/\/www.auderset.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/AR-160429970.jpgMaxW840q90.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nThree years ago, a small animation studio based in France called Moondog Animation Studios created a five-episode series about a lanky, trouble-prone guy named Willy Grunch. The company embarked on the project after Alain Auderset, the Swiss comic book artist who first created Willy, approached Studio Director JM Khayat about animating him.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\nSo Moondog raised some money and made the five two-minute episodes about Willy Grunch, which they put on YouTube and Vimeo for anyone who was interested. Bryan Ransom, the company\u2019s CEO, said they did some marketing for the series, but right around that time, they were also busy relocating the company from France to Mount Pleasant.<\/p>\n
In the years since, Ransom said the series would often come up, and they would talk about how they could reinvigorate it, including exploring the possibility of making it a TV show. But for a number of reasons, the animated Willy Grunch stayed confined to his five episodes online.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was there, and it would rack up a couple hundred views every month or so,\u201d said Ransom, \u201cbut it wasn\u2019t like thousands upon thousands of millions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Virality<\/p>\n
Then, just a about a month ago in mid-March, Auderset, the comic book artist, got an email. It was from a friend directing him to a Russian Facebook page. Whoever managed the page had posted one of Moondog\u2019s Willy Grunch episodes, and it was popular.<\/p>\n
Within a week, the video had three million views, and the guys at Moondog found other pages that posted the video, five in total, and there may be more. Altogether, they counted nearly seven million views from just about all over the world, and everywhere it went, people were talking about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were hundreds of thousands of shares. There were like three or four hundred comments,\u201d Ransom said. \u201cIt was just going everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
At first, they were mad. After all, somebody on the other side of the world had taken their work, chopped off the intro that attributed it to them and put it online. (The video still had the end credits, so it wasn\u2019t scrubbed of all attribution.)<\/p>\n
But Khayat, the studio director, said that feeling was quickly eclipsed by a sense of validation.<\/p>\n
Moondog\u2019s founders \u2013 Ransom, Khayat and CTO\/Technology Strategist Ben Davis \u2013 formed the company with a mission, which is exhibited by the Willy Grunch series. Ransom said they want to make animated stories that do more than entertain, but have the power to make people think about big life questions.<\/p>\n
Their videos are really geared toward the 15 to 30 age group, and while most animated videos geared at that group err toward the crazy and crude, Ransom said they put more stock in that group\u2019s desire to seek answers to those big questions. So, every episode of Willy Grunch has a theme, a sort of moral constructed by the choices Willy faces and the consequences of his decisions.<\/p>\n
Khayat said seeing the video\u2019s popularity and the conversations it provoked felt like evidence \u2013 after three years \u2013 that there is a real desire and market for that kind of content.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had that proof,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was a good feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cKind of a, \u2018I knew it,\u2019 type of feeling,\u201d Davis added. \u201cI knew it could work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Free Willy Grunch<\/p>\n
The video\u2019s virality also offered them valuable information about what people like. The five videos they created cover a spectrum of themes and how they are conveyed, and one video was more popular than the others. It clearly had a moral, but it was not as specific as in some other videos, and in the comments, people used that openness to interpret the theme how it made sense to them.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople read into it how they want to because we\u2019re staying at that parable level,\u201d Davis said.<\/p>\n
The video\u2019s newfound popularity also gave them momentum to build on to make more Willy Grunch videos. To make the first episodes, they started a campaign on Kickstarter and had huge success. Their goal was to raise $99,999 in four weeks. They raised $117,000, and in the process, they learned a thing or two about how to entice people to donate.<\/p>\n
After a mediocre first week of the Kickstarter campaign, they dreamed up Workout Wednesdays. Whenever someone donated five dollars on a Wednesday, the Moondog team made a video of one of them doing five pushups, then calling out the donor\u2019s name. By the last Workout Wednesday, Ransom said six people did something like 250 pushups each, and they tried every way they could to make it fresh by doing the pushups in a hand stand or on top of a car. Plus, donors shared their personalized feats of strength on social media, prompting their friends to look up the campaign and get involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust awareness is one thing,\u201d Ransom said, \u201cthat interactivity of people is where you get that next stage.\u201d<\/p>\n
As they move toward launching their fundraising campaign to \u201cFree Willy Grunch\u201d and make more videos, they\u2019ve got ideas for how to once again make the donations interactive, but they\u2019re also doing a few things differently.<\/p>\n
For one, they\u2019re getting Mount Pleasant-based developer Chris Wolf to make their fundraising site for them \u2013 willygrunch.com \u2013 set to go live today.<\/p>\n
The episodes will be free, but donors will get access to live Q&A\u2019s and other perks.<\/p>\n
But even more unique is there\u2019s no set end to the campaign. Instead, they\u2019ll keep making episodes as long as the money is coming in.<\/p>\n
Khayat said that in a time when viewers can stream what they want when they want and their attention is being further divided seemingly every day, they\u2019re trying something different by giving the audience a say.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe said okay, let\u2019s leave it to the viewership,\u201d Ransom added. \u201cThey can give five bucks today as a one time, or they can become a subscriber and give five bucks a month, or whatever they want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Khayat said, that leaves it to them, Moondog, to make content worth keeping alive \u2013 even after three years of sitting dormant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\u00a0 Keeping Willy Grunch alive – A local company\u2019s viral hit and a novel plan to revive it Three years ago, a small animation studio based in France called Moondog Animation Studios created a five-episode series about a lanky, … More…<\/a> More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11099"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11107,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11099\/revisions\/11107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Three years ago, a small animation studio based in France called Moondog Animation Studios created a five-episode series about a lanky, trouble-prone guy named Willy Grunch. The company embarked on the project after Alain Auderset, the Swiss comic book artist who first created Willy, approached Studio Director JM Khayat about animating him.<\/p>\n
So Moondog raised some money and made the five two-minute episodes about Willy Grunch, which they put on YouTube and Vimeo for anyone who was interested. Bryan Ransom, the company\u2019s CEO, said they did some marketing for the series, but right around that time, they were also busy relocating the company from France to Mount Pleasant.<\/p>\n
In the years since, Ransom said the series would often come up, and they would talk about how they could reinvigorate it, including exploring the possibility of making it a TV show. But for a number of reasons, the animated Willy Grunch stayed confined to his five episodes online.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was there, and it would rack up a couple hundred views every month or so,\u201d said Ransom, \u201cbut it wasn\u2019t like thousands upon thousands of millions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Virality<\/p>\n
Then, just a about a month ago in mid-March, Auderset, the comic book artist, got an email. It was from a friend directing him to a Russian Facebook page. Whoever managed the page had posted one of Moondog\u2019s Willy Grunch episodes, and it was popular.<\/p>\n
Within a week, the video had three million views, and the guys at Moondog found other pages that posted the video, five in total, and there may be more. Altogether, they counted nearly seven million views from just about all over the world, and everywhere it went, people were talking about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were hundreds of thousands of shares. There were like three or four hundred comments,\u201d Ransom said. \u201cIt was just going everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
At first, they were mad. After all, somebody on the other side of the world had taken their work, chopped off the intro that attributed it to them and put it online. (The video still had the end credits, so it wasn\u2019t scrubbed of all attribution.)<\/p>\n
But Khayat, the studio director, said that feeling was quickly eclipsed by a sense of validation.<\/p>\n
Moondog\u2019s founders \u2013 Ransom, Khayat and CTO\/Technology Strategist Ben Davis \u2013 formed the company with a mission, which is exhibited by the Willy Grunch series. Ransom said they want to make animated stories that do more than entertain, but have the power to make people think about big life questions.<\/p>\n
Their videos are really geared toward the 15 to 30 age group, and while most animated videos geared at that group err toward the crazy and crude, Ransom said they put more stock in that group\u2019s desire to seek answers to those big questions. So, every episode of Willy Grunch has a theme, a sort of moral constructed by the choices Willy faces and the consequences of his decisions.<\/p>\n
Khayat said seeing the video\u2019s popularity and the conversations it provoked felt like evidence \u2013 after three years \u2013 that there is a real desire and market for that kind of content.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had that proof,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was a good feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cKind of a, \u2018I knew it,\u2019 type of feeling,\u201d Davis added. \u201cI knew it could work.\u201d<\/p>\n
Free Willy Grunch<\/p>\n
The video\u2019s virality also offered them valuable information about what people like. The five videos they created cover a spectrum of themes and how they are conveyed, and one video was more popular than the others. It clearly had a moral, but it was not as specific as in some other videos, and in the comments, people used that openness to interpret the theme how it made sense to them.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople read into it how they want to because we\u2019re staying at that parable level,\u201d Davis said.<\/p>\n
The video\u2019s newfound popularity also gave them momentum to build on to make more Willy Grunch videos. To make the first episodes, they started a campaign on Kickstarter and had huge success. Their goal was to raise $99,999 in four weeks. They raised $117,000, and in the process, they learned a thing or two about how to entice people to donate.<\/p>\n
After a mediocre first week of the Kickstarter campaign, they dreamed up Workout Wednesdays. Whenever someone donated five dollars on a Wednesday, the Moondog team made a video of one of them doing five pushups, then calling out the donor\u2019s name. By the last Workout Wednesday, Ransom said six people did something like 250 pushups each, and they tried every way they could to make it fresh by doing the pushups in a hand stand or on top of a car. Plus, donors shared their personalized feats of strength on social media, prompting their friends to look up the campaign and get involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust awareness is one thing,\u201d Ransom said, \u201cthat interactivity of people is where you get that next stage.\u201d<\/p>\n
As they move toward launching their fundraising campaign to \u201cFree Willy Grunch\u201d and make more videos, they\u2019ve got ideas for how to once again make the donations interactive, but they\u2019re also doing a few things differently.<\/p>\n
For one, they\u2019re getting Mount Pleasant-based developer Chris Wolf to make their fundraising site for them \u2013 willygrunch.com \u2013 set to go live today.<\/p>\n
The episodes will be free, but donors will get access to live Q&A\u2019s and other perks.<\/p>\n
But even more unique is there\u2019s no set end to the campaign. Instead, they\u2019ll keep making episodes as long as the money is coming in.<\/p>\n
Khayat said that in a time when viewers can stream what they want when they want and their attention is being further divided seemingly every day, they\u2019re trying something different by giving the audience a say.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe said okay, let\u2019s leave it to the viewership,\u201d Ransom added. \u201cThey can give five bucks today as a one time, or they can become a subscriber and give five bucks a month, or whatever they want to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
And Khayat said, that leaves it to them, Moondog, to make content worth keeping alive \u2013 even after three years of sitting dormant.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 Keeping Willy Grunch alive – A local company\u2019s viral hit and a novel plan to revive it Three years ago, a small animation studio based in France called Moondog Animation Studios created a five-episode series about a lanky, … More…<\/a> More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11099"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11107,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11099\/revisions\/11107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.auderset.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}