Tubby Nugget is a comic and animation character created by Josh Jackson and Jenine Pastores. They post original content sharing stories of Tubby Nugget on social media such as Instagram, Tik Tok, Youtube etc and have millions of followers across these platforms.
They have garnered a very wholesome fan following over the years, making it one of the most positive communities you can be a part of on the internet. Tubby Nugget is also a very successful business that sells plush toys, stickers, key chains, and other merchandise on their Shopify store.
Bringing Wholesome Personalized Animations of Tubby Nugget to fans at scale.
The Challenge
Fans of Tubby Nugget had been demanding for personalized videos for special occasions for a while now, and they finally got their first personalized video product for Valentine’s Day 2022.
It was a massive success with over 300 orders.
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But the co-founder and animator of Tubby Nugget, Josh, had to pull a couple of all-day, all-night work with minimal sleep to be able to fulfill the orders.
It was exhausting, tedious, and repetitive work. And the worst part was they had to limit the total number of orders as the process was not scale-able without hiring a bunch of animators to help.
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Josh was happy with the reception of the campaign, and planned to add more personalized videos to the store over the course of the year.
He wanted to make sure he could handle the requirements of Tubby Nugget’s growing fanbase without sacrificing his own health and peace of mind.
He wanted to partner with a studio that he could trust to scale his operations and that did not cost a bomb.
The Solution
When Josh reached out to Fabel, the initial discussions centered around scaling the operations by increasing labor to do the tedious and repetitive work.
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The process Josh was using to fulfill the orders was quite manual.
It required someone who knows how to get around After Effects to edit the recordings, customize text while keeping the design intact, replace audio, change timing of the layers, and then put it for export.
The time taken to do one order on average took around 10 minutes and required prior knowledge of After Effects.
Something we knew from the onset was, to make this scale-able we had to bring down the time taken to produce a video and the skill required of the person producing the video. This would increase our capability to produce more videos and drive down costs.
The Approach
Our initial exploration was to move the process to Premiere Pro from After Effects using Motion Graphic Templates.
This would cut down both the time taken to produce a video, and we would reduce the skill required to the level of a junior editor - it would still be a manual process, but much more scale-able.
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The Motion Graphic Templates proved not to be flexible enough to accommodate the complex nature of the animation project file. And keeping the future potential for the personalized videos in mind, we had to find a way that did not sacrifice the quality of the product.
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After Effects is an advanced tool and is used in so many fields for various purposes. We had been using it mainly for motion design and editing projects so far.
But it became quite clear that to maximize the value in the scale equation shown above, we had to reduce the time taken to 0 and the skill required to the level of pushing a button. This was something that can be achieved only via scripting(coding) in After Effects.
The Pipeline
It did take us two weeks to figure out the complete code for automating the tedious tasks inside After Effects using ExtendScript.
ExtendScript is the computer language that Adobe uses for scripting in After Effects. It was a great learning experience and very satisfying to crack the code as ExtendScript has very few resources to study online.
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After Effects is only one part of the pipeline, albeit an important one.
We had to create a pipeline for creating these videos in an efficient way from the moment an order was made to fulfilling the order. We had to think with User Experience in mind so that it was made as easy as possible for them to get their desired videos.
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Add product to Shopify Store
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Send Purchase confirmation mail with link to google form
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Google form details added to Google Sheet
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Recording of the orders by Voice Over Artist
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Editing the recording into individual audio files
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Rendering unique videos by matching order details to individual audio files
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Quality check of the videos
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Sending the videos to the mail of the buyer
We have automated every step of the process except for steps 4, 5 and 7.
We do have ideas for how to make a totally automated personalized video digital product, but it was not required for this project.
We are excited to keep working on the pipeline and improve the scale factor by taking on more automated video projects in the near future.
The Impact
We were able to successfully solve the major challenge Josh faced when he came to us with the project.
Now, he doesn’t even touch the videos.
The only responsibility from their side is to record the voice overs in a timely manner, and we take care of everything else in the pipeline.
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We started out by helping with their Anniversary Personalized Video Pipeline. Once we figured it out, we were able to quickly implement the same pipeline and add more Personalized Videos to the store.
Fans can now enjoy and gift six different types of personalized videos.
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Anniversary
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Birthday
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Graduation
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Get Well Soon
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Valentine’s Day
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Christmas
The most satisfying part of the job is to fulfill an order and hear back from the fans share about what it meant to them and their loved ones.
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It feels amazing to contribute to a brand that adds a lot of value to their community!
The final part of the impact comes in the form of revenue.
These personalized videos have generated more than USD 50,000 in revenue since the first of them was rolled out in May 2022 with our help.
We do a profit sharing model with Tubby Nugget, and there are no overhead costs for these digital products unlike the physical products in the store.
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