(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net last month. PLEASE NOTE SOME THINGS MAY BE OUTDATED! Sorry I didn't post this here sooner)

I figured since I have terrible long-term memory problems with my online work, and I also want to re-assure people that this weekly phone series is not the only thing I want to do, I’m gonna start something unprecedented… I’m going to actually talk about the things I want to do in the future every month, rather than keeping them a complete secret until they’re done! Yay!!

So here’s what’s on my mind…

I have this extension in my browser that hides the performance stats of my latest upload on YouTube. I know those numbers can be helpful advice, but as someone who wants to keep this a hobby, the last thing I want is to feel any guilt of uploading a video that doesn’t “perform well.”

That being said, I still noticed that my subscriber count went down after my last video went up. The little number under my name in the YouTube dashboard went from 42,800 subscribers to 42,700. However, this is fine. The current metagame of YouTube is that you only get rewarded for doing one type of video and doing it consistently. Losing subscribers happens naturally when you switch things up, and I expect my sub count to go down even further since all the fans that only want animations are going to leave. It’s within their right to do so!

The ACTUAL problem is not committing to a new video format once you do change, because the more you switch it up, the more you’ll just lose subscribers without gaining anything in the long run (excluding a very small subset of people that truly love everything you do and stick around forever.) This is something I’m trying to end my struggle with- I did enjoy trying all the different videos I’ve made over the past few years, but I would like to actually try committing to some sort of series again. And so Call Wavetro was born.

I’ll talk more about that later though, since you might be wondering if I’m planning on doing anything more original or interesting. Not that there’s anything wrong with Call Wavetro, but certainly I still want to make something that’s more than just playing video games with voicemails in the background, right? Right!

I’ve been considering getting back into comics again, especially since you can just slap an audio track on them and upload it to YouTube. They’re still a LOT of work, but there’s a lot more upsides to sinking time in them compared to animations.

My main issue with Stickmen 2020 was that it was a vicious cycle and a terrible lifestyle: building environments, modeling characters, animating them, etc… only to use everything for a 1-minute comedy video and then starting the process all over. You can take some shortcuts like re-using the stickman model, or having plain photos as backgrounds, but it still ultimately leads to burnout when I did this over and over again on each video.

Cavefolder was actually a more sustainable idea- it was a show that was more worthwhile to work on since it could compete with Stickmen 2020’s re-watchability. It was an original story that doesn’t rely on relevant topics or memes to make jokes, making it way more evergreen and highly satisfying to finish. Cavefolder only ended since it was a random experiment for college and I wasn’t that interested in the story, despite popular demand. But what if I put more thought into a different longer story, and did something with that instead?

This doesn’t mean the animations are going to come back (especially because I get REALLY sick of 3D if I spend too much time in it,) BUT comics are a promising alternative. They’re faster to make. They can be posted outside of YouTube. They can be printed in books. They can be enjoyed by people with hearing problems since they’re subtitled by default. They can even build a strong foundation to turn into an animation later, if I ever find a million dollars lying around anyway.

I had the right idea about this when I was experimenting with vector art last year, but I think I overlooked the comic part because I was only fixated on that vector art style I was trying, and that alone was just too labor-intensive. But bringing back standard 3D comics like the This Is It strip I made almost a decade ago? That might be the actual play.

However, I need to sit down and start writing a story before I can actually make anything like this, which I haven’t found time to do yet. I also want to evolve into making multi-episode stories, rather than doing the “funny one-offs” of Stickmen 2020 or This Is It again. Though it might not be a bad idea to do that anyway to get warmed up. I don’t know!

• Idea for a multi-episode comic - Teddy & Ben: Road Trip America in which Teddy majorly fucks up his life somehow and now Teddy and Ben are on the run in a road trip across America. Would be funny
• Idea for one-off comedy comics - Shapiens are the name I’ve given for the new channel mascots you’ve been seeing lately. I could maybe use them for Stickmen 2020-style comedy comics, but I don’t think they would be as funny as the animations I used to make. I would rather do the road trip idea

But yeah, that’s what I’ve been stewing on lately. Comics.

It is a natural part of every YouTuber lifecycle to eventually touch a music-making application. Usually it sounds mediocre as shit once posted, since a lot YouTubers that do this are more interested in being perceived as a famous musician rather than making music with effort and creative input, but I still want to give it an honest try. In fact, I’ve actually tried to get into music-making for many years now, but I’ve always put it off or gave up because I was busy with 3D animation projects.

With animation now out of the picture though, I might try this again at some point, but more seriously this time! If I do try this, it would be a LONG time before you actually hear a finished song from me. I haven’t even bought a copy of Syntorial yet, which looks more promising than the boring music production tutorials I’ve tried to sit through. But I would like to see where it takes me, especially since I did make that short outro tune for Teddy & Ben back in 2022. I would love to have my own library of music instead of trying to license other songs for use in my videos.

I was also originally going to attempt this with sample-based beats after I had some success with a PO-33 in my free time, but ever since I’ve heard about copyright scares and DMCA abuse from using even somewhat-known samples, I’d rather master a synthesizer first before I try to compose a song. I’m not interested in learning an actual instrument at the moment either, the sound design aspect interests me more than music theory right now.

Bottom line: don’t have high expectations for this, it might not pan out for a while or even at all.

For the handful of you that like to check up on wavetro.net once in a while, you might notice that the Videos page is going to get very annoying to scroll down once the weekly Call Wavetro stuff continues this year. It’s just a very long vertical stack of everything I’ve ever uploaded, and it’s going to get longer as time goes on, possibly even lagging for people visiting on a mobile browser.

So keep your eyes peeled for a new design later this month or in June: I want to rework this page to make it easier to browse. Maybe something like Netflix’s UI, maybe something like a YouTube channel grid- I don’t know yet! But this page is going to look nicer soon, hopefully before the next State of the Wavetro post drops next month.

These are all exciting ideas, but right now my #1 priority is to make Call Wavetro a viable show. I think the latest episode I posted isn’t the viewing experience I’m going for yet, especially because the intro could have been faster and it felt like I put too many voicemails in, among other things. I’m trying to create something that’s as satisfying as a series of YouTube Shorts stitched together, but without actually posting to YouTube Shorts because apps like TikTok or IG Reels are poison. I got some really good feedback so far, like putting all the texts at the end so that people can listen to just the voicemails in the background uninterrupted, or opening a Signal account for Europeans and other international people to leave calls and texts without getting crazy phone bill charges (which was supposed to be with Telegram like I said in the video, but I got banned on there for having a Google Voice number. So far Signal seems to be working better!)

But more than anything, I just want to stick with this for a while, even if I’m not currently happy with it. I already feel tempted to scrap this idea again after seeing my YouTube “metrics” go down after I posted, but I also just want to stop changing up my uploads so fucking much. I just want to have a video series that’s consistent and reliable, so that there’s a consistent and reliable audience ready-to-go when I DO try something cool like comics or music.

So if Call Wavetro isn’t your cup of tea, I hope you still stick around long enough until something new from me comes along, and that the weekly notifs you’re gonna start getting about this show aren’t annoying!

Overall, I think that within a month or two, Call Wavetro will be a lot more streamlined, and more new viewers will stick around for it. But that won’t happen before more people on YouTube continue to unsubscribe (sadly) and I finish ironing out the weaker parts of the show, all while enough people stay interested in continuously calling or texting 918-WAVETRO.

Here’s hoping I pull this off nonetheless!

Thank you for your time! Please let me know what you think in the comments.

George (wavetro)