The Future of Deerstalker Pictures? (Patreon)

You might be wondering where our My Hero Academia film is and tbh we are too. When we were planning this project we wanted to make it as good as possible and not just rush out content for content's sake.

We decided to include a cameo appearance by some League of Villains members because we felt the narrative would be better off for it, plus the additional characters would make the film feel more like a Hollywood-sized production. Knitemaya came on board as Shigaraki, and we ordered the costume from Taobao with express shipping. And so we waited for the package to arrive. And waited. And waited...

Four weeks later the costume arrives and it doesn't look very good. We could have made it ourselves in less than half the time and it would have looked better, but we ran out of budget for this project a long time ago so we had to trust in Taobao.

I just thought this was a good example of the filmmaking process and why it's difficult to have any consistency when we're working on such a small budget for each video. Because making short films is such a collaborative process, a lot of it is out of our control, and we're left with nothing to do but wait and stress for long periods of time.

Meanwhile, because we haven't posted anything to our channel for a few weeks, our YouTube views and ad revenue are right down, so we can't afford to start on the next project. We want to continue to grow - if we're just staying the same and not evolving then it's boring for us - but YouTube's algorithm and requirement to post every other day essentially means we'll get penalised for putting more time and effort into a project. That leaves us in an awkward Catch-22 - because we're trying harder to make this video better, we'll end up being more out of pocket at the end of this project.

This is where Patreon is supposed to come in - it's designed to supplement your YouTube income and allow you to work harder on your passion projects. Unfortunately our Patreon doesn't get much traction for a number of reasons, all of which I totally understand, so at the moment it doesn't really seem like an option.

We recently found out that a very similar channel to us has gone through this exact scenario and couldn't find a solution, so they changed direction completely and are no longer making anything to do with cosplay. If anyone has any suggestions for what we should do - revamping our Patreon, only doing sponsored content (ie World of Tanks videos), making a Kickstarter for each new project - let us know, and we'll try to figure out the best way forward.

Anyway, now we're shooting the League of Villains pick-up shots this weekend which means the My Hero Academia short film should be finished in the next week (we'll start rolling out BTS videos next week). Finally!

TL;DR: Filmmaking on a budget is hard.