Cash kitty

Simon Tofield is the master of combining cats, YouTube and success, writes

CATS have provided the web with funny videos and pictures providing countless viral hits — but Simon’s Cat is the unlikely megastar. His charming animated, black-andwhite adventures have now amassed more than 500 million views on YouTube, and led to books and merchandising that fund an entire studio in London. He is a phenomenon that simply would not have emerged without the web.

The animators behind Simon’s Cat, led by creator Simon Tofield, have now taken an even more internet-savvy path. In a bid to fund a full-length short film, in colour, they’ve turned to online crowd-funding site Indiegogo to raise some £275 850 (about R5-million). The project will be the equivalent of a year’s output for the studio, and if it can attract hordes of small investors, it should premiere — online, of course — by June.

At the time of writing, almost 4 500 had already signed up. Typically pledging less than £50, they’d contributed half of the total in 10 days, with the fundraising drive running for three more weeks.

The origins of Simon’s Cat are a typical story of internet success: Tofield was an animator learning the programming language Adobe Flash. He set himself a challenge to encourage him to learn it — Tofield is severely dyslexic — and came up with the idea of a short animation about a cat waking up his owner, based on his own cat, Hugh. Cat Man Do languished on a showreel for a year, until a company asked him if they could put it online. They did, and its 35 000 almost immediate views crashed their server. Tofield was both delighted and infuriated: within minutes, pirate copies were on YouTube garnering millions of views and depriving him of both the credit and the income.

“A friend phoned me up,” says Tofield. “And he said, ‘I’m a little bit sad because I’ve just seen your film on YouTube.’ It was getting copies and millions of hits. I thought the only way I could prove it was mine was to make another one.”

Called Let Me In, the second film “went crazy” too. But the web was a gateway to conventional success, says Tofield, because making money from YouTube is difficult. “The breakthrough came for me after the first two or three films were out and a book company came along and said: ‘Would you like to turn it into a book?’ It was always my dream to illustrate a book, never mind create one.”

In a sense, the rest is internet history. From those 2008 beginnings, Simon’s Cat has gone on to become the UK’s No 1 animation channel on YouTube, producing new films with the same Flash methods every couple of months.

One might think such a story of success would mean Tofield has no need of a crowd-funding site. “The revenue from YouTube allows us to keep people in work but millions of views does not translate into huge revenue,” he says.

The appeal of sites such as Indiegogo, and its rival Kickstarter, is that gathering small contributions from many fans allows writers to avoid the influence of single, major investors. “Doing this through crowd funding allows us to keep creative control,” says Tofield. “I think it will make people feel like they’re part of the project.” —