# Pencilish Animation Studios Update! | Pencilish Animation Studios presents...

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/feed/165351
- Entity ID: wefunder:feed_item:165351
- Published at: 2023-07-04 15:41:01 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-16 07:14:47 UTC

## Author
Tom Bancroft

## Subject
Pencilish Animation Studios presents...

## Content
First of all, I'm sorry for not creating an update here on WeFunder for quite some time. We have told everyone many times to please follow our mailing list and that would be where we would continue the updates. Well, two things happened since then: 1) Wefunder told us that if we didn't update here, they would post that they tried to contact us and we are not responding- which wouldn't look good at all, right? As you know, we have been doing lots of consistent updates, just not here on Wefunder. Still, I get their point, some of you may not want to follow our email mailing list. and 2) As of May 31st, 2023, we have been embroiled in a cyber hack that has been an ongoing fight for us to get our website domain names back from the hackers. We are not paying their ransom, but the "legal process" that you need to go through is long and (to be honest) full of hurdles and people that don't want to help you. We feel we are close in getting our Pencilish.com website back (hopefully within days) but for that reason, we are not sending people to our website to get on our mailing list. To be clear, we have secured all banking accounts and the mailing list also, it's just the domain name registrar (in this case GoDaddy) that needs to be involved for us to get our sites back and running again. Those are the two reasons I felt it was important I posted here. Again, I apologize for seeming to have a lapse in updates for some of you. Now the hard part: The update. If you haven't heard all the updates up until now, this will be a lot so forgive me if I skim and give an overview of where we are at. We've accomplished a lot over these first three-ish years. We took the first 6-8 months and did two major things: 1) developed internal projects and tied down the intellectual properties for them, legally. As in, trademarking them. We developed many projects in that short amount of time, but really concentrated on three of them to launch: "Bjorn the Last Unicorn", "JuJu Brain", and "Mind Over Murphy". 2) we became "YouTubers". We created our branded Youtube Channel and immediately started creating "Behind the Pencils" content to get people excited about our shows WHILE we were making them. We reached all the Youtube monetization goals (no easy feat!) just before we launched our first Bjorn the Unicorn episode! That brings us to the next year and a half after that: What I call the "Production" phase. After a lengthy animation studio search, we developed relationships with two foreign animation studios, one in New Zealand and one in Spain, to produce the animation for "JuJu" and "Mind Over Murphy", respectively. We kept "Bjorn" with our internal animation team and built that team up to about 15 people. We kept all the upfront development for all three shows internal. That's scripts, storyboards, design, art direction, voice recording and finished animatic, for all three series-simultaneously! It was A TON of work for a small team, but it was also so rewarding! We even threw in a fourth series to develop during that time: Aro Lucha. For that, we only created a finished 1 minute "sizzle reel" of animation, but the process of developing the (nearly) entire show was still a ton of development just to create that 1 minute piece! So, at the end of roughly 2.5/3 years in, we had 4 series developed and 3 pilots and a 1 min. sizzle reel with a growing following on Youtube because of those shows but also many "colabs" with well known youtubers (I was on Corridor Crew twice), our voice casts (also well know youtubers) and "Making of" and art instruction videos. Meanwhile, in the last year, we have ALSO been running internships via the animation program I created at Lipscomb University in Nashville. I hand pick the students to be offered the internship and it is a class where they get credits and a payment from Pencilish at the end. It's an amazing win-win situation and we are blessed to have this special relationship with Lipscomb University. We have run three internships through the 3 years and its been an amazing experience for all involved. Some of this becomes some of the newest content we have been working on: "Shorts" for YouTube and Reels for Instagram. This 20-40 second format of scrollable content has become a huge boom in the social media area and we have been working to create original content in this area over the last 6 months. To wrap up, we are now in our third phase: SALES. ( To be clear, The other two were Development and Production phases.) While we are still developing (we have a Pre-k series almost out of development now and about 5 other projects near completion in the development phase) and still in production (largely on the "Shorts" format for now), we are striving for revenue generation in this phase. To be honest, the first 3 years has been a big "spend" time, for all the things/reasons I stated above. We had to create and build so we knew this would be the most expensive years. We have already started into revenue generation in two ways: 1) Sales of our properties and concepts in the form of possible licensing deals and also the partnering with distributors on the actual animation series, to expand them into longer running series seen all over the world. We have signed contracts recently and are announcing partnerships with a distribution agency very soon, so look for that in the next few weeks. Simultaneously, we have a toy industry veteran pursing the licensing projects for our projects. 2) We are creating an arm of Pencilish (loosely called Pencilish Media) where we will can provide animation service work. It's officially already started as of last February, when Pencilish was hired to create a 30-40 second full, 2d animation test for a feature film in development. This brought in revenue already, but it went so well that that production hired Pencilish to provide leadership for the entire film. I am a co-director on the film and our Producer, Pam Darley, is now a producer on that film. More on this arm of Pencilish Studios soon also. Whew! I'm going to stop there, but I hope this gives the person that hasn't heard anything for a year or more the overview as well as some new developments for the "in the know" mailing list reader. Lastly, thank you ALL FOR YOUR SUPPORT! I write this on Independence day 2023 here in the US and I hope you all are having a relaxing, fun filled, day with family and loved ones- wherever you live in this world! Viva la Animation Revolution! -Tom Bancroft, CEO