Do-it-yourself kids’ show finds online success.
Canadian couple rides the DIY digital wave to global success
From the basement studio in their rented house in Victoria, B.C., Billy Reid and Reb Stevenson are riding a doit-yourself digital wave to a global audience of kids and their parents.
The couple is the brain trust behind Pancake Manor, a series of short videos featuring a pair of puppets and Reid’s original songs. In two years they’ve drawn more than 25 million online views, from Istanbul to Singapore and everywhere in between, of their 30-plus videos, with more than half a million new views each week.
“We’re excited that we can do this for a living,” said Reid, who went from film school 10 years ago to work as an advertising jingle writer and TV host before teaming up personally and professionally with Stevenson, a former journalist.
“It’s a two-person operation — we live in the city where we want to live and we have this international following. You can do it from anywhere.”
Their most popular video, featuring puppet characters Zack and Reggie, is called Shapes, which has drawn nearly seven million views on YouTube. Their work is aimed at preschool and preteen viewers, and an English teacher in Istanbul recently sent the pair a video she shot of her students dancing and singing along to Shapes.
Reid started honing his production and musical chops back in 2007, posting comedic videos of his original tunes — without puppets — aimed at a general audience.
Those videos drew the attention of CBC Vancouver, which used some of those videos on the short-lived variety TV series Exposure, and hired him to write and co-host the show.
Along the way, Reid had designed a pair of puppets, not sure what he wanted to do with them.
“I’ve always been interested in puppetry,” Reid said. “As a kid growing up I was obsessed with Jim Henson and the Muppets. I used to put on puppet shows at home.”
Pancake Manor was born in 2011, when Stevenson suggested they focus on kids’ entertainment and the puppets. They moved back to Victoria a year later.
“We’d already seen a little success, maybe a million views at that stage, which I thought was pretty good,” he said.
They spend one to two weeks making each video, and their basement production studio includes audio recording gear and a green screen covering a piece of the floor and a wall, which allows for animated backdrops to be added in post-production.
They come up with the concept and story boards for each video together. Reid writes and produces the music, they both work the puppets and share camera duties, and Stevenson has joined the puppet cast as a mom type. Most of the filming happens within a couple of blocks of their home.
Somewhere along the way, Reid sought out one of his puppeteer idols — Sesame Street’s Caroll Spinney — for advice.
Just shy of his 80th birthday, Spinney has played Big Bird for more than four decades.
“He said you have to keep the character grounded in reality and decide, is your character a young character? Big Bird is a five-year-old, so he plays it through the eyes of a five-year-old — very curious, there’s a naivete.
“My main character Zack is similar. I’ve made him a little more childlike, because of what Caroll suggested.”
The videos have grown in popularity as parents and kids discovered them online. Those in charge at YouTube have brought the pair down to YouTube’s Los Angeles- based production studio twice to film there.
“They saw what we’re doing, and they’ve been really supportive,” Reid said. “They want people to stick around and keep making videos for YouTube.”
Meanwhile, Reid and Stevenson have started selling a DVD of 30 Pancake Manor videos and a CD of 14 of the songs through their website, pancakemanor.com. It’s old school — Reid thought they’d only ever distribute their work digitally — and the demand for physical copies comes from parents, not their digitally savvy offspring.
“A lot of them have DVD players in their cars or minivans,” Reid said. “We had no idea there was going to be this much interest in that.”
On the digital front, they’re developing an app for mobile phones and tablets.