Nonprofitable Premiere!
Food! Friends! Funny web series!
Hi, everybody! As I mentioned last month, my creative partner Onicia Muller and I had a party on Thursday, October 3 to officially release the animated show we’ve been working on for several years, Nonprofitable: The Web Series! We had about twenty friends with us at the outdoor patio of La Catrina Restaurant here in Chicago and I thought I’d share some of what happened while the Comics Book Club discusses Earthdivers, Volume 1. Enjoy!
I meant to share this before I went on vacation. Onicia shared her observations and a photo gallery within a week because she is way better at this than I am. XD
The festivities started at 7:00 pm and we had food and drinks available. It wasn’t as cold as I thought it might be, but there was definitely something going around. Several people weren’t able to attend because they were feeling under the weather. I’m glad I wore a mask.
We had a small backdrop of Onicia’s design that incorporated her production company’s logo, La Catrina’s logo, my website URL, and some of our character designs. Friends and family were invited to take photos in front of it and they took full advantage. Onicia also had made character head placards for people to hold up and it was great to see with which characters our friends identified.
At 8:00 pm, we had everyone gather around a television set. Parental discretion was advised, since some of our friends have small children and we weren’t sure how they might react to some of the more “mature” content. (In Onicia’s inventory, “One naughty finger, one f-bomb, and one scene featuring women selling ‘short-term love’.”) Fortunately, every small person in attendance was mostly interested in the animated cat and ignored literally everything else.
There are few experiences more satisfying than hearing people laugh at a joke you wrote. And even as the voice in the back of my head tried to convince me they were only laughing to be polite or because they were my friends, I could recognize that people were being genuine. I knew a running gag was paying off when during episode five someone asked about one of our main characters between guffaws, “Why does he keep doing that?!”
Afterwards, Onicia and I provided a short Q&A about the show and its progress. I had forgotten that I had overzealously pitched it as a four-season, twenty-minute episodic tv sitcom to a local grant program that typically creates short-form content. Thankfully, Onicia was present for that awkward video call and encouraged me to think in smaller, more manageable terms.
I spoke a little bit about the origins of Nonprofitable and how it was originally titled Unprofitable and intended to “promote Christian values,” a far cry from how I pitch it now as “Will & Grace for abortion.” Also, I shared different stories from my vast nonprofit experience as both an employee and a volunteer and how that has informed and evolved my vision for the show.
I’ve released the episodes individually over at my YouTube channel at the same time that this special newsletter is going out, but you can watch the whole series in one shot below. This is something I’m very proud of and I’m glad that what began as a promise in a live-action “coming soon” video three years ago has come to fruition. Presenting: Nonprofitable: The Web Series!
I’m so happy to share the complete first season of Nonprofitable: The Web Series with you. Let me know what you think! I hope you had as much fun watching it as I had writing it. This was a real labor of love and I hope this isn’t the end.
Let me know if you have any questions down in the comments. Do you have any nonprofit experience? Would you like to see more of this show? Take care of yourselves and each other! Thanks again for everything.