Haminations, BrodyAnimates, and illymation on being YouTube animators

For a lucky few, doodling online can be a full-time career. At VidCon Anaheim 2024, Polygon spoke with three artists — Haminations, BrodyAnimates, and illymation — who turned their love of art and cartoons into full-fledged careers as YouTubers.

All three YouTubers create content in the storytime animation genre. This is when an artist narrates a story, usually comedic or lighthearted in nature, while depicting its events in an animation or animatic — an animated storyboard with fewer frames than a traditional animation. The videos usually range somewhere between five and 20 minutes.

They also all started their channels around the same time — Haminations in 2017 and both illymation and BrodyAnimates in early 2018.

For illymation, starting their channel “was just an escape from college,” she said. “I was in animation school and I was only animating to get good grades and that was a pressure I didn’t love and I was like, I need to do things for fun again with art, and then unexpectedly I blew up on YouTube.”

Haminations started by doodling with friends. He’d draw a panel of a comic and pass it to a friend. They wouldn’t tell each other what they were planning for the comic, so “it’d always go in crazy directions,” Haminations said. He “never thought that people would be very interested in it,” but his dad encouraged him to start sharing his comics, and Haminations was created.

Animation storytelling is one of several genres that BrodyAnimates has tried on YouTube since he started creating content at the age of 8.

Over the past decade, Brody tried videos playing with Mario toys, sketch videos inspired by Smosh, and gaming videos inspired by CaptainSparklez.

“I was just replicating things I was inspired by,” Brody said. In 2018, “storytime animation became really popular and people like TheOdd1sOut and JaidenAnimations were really hitting the scene […] and it was the first thing that I was consistent with and people enjoyed.”

Animators have been on YouTube since its launch in 2005, but storytime animation as a genre didn’t start taking off until the 2010s. TheOdd1sOut and JaidenAnimations each hit 1 million subscribers in 2016 and sparked a plethora of similar animation channels popping up in the subsequent years, including these three interviewees.

Growing and maintaining their channels

Haminations, BrodyAnimates, and illymation all hire individual teams now to help make their videos. An average Haminations video these days consists of 30-plus workers, helping with tasks such as storyboarding, backgrounds, animation, and audio editing. On the lighter end, an average illymation video credits six people, and BrodyAnimates credits 10 to 15 people per video. Despite the help, generally these three YouTubers like to stay heavily involved with their channels.

“When I do hire someone on it’s because we really need it. Because if I were to just think about I don’t wanna do this, I don’t wanna do that, then I would basically fire myself from my own team,” illymation said. “There would be nothing left for me to do except manage — and that’s not fun.”

Staying heavily involved in each video “keeps you aware of how the pipeline is going, so you don’t lose focus on the big picture and how everyone has to pass things on to the next person.”

While some people might jump at the opportunity to hire help, it can be hard letting go of control, particularly when making personal art.

“Out of my friends, I definitely struggled the most out of giving up control,” Brody said. “Because as a creative […] you know exactly how you want it, but it got to a point where I was progressing as an artist — I was feeling more comfortable in my abilities, which meant I was spending more time on the things I create, which meant I was uploading like every six months. And you know, you kinda just have to find the balance between passion and productivity. And I realized that I’m gonna have to make a sacrifice. I’m gonna have to either lower my quality or I’m gonna have to bring people on to help me maintain that quality.”

Advice for artists wanting to make YouTube videos

All three YouTubers had similar advice for artists aspiring to make it on the platform: Start, have fun, and follow your passion.

“I’d say the best ways to learn are from other people,” illymation said. “You don’t need the fanciest tools to do what other people do because everyone starts somewhere. […] Just make sure it’s you having fun.”

Meanwhile, Brody emphasized the need for passion and persistence. “Push through and if you’re passionate about it, keep doing it,” he said. “Pretty much the only thing that can stop you is whenever you decide to stop. […] I think a lot of people stop something before they’ve even started it.”

“Start. Simply start,” Haminations said. “Perfectionism kills peoples’ journey before it even starts off. […] Everyone has 5,000 bad drawings in them they have to get out first before they can start making the good ones.”

Both illymation and Haminations are working on graphic novels.

Illymation said to “be on the lookout,” but that the process “takes a lot longer than [she] thought it would because it’s a book.”

“It’ll definitely take a long time to come out,” Haminations said of his novel, before mentioning that the writing is pretty much complete. He also gave a quick synopsis of his novel’s plot:

“So he’s kind of an antihero,” said Haminations. He also snuck in a lot of therapy stuff that he’s “a big nerd about” and hopes to secretly teach kids about accountability “in a way that little [him] would’ve liked to read.”

If you’d like to keep up with these artists, subscribe to their YouTube channels: