YouTube Millionaires: How one creator became TikTok’s most popular animator—in a Nutshell

By 08/11/2022
YouTube Millionaires: How one creator became TikTok’s most popular animator—in a Nutshell

Welcome to YouTube Millionaires, where we profile channels that have recently crossed the one million subscriber mark. There are channels crossing this threshold every week, and each creator has a story to tell about YouTube success. Read previous installments here.


When Nutshell Animations was three years old, they drew a motorcycle.

Yes, we know most three-year-olds’ art isn’t impressive. But theirs was an actual intelligible motorcycle–and their parents, one of whom was an engineer who dabbled in art for design purposes, still talk about it to this day as the first definitive sign that Nutshell had artistic potential.

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And when Nutshell grew older, they were determined to make the most of it. They sketched constantly as a kid, and during middle and high school fostered a love of multimedia, dabbling in everything from graphic design to photography, filmmaking, and 3-D modeling. But animation was the medium they became most fond of. As they put it, animation “brought a lot of those things together.”

“You can involve filmmaking, videography, all of those elements of photography into how you stage animation,” Nutshell tells Tubefilter. “It’s like a center of all those things coming together.”

Nutshell began sharing their bite-size comedy animations on YouTube in 2018. It was TikTok, however, where they really blew up: They started uploading in June 2020, and to date have gained a whopping 20 million followers.

It’s their YouTube channel we’re giving a nod to, though. They recently hit one million subscribers there–and, across all their accounts, drive around 300 million views per month.

Check out our chat with them below.

Tubefilter: Who are you, where are you from, and what do you make on YouTube?

Nutshell Animations: So I categorize my content in the animation niche, and there’s a lot of comedy and entertainment animations. I’m based in Toronto, Canada, and I’ve got like a passion for multimedia. That’s how I kind of got into animation, being one of the mediums. So I’ve done graphic design, 3-D modeling, photography, video, filmmaking, and obviously animation in the past. But animation is the one thing that I took public.

I kind of dabbled in all of them, but animation’s the one thing that stuck. And pre-COVID, I was mainly on YouTube and I didn’t really diversify in terms of the platforms I was on. In the midst of COVID, I kind of took TikTok as the primary focus and started doing the daily animation bits that I do today.

I noticed there wasn’t really a niche for it, because animation takes a long time to piece together and created. It’s a very patience-oriented thing. It takes a while. But I figured out a format, you know, short meme-like audios that I can creatively put my own spin on and show my own flare with animation, and I started doing them daily. And I’ve been doing them daily consistently since then. That was kind of, I guess, the golden recipe that really took it off. So in a nutshell—haha—it’s daily animations, little bite-size animation memes.

Tubefilter: How did you get into art? Did you have inspiration as a kid? Did you go to art school?

NA: My dad, I can say, I wouldn’t call him an artist but he’s artistic. He’s an engineer by profession and he had more of an artistic side when I was growing up. He would sketch out machinery and stuff like that, so I think that influenced me. He never sat down and taught me anything, but I’m a very visual learner and I really took that. So the first thing I actually drew at the age of three, my parents, I don’t even remember this, but my parents were telling me, apparently I drew a motorcycle at the age of three. I don’t know why, I just did. And I do have a motorcycle, it’s funny, but I drew a motorcycle at the age of three and that’s when they kind of figured out. That’s what started it all.

But throughout my childhood and everything, a lot of sketching and a lot of doodling throughout school. A lot of doodling always been artistic. I guess from the beginning there wasn’t a spot or time where it kind of came about. A lot of people are artistic in general to begin with, but I spent a lot of free time on pen and paper.

Multimedia was more towards the middle school, high school range. I got more into multimedia because the entire niche, multimedia, is very artistic, the entire subject. So then I dabbled into graphic design, 3-D modeling, all that kind of stuff like I mentioned, but animation was very interesting because it brought a lot of those things together. You can involve filmmaking, videography, all of those elements of photography into how you stage animation. It’s like a center of all those things coming together.

So this was what I started publicly putting out and kind of getting traction. That’s how I really became a thing. I just saw it get more eyeballs. I was more interested in seeing people’s reactions and I had this gratification, knowing I can complete an entire animated piece every single day. A lot of people that do animation, you don’t really get to see the final results until weeks, months down, however long it takes, but I’m pumping it out every single day. So I get the hype of creating a piece and actually seeing completed within that day. It’s kind of a bit of a high, you could say.

Tubefilter: What does your daily production schedule look like? Walk me through the process.

NA: So every couple weeks I’ll collect, you can say, trending audios or comedic audios. I won’t necessarily look for…I used to do more on the trending side. Like what’s working publicly. What’s out there. What’s getting a lot of traction based on how many view it’s getting. I used to do that, but now it’s more like what’s more comedic to me, because I can more creatively work with that. So I have like a library, a collection of audios now, that I work with over time. I guess it kind of populated as I collected them.

So what I’ll do with the daily pieces that I put out is I’ll create a week’s worth of daily content roughly within three or four days. Obviously that process, when I started, took a lot longer, like I would take ideally an entire day for a daily piece, but once when you’re doing it for two and a half, almost three years now, you naturally speed up.

So I’ll create an entire week’s worth within three or four days. And it can range anywhere, depending on the complexity of the animation, between three to six hours apiece. I’ve sped up on like the lips animation, I’ve sped up on the actual creative, like diligent creative part.

I used to storyboard in the past, but now I can visually piece together the scenes in my head. So I’ll do like a rough animation quickly over it. And then I’ll simply do the linework straight on it. Before, there were like more of three or four passes before I got to the linework, but I can kind of skip all that now because the flow of it is easier for me. And it saves a lot of time, obviously.

So I’ll simply do the rough layout straight to linework after that. And I’ll finish the pass with the lips animation and then I’ll do the camerawork on top of that. That’s how I break it down for the daily pieces.

Along with the daily pieces, obviously we do campaign videos and all those kinds of things, but moreso the content that’s been skyrocketing my platforms is the daily animations. So that’s how I piece them together.

Tubefilter: You mentioned briefly earlier why you started doing dailies, but can you go into that a little bit more? That’s a huge commitment to decide you’re going to do something every single day. So what brought you to that specifically?

NA: So initially when I started doing the daily stuff, I had a TikTok account. TikTok is the platform that kind of took this whole daily thing and amplified it. I had an initial account take off—I no longer use it—where I was testing it out. I was testing the platform. I was testing how to create the animation pieces and put it out there. I didn’t do the daily stuff. It was very rough. And then I kind of got the model of doing it. But then, and that account, I believe it got to 100,000 followers or whatever. I knew there was a traction for it, but I wasn’t committed to doing it properly. And then I kind of gamified the entire experience. I told myself, I’m gonna create a whole new account. I’m gonna do this. Because I know it’s working. There’s definitely a niche for it and it’s gaining traction, even though I’m not doing it appropriately or properly or committing myself to do it properly. I’m gonna create a new account. I’m gonna tell myself, “I’ll do this bit every single day.” So a gamified kind of thing.

I wanted to see how quickly I could grow the fanbase, the following, and my skill as an animator. Because I’m essentially gaining the skills of an animator, what one would gain across maybe five years, in the span of a few months because I’m doing it so often. You know what I mean? If you go back to my initial animations and see them, you can see a huge change. And none of that was purposely done. It naturally happened. So I kind of gamified the process as something that I just wanted to see and prove to myself how far I can get.

And it really kind of multiplied everything in terms of exposure as well across all of the major platforms. Follower count, monetary, all these kind of things. So it really worked, and once it was working, I just doubled down on it. I just kept it going since there wasn’t a reason for me to not continue it.

Tubefilter: Was TikTok the first account you had? Or did you have a YouTube channel before that?

NA: Oh, I did have a YouTube. YouTube was where I initially started putting my animation bits. So like I mentioned, I dabbled in some other multimedia things, and I had a YouTube account for animation. I did this before TikTok even became a thing, I think. So on YouTube I did animations and it wasn’t the daily stuff, obviously, that I do at TikTok, it was more on a weekly or semiweekly basis, a slightly longer basis, story-driven, but it was nothing I was committed to. It was as I felt like doing it, just an avenue for me to practice animation and just enjoy it, have fun with it.

Once the animation started taking off on TikTok, I just started cross-platform posting it, and I knew I’d found a recipe for viral content. I knew whichever platform I started posting this stuff, it simply works. That’s what grew the YouTube, that’s what grew the Snapchat. That’s what grew the Instagram. It just kind of worked across all platforms.

So initially the first account I did have was YouTube, and I never stopped YouTube. YouTube just kind of kept going all at the same time when I was on TikTok as well.I just started posting similar or the same content on YouTube as well. So that grew YouTube alongside it.

Tubefilter: Did you notice a difference in growth trajectory on YouTube compared to TikTok?

NA: Oh, definitely. Across all of them, YouTube and TikTok especially is completely different. The easiest thing to notice is a certain video will pop off on TikTok when it might not pop off on YouTube, or vice-versa. So you can, right then and there, see the demographic that’s kind of different. You can see amongst the comments what’s working for one side, what’s not working for the other. Also YouTube historically was based for longer content. So you can kind of see what people are looking for there rather than what people are looking for on TikTok. It’s just a completely different content.

Now with YouTube Shorts, it’s very similar. So I can find similarities in terms of growth and the content type and the people watching now. But initially it was very different. Now just more of a synergy within the content that works on both sides.

So TikTok, just because I think the algorithm, the way it works and the way it kind of cross-promotes content amongst various accounts, is a lot quicker. YouTube has always been more difficult to grow, so I’m glad that’s grown as well, but I think YouTube involves a lot more commitment for somebody to subscribe to your channel. It took a while. It took a lot longer. But I guess once people get used to your content, and when you’re dishing out something on a daily basis, it’s a lot easier to get that fanbase going. So initially it was a lot more difficult, but now I believe they’re growing somewhat at the same pace.

Tubefilter: What has short-form content done for you specifically?

NA: For me as an animator it has really skilled me up in terms of animation, truly, because I think that’s the only thing that I could have done. Like if it was more of a longer piece, I would dedicate, I think, less time to animating on a daily basis because I would know I’ve got a span of time that I can create a piece in.

It just happens right now that have to put out a piece a day, so I’m kind of sharpening my scales every single day. And so it’s really honed down in that. From an animator’s perspective, anybody who asks, you know, how to do this or how to create this or how to do this kind of animated piece, I can give my insight on it. A very, very skillful insight, I guess, because I’ve been doing it for so long, so it’s really sharpened me up.

Another thing it has helped me with—again, like I mentioned, growing the following. It was simply a niche that has not been trialed out before, an animation piece a day, so that it got me involved in and has just really grown a following.

Tubefilter: So do you consider this your career now?

NA: Yes. Yes.

Tubefilter: Like you’re full-time focused long-term on making content across various platforms.

NA: Yes, and forms of entertainment. Creating animations. Yes.

Tubefilter: Very cool. Do you have any future goals for your content or channel? Anything you want to get into or accomplish?

NA: Yes. There’s so many, we discuss all the time with the team as well, there’s so many avenues you can go into. I’ve only hit a small portion of what’s possible. So we were discussing long-form content as something we really want to dive into, create more of a connection with the audience. Things like storytime animations, or even summary videos, or even something larger, like a fictional world. A Nutshell Universe kind of thing. That’s definitely something we want to dive into. And even the name “Nutshell,” before, the name kind of came initially from those summary videos, “in a nutshell” kind of thing. So I just kind of swiped the “in a nutshell” term and named the character Nutshell.

So yeah, we were thinking about long-form content, maybe dive a bit back into longer-based videos. Expanding on it. Because right now it’s strictly short-form, the majority of it. It would be cool to get into longer-form content and see how it can expand on the character, build more of a bond with the audience as well and see where we can take it from there.

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