FreedomToons to Twisted Plots: The Future of Conservative Storytelling | Seamus Coughlin | Ep. 66

Seamus Coughlin, the creator of FreedomToons, joins David Rutherford to talk about his incredible journey from self-taught animator to building one of the most unique storytelling voices online. Together, they dive into the launch of Seamus’ new project Twisted Plots, an anthology animation series with bold themes, sharp comedy, and a vision to reclaim storytelling.

Support Seamus Coughlin's new project, Twisted Plots: www.twistedplots.com 

Next Steps:

• 🏫 Get coaching by David Rutherford: https://www.froglogicinstitute.com/
• 📕 Get David's novel, The Poet Warrior: https://www.ballastbooks.com/ballast-bookstore/the-poet-warrior
• 📰 Sign up for David's weekly newsletter for free coaching tips, updates, and more: https://davidrutherfordletter.substack.com/

Timestamps:

00:00 - Intro

02:46 - Getting started and creating FreedomToons

08:11 - Launching Twisted Plots

09:48 - Avoiding civil war and the power of media

12:38 - The intention behind the show

22:50 - Developing storylines and fighting the narrative

34:03 - The difficulty of scaling animation work

39:06 - How to support Twisted Plots and the amazing perks you get

56:31 - Twisted Plots Promotional Video

 

Follow Clay & Buck on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/clayandbuck

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
When I was a little kid, there was something just
absolutely magical about Saturday morning cartoons. It was a time
where you could just fade into oblivion and really just
start to enjoy the beauty of the art, the funny,
the hilarity of the slapstick. And I think it was
just one of these things that said into me that

(00:29):
stayed with me my whole young life and as an
art school in college. But the problem was is I
got older, I wanted to see more mature comics, and
out came the Simpsons and then you know South Park Park.
And you know, as I got older and was in
the teams and working for the agency and all that,
I got definitely more conservative, and there were just no

(00:52):
no conservative based cartoons out there that were worth a damn.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
And I'm telling you what.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
A few years ago, I ran into one of the
funniest cartoon strips and videos that's out there by far,
Freedom Tunes. And so when I'm on X the other
day and all of a sudden, I see this advertisement
come on that they're going to turn this into a
serious series, I lost my mind. I talked to Jordi,

(01:20):
I said, that's it, Wright Stall, stop, we gotta get
Seamus on, and I'll tell you what. The man who
is inundated with being on Tim Poole's show every day,
going on trying to raise money for this every day,
he had the grace and the courtesy to come and
spend time with us on the David Rutherford Show. So,
ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the famous, the badass

(01:44):
mister Seamus from Freedom Tune.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Shamus, thank you, brother.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
I'm absolutely honored to be here. Thank you so much
for the invite and for all of your kind words.
You know, I love doing timcast. I love doing all
the shows that I've had the opportunity to do on
this circuit.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
I'm really excited to do this one man.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
We had a conversation yesterday for a little bit and
we talked before the show, and I think it's going
to be a fun one. You were mentioning that you
had you previously considered being a cartoonist, which I found
really interesting and really cool, and then you became a
Navy seal. Pretty similar, you know, pretty similar fields there.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Well, when when your dad's and when your dad's an
attorney and you tell them all right, I think I'm
going to be a cartoon, right, you know, the the
freedom that yeah, the freedom ride ends pretty quick. So
you know when I said, you know, all right, I'm
not going to be a cartoonist.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
I'm going to join the Navy.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
And he was a little bit more complimentary, but yeah,
I I had this thing. And if any of my
college buddies will remember, man, I came up with this
character called Stymy and he would, you know, sit around
and rip bong hits and get rejected by all the
hot you know, sorority girls.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Pretty much my lifestyle in college.

Speaker 1 (02:50):
And and and you know so I but I have
this profound appreciation for the art, the story boarding, the
whole thing. Can you just tell my audience a little
bit about how you got your start in art and
why cartooning became the vehicle that you knew would be
able to you'd be able to tell the best stories with.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
Absolutely, I'd be happy to.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Firstly, I just want to mention we had a conversation
about this before the show, and I'll tell your audience
what I told you, which is that it's a good
position for you to be in as opposed.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
To the position I am in.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
Because a Navy seal who wants to become a cartoonist
is going to have an easier time doing that than
a cartoonist who wants to become a Navy seal. So
I think you're set up for success. If you ever
want a career change. I probably can't. I probably can't
cross over to that. That's going to be a little
bit more difficult for me. But what I am trying
to do is cross over into longer form content production.
You know, maybe not necessarily as arduous as the seal.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Training, certainly not.

Speaker 3 (03:48):
But the way I got my start, I began teaching
myself to animate when I was about twelve thirteen years old,
and I'd been drawn since I was a little kid.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
And I started a small business.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
In animation production when I graduate Waited High school. And
before that, i'd been doing little freelance gigs here and there.
And so when I was nineteen, I decided to just
start uploading these short, little political cartoons to YouTube. And
this was back in twenty fourteen, eleven years ago now,
which feels insane to say out loud.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
One thing I've come to realize.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
Is that being an adult is just constantly being shocked
that ten years ago was ten years ago.

Speaker 4 (04:21):
How is that that was some years? Are tell me
about it, man, I gotta yeah, it was like twenty years.
You're like, how was that twenty years ago? Well, being
in the sealed teams is like dog years too. It's
like every one year is like seven years. So I
feel like I'm actually one hundred and three right now.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
But that's why Freedom Tunes brings me back to reality.

Speaker 4 (04:40):
Man.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
All right, so you're in there, you're driving forward. At nineteen,
you start uploading. Did you see success initially?

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (04:48):
I saw some success early on, and nothing like the
numbers that we get now. Arnded up getting over the
years as our video started to go viral. But I
remember the first one I uploaded at some point in
the first month that ended up surpassing it thousand views
or something like that or two thousand views, and I'd
never gotten views like that before, and so I was
totally blown away. And I thought, I think, if I

(05:08):
keep doing this, I can make this a success. And
so even though at that time my business in my
time were basically oriented towards creating work for clients, I
decided to shift more and more energy towards creating the cartoons,
and so I started running Freedom Tunes. I started a Patreon.

(05:29):
I started collecting money from that, and it was just
a little bits of money here and there. But what
I would do is I would like hire someone to
just do the lip syncing for me, some of the
smaller parts of the animation process, so I could get
more videos done. And so it ended up becoming a
pretty significant workload. And I was in college at the time,
and so I was running the business while I was
in school, and about the semester before I graduated college,

(05:52):
it was finally profitable enough for me to make a
living off of, which worked out perfectly. So for that
next year and a half, I was just constantly grinding
at my apartment, working really really hard on these cartoons.
For a good chunk of time, I was working on
every upload basically by myself, with a little bit of help.
And then I started accumulating more people and started growing

(06:13):
a team. I had this one guy I worked with
a call him Ghost Boy. Give him a big shout out.
He's amazing, which is Ghost go do what. He's an
absolute man, and he's you know, he's moved on to
other things, but he's he's an awesome dude and I
remember like probably twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, him and I
working together really hard and we would pull all nighters
all the time to get these videos out. And then

(06:34):
I also got a shout out Kayleb Black, like he's
my right hand man, and I've been working with him
since around then two and over the years I've had
to accumulate this team because what a lot of people
don't realize is animation takes a really really long time.
So for example, an episode of The Simpsons takes nine
months to make, and people go, well, how do they
do an episode every week? It's because they have a
bunch of different teams working on different episodes at the

(06:56):
same time. But yeah, it's like up nine months for
an episode, and so so that's basically why there aren't
other channels that upload animation on a weekly basis, whether
they're political or not. And YouTube even disincentivizes animation because
they pay you based on the amount of time people
spend watching and not the number of views. So if

(07:17):
you do an hour long live stream, it takes you
an hour and you get like an hour's worth of
ad revenue per view. If you're making an animation, it
can take one hundred and two hundred hours for like
two minutes, so you can imagine it just doesn't work
out to a great ratio with ad money. So we've
been very reliant on fans, sponsors, crowdfunding, clients, that kind
of thing.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
We have an awesome, generous audience.

Speaker 3 (07:40):
And after eleven years of doing that, eleven years of
making these shorts and also seeing a lot of different
organizations try to make conservative films and conservative TV shows,
I've just had a number of critiques about how they're
doing it, even though I think their hearts are all
in the right place.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
Some of them are doing a great job.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Some of them, I think there's more to be desired,
and looking at it, I went, I know that myself
and my team, with the experience that we have doing this,
with the workflow that we have, with the artistic chemistry
we all have together, we could make something a lot
better than a lot of these groups are making. And
we can make something that our audience and a general
audience is really gonna love.

Speaker 2 (08:18):
And so that's basically what we're doing.

Speaker 5 (08:20):
Now.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
We've launched a show called.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Twisted Plots, and it's an anthology series, so each episode
is like a completely different story. So it's similar to
Freedom Tunes in that sense, like each upload for Freedom
Tunes is a different story. For Twisted Plots, each episode
is a completely different story and it tackles a different
modern issue or a different moral perspective, and we just

(08:44):
make it as try to make it as funny and
zany and cartoony and crazy as possible. So our first episode,
I don't want to spoil too much of it. I'm
really happy with how it turned out. It's twenty five
minutes long. We actually got the whole twenty five minute
fil finished before we launched the campaign.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
It was a really big lift.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
It was really expensive to do, but we were able
to do it.

Speaker 2 (09:03):
It was an awesome learning experience.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
I think it turned out great, and people who don't it,
people who go to Twisted Plots dot com and support
our campaign at the twenty five dollars level, they'll get
to watch the whole twenty five minute pilot. They'll also
be supporting the show because we're not going to release
the pilot for a while here, and but we want
people who are supporting the show to like be able
to see it ahead of time. So we're really we've

(09:27):
been getting great feedback that. That's one of the really
heartwarming things is people are watching it and they're really
really loving it, which means a lot to me, Which
really means a lot to me, because that's the whole
point of this, right, I want to make something people enjoy,
and the goal is to make something that people can
enjoy even if they're not right wing, even if they're
not conservative, and it has a conservative message, and it'll
it'll maybe make them think about things differently. But they're

(09:50):
not going, oh, the LIB got dunked on, the LIB
got owned. They're just going, this is a really entertaining story,
and oh, you know, I never thought about it that way.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
That's that's the goal. Well, I think that's the artist part.

Speaker 1 (10:00):
Right, there's so I mean, thank god, there's you know,
an unlimited supply of social issues, political issues, right, yeah,
religious issues.

Speaker 2 (10:10):
I mean, you know, I mean.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
There's we you know, most people I talk to who
are in this business, they're like, you know, this is
the best time to ever be in content creation because
there's an unlimited, you know, way to disseminate or to
topics to pick.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
You know.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
Some people hate it because I think a lot of
the audience hates it because they don't know where to
direct themselves, right. They don't know which stuff is going
to be legit, which stuff isn't, which stuff is crazy,
which stuff is you know whatever. I love it all
personally because I my favorite thing about the human condition
is just creativity. I think if more of us were

(10:51):
doing what you're doing, we probably be able to turn
that dial down to where you know, according to you know,
Tucker Carlson's latest message with interview and Nick sorder out
in Portland for getting arrested for you know, being a
disrupting you know Antifa protests. You know we're going to

(11:12):
be in a civil war here soon, right, And you know,
one of the greatest things is talking about all these
different forms of media and how we're going to access
those and how we're going to get our message in there.
But before I do, I just want to give a
quick interruption, and I want to talk about one of
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(11:32):
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Speaker 4 (12:28):
Right.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
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(12:50):
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(13:12):
the switch today? Who yeah, God bless America. All right, Seamus,
let's get back at it. I want to talk about
the different types of patriotic influences or opportunities in the
various forms of mediums within media itself. Better songs, right,
better content, whether it's interviews right, you know. And for me,

(13:33):
I love the art piece. I just I just love
the fact that art has been opened up and it's
not controlled by Disney, It's not controlled by uh, you.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Know, uh souther Bees.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
You know, I mean when you got Banksy able to go,
I don't know if you saw his latest piece he did, Yeah, yeah,
that was great.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
And you know what, they actually made it better by
removing it, because.

Speaker 4 (14:00):
Removing it and it was just amazing the negative related
job proving his point.

Speaker 2 (14:06):
And so that's the thing.

Speaker 1 (14:08):
Man, It's that creativity that lifts people up, that that
forces people to be you know, maybe laugh a little
bit about some serious shit. But then what it also
does is it just it it It can reallocate focus
away from all the madness towards something that tells a story.

Speaker 2 (14:26):
And in a much more positive way. And that's what
you're doing, dude. Thank you man. Is that the intention?

Speaker 1 (14:33):
Like are when you guys sit around and you storyboard
an idea. Can you just walk us through that process
a little bit how you pick stories? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (14:41):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
And firstly, before I even dive into that, I just
want to seizon something you mentioned here and make a comment.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
You said, as.

Speaker 3 (14:47):
Somebody who actually served in the military as a seal
and you've seen a lot of this really ugly stuff,
you're the first guy to say you don't want this
to happen. It's all the internet tough guys who go
I want I want a civil war and I want
to be a part of He says, like, Bro, I'm
a cartoonist. I need to stop the civil war from happening,
Like I need to make sure that this never occurs,
you know, in all seriousness.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
And that's why that's why, that's why special operations in
cartoonists need to bond right.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
Well.

Speaker 3 (15:15):
And I will say one of the really important things
is having a robust pro peace branch of the right wing.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yes, and I've said this before because this is.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
Something I've noticed when it comes to left wing anti
war activists, how do they approach the subject? They go, well,
these young men were told that if they went and
fought in this war, they were going to be protecting
and preserving Christianity and the United States, and they'd be
honoring the flag, and those things are stupid, And they
go out there and say, you're an idiot for wanting
to fight for those things.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
You're a brainwashed fool.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
Whereas, firstly, that's not ever going to persuade the kind
of brave young man who's going to join the military. Dude,
like he's not going to pick up Andrea Dorkin and
start reading your women studies crap and go, oh my gosh,
I thought I was a warrior, but it turns out
I'm a feminist. But more importantly, guys like you are
able to say, hey, dude, our flag is a wonderful

(16:15):
representation of an incredible nation. It's good that you want
to protect your family, it's good that you want to
protect Christianity.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Those are great things.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
That good desire is being manipulated by bad. Keep bad bad,
and that's what's important. That's what young men. So someone
like you can actually reach the young men who would
be considering and listening for something like that or you know,
agitating it. Not even necessarily on the warfare front, but
just in terms of the heightened tension we're seeing in

(16:43):
this country in general, and all this talk.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Of like insurrection in civil war.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
It's really really important for young guys to hear from
men like you who do love your country that there
are peaceful solutions we got to seek out here before
we let things get crazy.

Speaker 1 (16:58):
Well, I mean, it's it's such an intense thing, right,
the drive towards division in all the different ways they're
doing it, driving division within the left, driving division within
the right. I mean, you know, for most of my
bodies that you know have five, six ten combat deployments

(17:18):
in the GWAT, they're telling their kids don't sign up.
I don't care what I don't care what Pete hag
Seth is doing, you know, push ups and all that.
But you know you're gonna they're gonna send you to
war that you don't want to go fight.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
That's not unjust, you know.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
And and I think you can even see like there's
they're pitting in our community there, we're pitted against each
other too, and tearing each other down to negate that influence.
I think to say, hey, man, no more stupid wars.
We're not gonna go sacrifice. The youth the most valuable
asset that we have in this country as young men,

(17:54):
right right. And I don't give a damn if you're black,
you're white, Hispanic, Jewish, Christian, I don't care. Man. All
young men have value because the country is built on
their backs.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
And so my thing is, you don't want war. You
don't want this. You want peace.

Speaker 1 (18:10):
You want you want to be able to, you know,
laugh about things. You want to realize that you're being
pitted against each other's right. Like, that's it, man, And
that's that's what I'm trying to do. A lot of
other my friends, Sean Ryan's trying to do it. You know,
a lot of other guys out there are really trying
to say, hey, listen, young guys, man, have a voice.

(18:32):
You know, believe in what you believe, be true to
those beliefs, stand up for your beliefs. But don't get
sucked into the other stuff as well too. Like we
did well, And that's what I love. There's a great
quote from Saint Mother Teresa. If you want to change
the world, go home and love your family. Ultimately, that's
what a lot of this stuff is about here.

Speaker 3 (18:48):
It's about finding like and part of what loving your
family is, by the way, is faithfully executing the duties
relevant to your career, doing your job well. And so
that's another part of what I'm trying to do here
and what I'm tring to inspire people to see. With
the content that we're making, it's a show that again
it's zany, it's all over the place, it's funny, but
at the core of it is like a very Christian,

(19:09):
very very pro family message, and you on the first
watch it won't like smack you in the face necessarily
with every episode. But here's how Hollywood took control of
the culture. They told stories that taught you a lesson,
because that's how people taught lessons through all of history.
And when everyone was sitting around the campfire in prehistoric

(19:30):
times and the shaman was telling a story, he didn't
have a clumsy set of dialogue where like the SJW
got owned or whatever, or the conservative got owned or whatever.
He just told a story and through the story itself
and what happened to the character, you learned a lesson
about how you should behave about morality about life. The

(19:51):
problem is so much of our media tells a really
really bad story and gives you a really bad and
moral lesson. But they're so good and they have this
art perfected at making you buy into horrible stuff. So
an example I love to use this is one of
the most popular films of all time, Titanic YEP. And

(20:12):
I love using this as an example because it is
a masterclass in this exact kind of emotional manipulation. If
I just lay out the plot for that story on paper,
completely black and white. It is about a woman who
is engaged to be married to a man. They're traveling
to the United States. While she's on a ship with him,

(20:33):
she begins cheating on him with a homeless man, and
then she fornicates with this homeless man in the back
of a car in the bottom of a ship, has
him draw a picture of her nude wearing her engagement
present that her fiance got her, puts it in the
safe that he owns, just to insult him. Then, when
the ship is sinking, she jumps off a lifeboat to
get back out of the ship, and then even the

(20:54):
homeless guy ends up dying trying to save her like
on and sorry for the spoilers.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
If you haven't seen it right on.

Speaker 4 (21:00):
Paper on paper, you do not hear that story and
root for that woman.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
You do not hear that story. That's so beautiful.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
Right, But listen, man, I'm i am man enough to
acknowledge that movie draws you in.

Speaker 2 (21:14):
The special effects are phenomenal.

Speaker 3 (21:16):
The mood the music is like gut wrenching and heart wrenching.
The cinematography is executed brilliantly. They're able to hypnotize you
into celebrating like the horrible actions of this woman, who
by the end of the film, by the way, when
she's in her like nineties, is still a really selfish person.
Because what does she do. She like drops the diamond

(21:37):
off the side of the boat. Instead of giving it
to the people who were searching for it, or her
granddaughter or like giving it to or whatever, she just
throws all this wealth away. So the reason I like
bringing that up as an example is because it's like
a perfect case study, because you don't know, no one
thinks like Titanic that's leftist propaganda, But that film is

(21:57):
pro adulterry. That film is pro fornication. That film is
pro licentiousness. That is how Hollywood has done this for
years by having a person who does really really bad
things either not pay a consequence for it, or for
you to actually appreciate and celebrate the bad things that
they're doing. So what we and this is a big

(22:17):
part of what we're doing with our show, is we're
just telling really good, really fun, really interesting stories where
we don't celebrate people who are doing bad things, like
we don't like, yes, there are some jokes there, there
are people who do bad things, like we don't celebrate it,
and we make it clear that like that's not the
winning strategy. By the end of the story, you know
what we're trying to say, but again without it being

(22:39):
heavy handed. Just because you saw what happened to the characters,
you saw where the story went.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
I love that And so that's why I mean for me,
developing storylines is the funnest aspect of what you're doing, right,
Like you start with an intention and then you all
you build this this whole thing around and I'm there
was a few years ago I got a film crew
together and I was trying to put together real to
try and sell about the Second Amendment, and it was

(23:08):
really all right, like what's the storyline going to be?
And you know, and that was the fun part, right
trying to figure out what the end result in the
individual's mind's going to be. Can you kind of talk
to us about your process of picking a topic breaking
it out? And you know, there's this really great video

(23:28):
that always kind of recirculates on the interwebs there and
it's with Trey Stone and Matt Parker talking about the
development of plot lines like this needs to go this,
this needs to go here, then something needs to happen
to rebuild it here.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Can you just walk through how you guys do it?
One million percent?

Speaker 3 (23:47):
Yeah, And I just want to mention about the Second
Amendment first, because I think this is a really strong
point and it relates to something you and I were
talking about before the show. One of the most pro
Second Amendment films ever made, one of the films that
inspired a Mary Cans to say, we need to hold
onto our firearms. Silly as this might sound, but I
am being serious. It was not some pro Second Amendent documentary.
It was Red Dawn. Like I am, I am so

(24:09):
serious about this, By the way, I really mean this.
I know I love listen. I know I've seen the
eighties version. It is silly, it is cheesy, it is ridiculous,
and I don't think it was it was trying to
be a pro to a movie or anything like that.
But what you got to remember is, like, in the
same way that Titanic promotes fornication, or like you know,

(24:30):
a film like Philadelphia promotes homosexuality, Red Dawn was promoting
gun ownership, whether it realized it or not, because the
story puts in your mind, oh like, actually the purpose
of the second ammenent is to fight a trannical government
or afford invasion or something along those lines. So as
and that's remember trying to oh yeah, go ahead. I

(24:53):
just got to tell you.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
I love your brain, you your ability to see those
things and those narratives, you know, and I and I
just one quick note before you get into the details
of this. I think everybody who is waking up to
this stuff, right, they're see it now, like it's not
camouflaged anymore. They know that we've you know what, you know,

(25:16):
you've been propagandized.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
You know, you've been.

Speaker 1 (25:19):
Led down this very long, very arduous path of what
you're consuming for inspiration, right, and that's that's why you
that's why you consume uh uh media in the first place,
is for this, this, this, this, it makes you feel something, right,
Like everybody remembers, you know, their first major breakup in

(25:40):
what song you listen to on repeat? Right, everybody remembers
you know that movie that like, Yeah, for me, I
was in college, I watched JFK. I was like, holy shit,
the government's bad, you know what I mean. And it's
like and it's like, you know, and and that's the
thing about this, that's the power of what you're doing.

Speaker 2 (26:00):
Well, thank you.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
And this is the thing because I know that there
are some people on occasion we'll scoff at this. Well,
the documentary is much more important. Listen, there are great documentaries.
But let's face it, you for is brilliant as you
think you are. You know, mister smarty pants, who only
watches documentary. This is me talking to the hypothetical opponent
I have in my head. You are more influenced by

(26:22):
a narrative film than you are by documentary, whether you
realize it or not. And the documentary is still important.
By the way, I'm not dismissing it. I'm not dismissing it,
but I'm saying conservatives have done a lot of that.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
We need to make narrative stories.

Speaker 3 (26:35):
And so you were asking about the process we have here,
and you mentioned Trey Parker and Matt Stone discussing story
and I know what you're referring to. They were saying,
when you make a story, you need to ensure that
your plot is so then and not and then. In
other words, this happens, so, then this happens, So the
character does this, so then that happens, This happens, and

(26:57):
then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happened.
Because then it becomes disjointed and you don't really care
about what's happening. A bunch of things are just being
thrown at you. And when we were working on the
pilot for this, actually we have the stript written and
we were working on it, and a couple months ago,
as I was watching a draft of it, I went, all, right,
there's a lot of this that's really strong.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
I think the ending is.

Speaker 3 (27:15):
Strong here, but the beginning of it felt very and
then it didn't have the right so then build that
I felt it needed to, so I added new scenes.

Speaker 2 (27:23):
We readed some of the animation.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
We modified some things because it's very important for the
audience to be able to follow a thread through the
episode and feel like they've been told the cohesive narrative
instead of just seeing a bunch of different things happen
on screen. And that's one mistake that a lot of
big action films will make, is they'll they'll throw a
lot at you. It's very important to just remember that
thread because at the heart of it all, you are

(27:46):
telling a story. And when you do tell a story,
there's a reason. There's a reason, Like when a little
kid tells a story, it's very funny, but it part
of why it's funny because their method doesn't work because
that's what little kids and then this, and then this happened,
and then this happened, and then this happened. But to
tell a story that's really going to captivate a wild
wide audience, it has to be like this happens, so

(28:07):
this happens, so this happens, so this happens, so this happens.
It's a very clear line connecting everything. And then if
you know, if you're a really creative director, and this
is something Christopher Nolan has done a good amount is
like you have that line, but then you kind of
break up the ordering in which you tell it, or
like Pulp Fiction famously did that.

Speaker 2 (28:23):
But remember Memento Member Memento.

Speaker 3 (28:26):
Yes, the great film, but that film, and that's a
very clever film and the way it breaks it up
and shakes the order, but it's still just a very straight,
clear narrative.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
It's not a bunch of stuff happening.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
And so yeah, it's really really important for your story
to have a cohesive narrative where the character's choices affect
the world around them. And for the first episode, as
we were writing it, I was so glad that we
were able to nail that and make that work because
it's an episode about a lot of things happen.

Speaker 2 (28:57):
I don't want to spoil it.

Speaker 3 (28:59):
I don't want to spoil it, but it's an episode
about a character reacting to a lot of things happening
broadly in society.

Speaker 2 (29:05):
Let's say it touches I'll put it this way.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
It touches on like the question of ets an extra
trustrial life.

Speaker 2 (29:12):
You guys are gonna love it. I actually think you
guys are gonna love it. But it's.

Speaker 3 (29:18):
Part of that is like, Okay. The sow then is like,
what how does he deal with this? How does his
perspective change what is happening in the world around him
as opposed to like, aliens do this, aliens do that.
This happens, that happens, that happens.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
It's great.

Speaker 3 (29:34):
And so there were a couple moments where I was
watching it in the production process where I was like,
I think we need a scene where we see our
protagonists doing something here.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
I feel like we need an extra moment.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
There to really sell that this is still like a
story about this guy and what he's going through. And
we were able to get it to a place where
it just balances and you get a good feeling for
the story thread with all of this awesome crazy stuff
still happen.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
I love it like I got this great advice from
a writing class I took in college.

Speaker 2 (30:06):
And you know this. It was this old guy too.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
He'd been teaching at Penn State for like fifty years,
but he was brilliant, been published, and he would say,
because I would write these fantastical scenes and all this stuff,
and he'd say, hey, never forget that your reader wants
to feel what your main character is feeling yeah, And

(30:31):
that was huge for me to realize that. And so
you know, I've worked on my first fiction book over
the last year, getting ready to release that coming up.
But it was like, all right, it's about the evolution
of this individual, right, and that's what you what I
think grounds you in that that development of the narrative.

(30:53):
If you can always put yourself back in their shoes,
that's where the magic happens.

Speaker 3 (30:58):
And you know, there's there's two kinds of story structures
in that sense that are really popular. Firstly, in the
most common one is a character changing throughout the story.
So he starts one way and by the end of
the film he's a different way.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
A Christmas Carol's a great example of this.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
There's other kinds of stories, and these are less common,
but they're probably more.

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Difficult to pull it off. But if you pull it off,
it goes really well.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
And those are stories where the character stays the same
but the world changes around is they're able to change
the world. So I think a good example of that
might be Forrest Gump or Shawshank Redemption. It's not to
say Andy your Forest don't have any character growth, but
they clearly shape the world around them in these really
incredible ways, whereas again and other stories, that's not how
it goes. But you need some kind of narrative arc

(31:40):
in that way. And this is funny, This is just
occurring to me now. Actually, our protagonist in our pilot
episode is a veteran, and part of the subtext I like, again,
I don't want to spoil too much of it. I
don't want to spoil too much of the story, but like,
part of the subtext of that first episode is.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Again, this is subtext.

Speaker 3 (31:58):
It's not like a big theme that we but part
of it is, you know, we sent these people to
fight in these wars and make these sacrifices, and then
they come back home and all of our media is
totally nihilistic and telling them that nothing matters. So not
only did you send people to be involved with something
that was absolutely horrible and difficult to cope with, but

(32:21):
then you took away the number one coping strategy from
our culture, which is to believe that things do matter,
that there is a right and wrong, and like even
if the particular war, for example, wasn't a war we
should have been fighting, that doesn't mean that there wasn't
some real good moral reason for your own development. Maybe
it brought you closer to Christ, maybe it helped you

(32:43):
experience something, learn something was part of your mission, right,
But we as a society have just stolen that from people.
And that's the theme of the entire show. The theme
of my entire show, of the entire anthology series that
we're making is life matters. That's the that is the
theme is like, life matters, and morality is real, and

(33:06):
you matter and your actions have consequences because you're important,
because you actually matter.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Dude, I'm like, I'm I'm chopping at the bit for
this now. It's crazy. I just I you. You have
logged in the time, right, and that's and that's what
so many people don't get, right, Like, you don't just
wake up and you're able to generate a framework of understanding, narratives, plotlines.

(33:32):
Character development just doesn't happen overnight. It takes you know, countless,
countless countless hours, you know, writing something that sucks, scrapping it,
starting and over writing something that scraps, drawing something that scraps,
starting over, refining, tweaking, refine. Yes, and you have done
that over the last you know, twenty years of your
life since that first strip? You ever did you know

(33:55):
one of the things that I always find interesting, you know,
because you're so intimately connect to that it's personal to you.
Right what what the audience member fields is personal to you?
How does it work now for you? Because now you're going,
you're you're scaling, You're going to the next level where

(34:15):
you're you're moving into that uh, you know, Lucas level
where you're you're gonna be in charge of the whole production.

Speaker 2 (34:22):
You're you have to take a step back.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
You have to give ownership to people who are doing,
you know, different aspects of sound or or artwork or
background work or whatever it is right in the production dynamics.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
Is that hard for you?

Speaker 1 (34:38):
Because I hear you talk man Seamus, and I'm like, man,
that motherfucker believes what he's.

Speaker 2 (34:44):
Doing, and like that gets me all fired out. Like
there's nothing that gets me more fired up.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
And I don't care if you're passionate about something that
I don't believe in. As long as you believe it
and you're passionate, you're willing to speak about it intelligently, right,
I'll like, all right, let's hear it, But man, it's
in you, is it? It's hard for you now as
you're scaling to kind of get above it a little
bit and be the you know, you're raising the funds,

(35:09):
you're the face, you're the director, you're the main executive producer,
you're hiring staff. Is that becoming? You know, you're doing
thousand interviews. You're like, tell me what that's like in
this transition for you.

Speaker 3 (35:20):
I actually appreciate that question because it's something people probably
don't consider or think about, because, as I mentioned, your
average person doesn't really know how much goes into animation
and how large of a team you usually need in
order to make it. So what happens is the visionary
behind the project or the person who initially created it
usually does end up having to step back and take
on a larger team in order to scale it. And

(35:41):
that has been a slow, purgative process. It's painful to
a degree, but it's also great to a degree because
you're able to step out and expand and focus on
other things, and you're able to get people on your
team who are great and I have the best team
in the world, by the way.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
That's also why I'm really confident about this show.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
I've the best team, and you have people who are
really talented and really good, and where the humility comes
in and where the pain and the process comes in
is going that's different than I would do it, and
it's actually better. I have a rule, and I've had
a rule for a long time that like, I don't

(36:21):
hire someone unless they're better than me.

Speaker 2 (36:23):
It's something.

Speaker 3 (36:26):
Man because and everyone on my team has like something
they're able to pull off that I'm not as good at.
And because of that, the quality of the videos has
improved immensely over the years, and we were still able
to keep it in a consistent style where you look
at that and go, that's Freedom Tunes. If you look
at our videos from ten years ago, you'll still be
able to tell that it's Freedom Tunes, that this is

(36:46):
work that I'm behind.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
But the stuff we're doing now looks a lot better.

Speaker 3 (36:50):
It looks a lot better, and the show we're making
looks even better than the videos that we're doing now.
And so it is a slow process and it's taken away,
but I've got enough experience now with it that you
know I'm still gonna be I'm still gonna be very
much in the production. But my role is going to be,

(37:10):
you know, yes, animating some shots here and there, but
a lot of it.

Speaker 2 (37:12):
Is going to be going.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
You know what, if you really want the comedic timing
to land for this scene, you have to cut like
four frames out of this and you got to squash
this a little more, stretch this a little more. There's
things like that that you start to have to do
as a director. Here's the right music that we need,
Here's how we want to cut this sequence so that
like the audience feels it in their chest when they
see the.

Speaker 2 (37:29):
Video aligned with the music.

Speaker 3 (37:32):
And so my role is more or less transitioned into that,
and it's been a slow transition over the years. But
that's also part of why I feel confident that we're
gonna be able to pull this off, because I have had
experience delegating and stepping back and managing the team. I've
got a really good friend, actually my best friend. He
fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's a former military guy.

(37:54):
And one thing he used to tell the guys who
he was in charge of, which I absolutely love and
I quote all the time, is he said, you will
never rise to the occasion, you will always default to
your level of training. I love that so much and
it's been a model to live by, and that's why
I was like, I feel we've gotten to the point

(38:15):
where our default level is to really quickly and competently
churn these videos out, so I know that we're capable
of taking a project like this on. Like, I would
not be attempting something like this if I didn't believe
that we were in a place where we were consistently
rising to the occasion to deliver content. And it's been
eleven years now since we've been uploading this stuff consistently,

(38:36):
so I really believe this is the time for us
to expand.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
Oh man, I'm so far up, dude. And your buddy, Man,
he's genius. That he is a great I love him, Dude,
the greatest lesson you can ever learn. Like, it's about
your preparation, it's about your training, it's about your team,
it's about your unity, about your motivation, about your mission focus. Man,
that is genius and I love that more than anything.
All Right, here, what I want to do now, Seamus,

(39:02):
is I want to talk about how we going to
get people to open up their wallets, get out their
credit cards, and why should people come in and then
give us like the stages of what they'll get based
on how much they invest the whole thing. I mean
when I read through these, I was pissing myself when
I was reading through the descriptions on them, they're absolutely awesome.

(39:24):
So take us through, all right, what give us the
general framework of what's taking place, and then how people
can contribute, how they can get behind you, what they
can do.

Speaker 3 (39:34):
Yeah, So firstly, one thing I want to mention for
people who love freedom tunes. We have no plans of
stopping freedom tunes or anything like that. This is an
expansion project. This is not like we're done with freedom tunes,
we don't want to do it anymore. This is another
bigger project that we're trying to take on, to grow
as a studio, find an even larger audience, make something
that again your average person who maybe isn't as tapped

(39:56):
into the political news cycle, we'll be able to enjoy
and learn from. So Twistedplots dot com is where you
can go. It's going to take you to our go
fundme page and basically we've got a number of different
perk setup if you donate at the level of twenty
five or more, you will have access to our first episode,

(40:16):
and it's again twenty five minutes long. This episode took
us about eight months to make. We were working on
it with a smaller crew, basically as we were producing
Freedom Tunes. Myself and a smaller team of people were
working on that. And so we believe what the funding
that we're raising now and what we're asking for with

(40:37):
the per episode costs that we're going to have, we're
gonna be able to get each episode done, we believe
in about three months, so we're gonna be doing it.
It's gonna be a five episode season. Episode one's already done,
so the plan is three months. If the first episode
has some production stalls or something like that, it might
take a bit longer than that. And if you if
you donate, by the way, we're going to keep you

(40:57):
updated on all of it. Like we're gonna send updates
to the people who are donating, so they know what's
going on with the episode, they know how their dollar
is being stretched. Because we aren't really really stretching people's
dollars here.

Speaker 2 (41:08):
I want to give everyone like a little bit of
perspective on how.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
Much animation costs because this is confusing, and I don't
blame them. When you say, like, we need this much
for this project, they go, well, I don't understand what
makes animation cost that much. So if you look at
an episode of south Park from nineteen ninety seven and
you see the animation quality of that one episode of
that show costs two hundred fifty thousand dollars to produce

(41:32):
in nineteen ninety seven, Yeah, with that level of quality, Yeah,
with that very like respectfully could but they were trying
to do it low quality, right, That was part of
the joke, with that really low quality, choppy animation back
in nineteen ninety seven. Adjusted for inflation, it's it's something
like five hundred and ten thousand. Like, we are going
to be able to do our entire first season for

(41:54):
less than it costs to do one episode of south
Park thirty years ago, basically twenty eight years ago, so
we're really stretching the dollar. But it is expensive because
we basically have to hire a team of eight to
ten people for about three months in order to get
these episodes done. But because I believe in this project
so much, because I want it to exist in the world,

(42:14):
I invested company savings into getting the pilot produced, and
now we're at the point where listen, it was expensive.
It didn't cost quite as much as the episodes we're
going to be producing now are going to cost, because again,
we want to churn them out more quickly, we want
them to look nicer, we want more of the team
on them. But it was expensive, and so now we're

(42:34):
at the point where we have this proof of concept.
We know it's great, we know it works well, we
know the audience that has seen it has really loved it,
and so we want to be able to get the
rest of these episodes funded the actual wage it works
out to. And I have a little pitch video where
I explain this is, Yeah, we're.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Going to play that at the end forever Abody perfect.

Speaker 3 (42:53):
Yeah, So maybe I can maybe I can allow you
to play that at the end. And for now, I'll
just sort of explain to people why I think this
is so important. The reason this is so important is
because again, for years and years, the left is completely
and totally dominated the entertainment landscape. And my good buddy

(43:14):
Tim has been doing a news show and that's extremely
important because we need news shows that aren't controlled by
the left, and it's a reason why a lot of
information has gotten out there. But we also need entertainment shows.
We need shows that are just there for you to
watch and tune out and enjoy and not necessarily think

(43:36):
about the world, but which can give you a positive
moral at the end of the day. So here's what
your dollar is going to be doing if you donate
to our cause and help us make this show. Firstly,
you're going to be getting good content out of this.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
We do have perks. You know.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
Again, if you're at the twenty five dollars level, you'll
be able to see the first episode. Even at the
ten dollars level, there are perks that you'll be able
to access, and we can go through some of those
in a bit. But you'll also be hiring and awesome.
You'll be helping to support a really awesome team of
animators who I've worked with for a long time, who
are good people who have been schurning on Freedom Tunes.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
For a long time.

Speaker 3 (44:13):
I'm just going to say this, there are a lot
of people in Hollywood and in the entertainment industry and
in the animation industry who are not willing to work
with me because of my values. The people who are
working with me are really, really, really cool people, and
I believe that they deserve an opportunity to work on
a big, cool project, and some of them have, Like

(44:34):
we've got former Disney animators with us. I mean, yeah,
people are waking up to how awful the woke culture is.
People are waking up to how awful the left is.
And so what I'm doing is I'm coalescing a lot
of those people into a studio to build this all out.
One problem I think a lot of conservative groups that
are that have tried to make media have run into is,

(44:56):
in my humble opinion, they've taken on too much at once.
They'll go, we're gonna make twelve movies and fifteen TV shows,
and you go, that's gonna be more than you think
it's gonna be even with that huge amount of funding.
We again have ten years of experience making these cartoons,
and we want to expand out into the next logical step,
which is you know, twenty two minute long episodes, and

(45:19):
then from there, if that's successful, what we're gonna do
is we're gonna start expanding out into making other shows.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Another season of that show or other shows or movie.
We want a movie, we want a movie. Listen.

Speaker 3 (45:32):
I have multiple, like one hundred and twenty page long
screenplays that I've heard from movies that I want to
I have. I have a children's film which has like
twenty minutes of it storyboarded and animatics that that I've
I don't.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
Want to reveal too much.

Speaker 3 (45:49):
I've been working on a lot of really cool stuff
in the background, but like right now, I believe this
project is our next sest, So we're full steam ahead
out of it on it. And once we make this,
once we release this, I think it's going to be
a gigantic hit. I think that people are gonna love it,
and it's gonna help a prove to the establishment that

(46:09):
shows like this can be successful, that studios like mine
are able to churn out really great content. Normally, because
animation is so expensive, only big studios and big companies
are able to finance it. But with grassroots funding from
a crowdfunding campaign, what you guys are saying with each
dollar you give is your average regular person, not your
network executive, not not your giant political donor, but your

(46:33):
average normal person wants this right and that such a
really clear message. And so the way crowdfunding campaigns generally
work is you want to raise as much of your
budget as possible early on, because usually you raise a
big amount right at the very beginning, a big amount
at the very end, and then in the middle it's
sort of slow and steady.

Speaker 2 (46:53):
And I just want to thank our audience.

Speaker 3 (46:56):
This is probably gonna be airing a couple of days
after we recorded it, but our first forty eight hours
we raised a third of our total budget, which is massive.
I mean, that's an explosive start for a crowdfunding campaign,
and especially for an entertaining for like an entertainment crowdfunding campaign.
For entertainment crowdfunding campaigns, you're lucky if you can get
to like twenty percent and forty eight hours. So the

(47:16):
message that has already been sent, I mean, you're luck
if you can get to like ten percent.

Speaker 2 (47:19):
Honestly, most of them fail.

Speaker 3 (47:21):
So the message that the audience has already sent is
this is the kind of stuff want.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
We want grassroots.

Speaker 3 (47:27):
It's not we want like content that's not degenerate, that
does have a good message, but we also want it
to be produced by people who really, really care about it.

Speaker 2 (47:35):
And really have a vested interests. And that's what I have.

Speaker 3 (47:38):
I've got an awesome small team of some of the
hardest working animators in the industry who are putting the
hours in because they love what they're doing and they
want to spread this message.

Speaker 1 (47:51):
Dude, Seamus, you are on fire right now and listen.
If you're listening to this right now. The one I
want you to direct to is I want you to
check out the one one thousand dollars one because they
will design a caricature of you and put you in
the background in this series.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
All right, So that's the money one right there.

Speaker 4 (48:10):
For that.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
I also love the Elon muss one and Elon please
give these guys a million bucks, right, God bless you know.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
Get listen.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
We want the whole colonization of Mars going on, right, Like,
go go for it, man, Yeah, So I just yeah,
go ahead, And I just want.

Speaker 3 (48:24):
To mention for information about the what we're doing with
background characters. We've been so surprised and like humbled, frankly
by the amount of people who have given for that.
I think when we saw at the end of the
first day they were like twenty people and I'm like
oh man, we're gonna have to like figure out a
lot of background characters, so at some point we like
may actually have to limit that, but we haven't limited
it yet. And even you know, our first episode, we

(48:46):
have the donor version finished, but it's not out yet.
Like you you might eat, we might even put your
character in the first episode because we have a couple
of crowdshots there. So again, if you guys go over
and donate, there's a lot of really cool perks.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
And I want to mention, are you.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
Able to put our camp paint on the screen so
we can show them the Elon Musk issue?

Speaker 2 (49:02):
Or should I read it out loud to them? Read
it out loud for him? All right? So we've got
a number of different donor levels.

Speaker 3 (49:07):
If you support it to ten dollars level, your name
is going to go and the end credits as a
founding supporter, and you'll get instant access. Well you would
get instant access if you donated within the first twenty
four hours, and then for the twenty five dollars tier,
which is the in the no tier, you'll receive updates
through production, like information on when scripts are completed, when
storyboards are done, and when we're entering the animation process,

(49:31):
and you'll also again get access to the pilot excuse me.
For fifty dollars, you'll receive early access to all episodes
up to forty eight hours before they're released. You'll also
get behind the scenes updates about when we move into
certain parts of production. That kind of thing will let
you in on a little more of the process. You
get to the one hundred dollars level, I mean, this

(49:52):
is very very generous. We really appreciate like any amount
that people can donate, but obviously at this level, this
is really generous. And so you'll get act says to
like commentary tracks from the cast and.

Speaker 2 (50:01):
Crew for each episode.

Speaker 3 (50:03):
Is they air at an unlisted link online, and we
want to do two commentary tracks, one which is like
the writer track where I'll be talking about this, and
then one way where it's like an animators track. I'll
also be on that, but with the whole animation team.
So in the writer track, I'll kind of be talking
about how I flesh the story out and what the
moral is. And then in the animation commentary track, everyone's

(50:23):
going to be talking about like the production and how
we did this, and so at the two hundred fifty
dollars level, you'll get access to animatics and storyboard, so
you can give figure, you know, feedback early on in
the process. For that level, you know you'll will want
to have you signed an NDA just to be like
one hundred percent certain that the episode doesn't leak or
information doesn't leak.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
But listen, we trust you, guys.

Speaker 3 (50:42):
I don't think you're going to do anything like that,
and it'll let you in on the process. You'll also
be able to give feedback like I really like this
this scene.

Speaker 2 (50:49):
And by the way, listen, I'm not some diva.

Speaker 3 (50:52):
If enough people of enough people are like this was
confusing to me, or I didn't like.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
This, I want this show to be good.

Speaker 3 (50:59):
I want this it would be something you guys like,
so I really take audience feedback very seriously. Then at
the five hundred dollars level, we're gonna give a poster
for the pilot episode, which is gonna be signed by
core members of the crew who worked on the pilot,
and when the first season's finished, you'll also receive your
choice of like either a collectible DVD with behind the
scenes content for season one or if you're like a hipster.

(51:20):
We're also gonna do VHS tapes of the first season
after its released. The thousand dollars level is will design
a characaterure you, which will use as extras or background
characters that might be used in backgrounds for different shots,
and we're gonna keep that folder open and we're gonna
we're gonna like put you in the library of background
characters that we draw from, which is really cool. I

(51:40):
think is really cool. We'll probably my favorite. I think
that's super awesome. And we'll have to get like, I'm
sure we'll have to get some kind of creative release
from people, but that's fine.

Speaker 2 (51:49):
I mean, people are cool about that. Now.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
If you're if you're like, if you're a wealthy person,
you know, and you you have this kind of money
to spare. Again this, if you're donating at this level,
this is extremely generous. We have tiers for people who
are willing to donate ten thousand if you have that
kind of cash, And what we'll do is we'll make
and send you a poster for every single episode, and
each poster will be signed by the crew who worked

(52:14):
on the show, and you'll also receive all of the
above perks if you're really wealthy, If you're really wealthy
and you really believe in this and you want to
contribute twenty five thousand, we put the option there as well.
You get all that stuff plus assigned VHS tape and
DVD containing the first season, all that signed and a
printed and signed screenplays for every episode. And then we
have one final tier. And this tier is for five

(52:37):
hundred thousand dollars and it's named Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 (52:42):
I'm writing this, Elon.

Speaker 3 (52:44):
If you pick this, I'll do a whole episode where
white South African farmers colonize Mars and make the land farmable.
And listen, you can't you can't blame me for trying.
You know, maybe Elon Musk comes in and funds the
whole season and then we do that episode.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
That would be fantastic, bro.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Either just everything about what you guys are doing is cool, man,
you know, from the content to the delivery of the ask,
you know, and then you, I mean you, I mean,
this is what in my mind, like, this is the
kind of person that I want to support. This is
You're the kind of person that believes in your staff.

(53:27):
You're the kind of person that's humble in your creative
process and you're I mean, you're super fucking funny man.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
And that man would say that's a very high praise.

Speaker 1 (53:38):
So I just can't say enough about what you guys
are doing. Uh, you know, at any time, any any moment,
if you guys want to come back on, you want
to come back on whatever, at any process, we would
love to have you, Shamus, Freedom Tunes, Twisted Plot. I

(53:59):
just you guys can find them on Instagram, on YouTube,
you can find them on on x or everywhere. Just
at Freedom Tunes. You're I just you're the real deal.
And I just can't thank you enough for coming on. Seamus.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
I wish bless you, thank God bless you, and I
just want to say it. It's Twisted Plots with an S.

Speaker 3 (54:17):
So in your browser, if you just type in twisted
plots dot com, it'll take you right to the GoFundMe page.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
We have, like again, a custom page set up.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
There, so if you want to help support what we're doing,
go to twisted plots dot com. Thank you, dude, thank
you so much for having me. I really appreciate this.
I want to thank you for having me. I also
I want to thank your audience for taking the time
to listen to me. You know, every now and again
someone says, I really want to support this, but like
I don't have any money. Listen, man, I totally get
at the fact that you want to support this at all.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Really means a lot to me.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
What people can do if they're strapped for cash, but
they really like this, they really want to see this
become a show. Just share it, Just share it, Share
our pitch video, guys, And a share means so much
more than an AD because people, you know, are like,
think about this.

Speaker 2 (55:03):
Are you more likely to.

Speaker 3 (55:04):
Donate to something you saw in an AD or that
you saw a flared trust share something someone shared it?

Speaker 2 (55:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
So if you, guys, if you're not able to help financially,
but you want to see this become a reality, just
share our link out please.

Speaker 2 (55:17):
And I'm going one.

Speaker 1 (55:18):
More deeper, Seamus. I want everybody who loves the show.
I want you to share the Twisted Plots a promo
with Elon Musk. I want him to get fifty thousand.

Speaker 5 (55:32):
Shares a day for the next like I want a
gorilla slam that motherfucker, And I want him to see
this and put his money where his mouth is.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Because this is exactly what he supports.

Speaker 6 (55:47):
I guess I'll have to make an episode of the
show that the South African farmers are going to go
tomar yes, us yes, to make the show then aid dollars.
Of course, that's I figure. I have that in between
my cushions somewhere. Let me send here, but I have that.
We'll do the way shout African episode.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
Oh my God, help you. Yeah, God, bless you, brother,
keep it. Ess you man, thank you, you're the man. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (56:15):
After over six hundred animated videos, gaining a million subscribers
and a quarter billion views, all with zero dollars spent
on marketing, it is time for me to answer the question.
My wonderful audience has been asking for years, when are
you gonna make something big? When are you going to
graduate to making shows and movies and that kind of thing.

(56:39):
And the answer to that question is now, and with
your help, I have been developing a comedy anthology series.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
It's a social satire.

Speaker 3 (56:51):
Each episode is over twenty two minutes long and explores
an insane and hilarious premise which conveys our values not
through ham fisted preaching like a lot of quote unquote
anti woke shows if attempted, but organically, through fun and
engaging storytelling, the show has a conservative angle. You won't
have to be conservative to enjoy it. That's why it's
going to shape culture. These episodes all range in tone.

(57:13):
The pilot's much goofier and zanier and more.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Off the wall.

Speaker 3 (57:16):
Other episodes are darker and more serious with a dry sensibility.
Others are somewhere in between. Now Here's the thing. Animation
is extremely expensive. I can't afford to fund this whole show.

Speaker 2 (57:28):
Out of pocket. For a little bit of perspective.

Speaker 3 (57:30):
An episode of The Simpsons takes nine months and costs
five million dollars. For Family Guy at six months and
it costs two million. South Park does each episode and
a week on a five hundred thousand and two million
dollars per episode budget, so they can hire a really
big crew. But with tight budgeting, an extremely dedicated team,
and the very efficient pipeline I've worked out over the years,
we're going to be able to produce the entire first

(57:52):
season of our show for less than the cost of
one episode of South Park. In fact, we're gonna be
able to make our entire first season for the amount
that it costs to make one South Park episode in
nineteen ninety seven, our entire season for five hundred thousand dollars. Now,
I know some of you are asking how, and others
are asking how for each episode, we're gonna need eight

(58:15):
to ten people myself included working forty to sixty hour
weeks for about three months. Once you factor in payroll taxes,
that one hundred twenty five thousand per episode budget works
out to about fifteen to thirty an hour, depending on
the animator and their level of experience. Seamus, you did
bad math silly cartoonists at five hundred thousand dollars. That's
one hundred thousand per episode, not one hundred twenty five thousand. Well,

(58:39):
I guess you weren't counting on me putting my money
where my mouth is. We've already made the entire first
episode and I paid for it completely out of pocket.

Speaker 2 (58:49):
How much did you pay for it?

Speaker 4 (58:50):
Well, actually, that's none of your business, but I can
assure you certainly wasn't cheape.

Speaker 3 (58:56):
It didn't cost one hundred twenty five thousand. I wish
I had that kind of cake to throw around.

Speaker 2 (59:00):
I'm not Tim Poole.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
Okay, So we had to cut a couple of corners,
and it took a good while longer to make than
we want the show to but it's still turned out great,
and we've already produced the first episode of our show
without any outside funding.

Speaker 2 (59:14):
But now I'm strapped for cash.

Speaker 3 (59:16):
I can't make this whole season on a pocket which
gives us the opportunity to make it together. Help me
to make something good, something that takes the audience seriously,
something that you'll be rewarded for contributing to, not just
with a great show, but perks like artwork from the production,
virtual premiere parties, getting put in as background characters, getting

(59:36):
to watch the pilot.

Speaker 2 (59:38):
As soon as you donate. It's not command YouTube for
another couple of months. Please come join us. This is
our time.

Speaker 3 (59:44):
We don't have to wait around for big studios to
decide to start to serve us, or for big investors
to put money into some conservative startup.

Speaker 2 (59:51):
We can do this now.

Speaker 3 (59:53):
I've got the equipment, I've got the team, and I've
got the experience.

Speaker 2 (59:57):
Give me your support and I will of everything I need.