Project Overview
Genuine Jerks
Weekly Comedy Series
Brett Maline is a writer for Marvel’s Loki. After coming up at United Artists, Lucas Hill currently reads for The Black List while independently writing and producing. Together they started Genuine Jerks, a YouTube channel that has grown to 64k subscribers and 11 million views and have been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, Vulture, and Funny or Die.
The comedians partnered with Cosigned to collaborate with their fans on a weekly web comedy series. Fans bought passes, in order to access the writer's room, where they could contribute prop ideas, lines of dialog and vote on the premise for that week's skit.
Role
3D Artist
Art Director
Motion Graphics
Social Media
UX Designer*
Team
CEO/UX Designer*
Developers
Deliverables
Ads
Promo videos
Visual mocks
YouTube shorts
YouTube thumbnails
* For this project, the CEO did the initial UX design while I focused on the marketing design because there were a lot of visuals needed. Once we launched the project and I had set up the templates for the marketing visuals, I worked on UX design for additional features.
Problem statement
How might we encourage fans to collaborate with a comedy duo?
This project faced some challenges:
- The target audience was fans of the Genuine Jerks. They had many followers, but because they previously had a sporadic posting schedule the YouTube algorithm didn't show their content to their fans.
- Their fans weren't necessarily tech-savvy or web3-savvy and we used NFTs to manage levels of participation. Ensuring customers could claim their NFTs and participate was a concern.
- The comedians were reluctant to give up their creative vision to placate the YouTube algorithm.
Despite advice on optimizing shorts for engagement, the duo chose to post full-frame, unedited versions (right) across their social media channels. I edited the episode into three separate 30-second clips, structuring them around the three "outfluencers" (left), which would have had higher viewer engagement.
Social Media
Advertising & Thumbnails
Some of the thumbnails created for the series. Some of the episodes featured the comedians' friends as guests.
Ads for aspiring writers and comedy fans.
Motion Graphics
Pass Design and web3 Ads
There were four pass levels that were named after film industry producer titles, except for the highest level which was becoming a member of the comedy troupe. In decending order: Become a jerk, Executive Producer, Associate Producer, Line Producer. The comedians wanted the passes to incorporate their most popular sketches so I incorporated key props from each of these sketches into the design.
Ad featuring the pass designs.
Animated passes created in Blender, Spline, and After Effects. Each one except the first one incorporates a key prop from their most popular skits. The first one features a photo the duo uses as their header image across their social media channels.
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