How the Nutty Professor Conquers YouTube: From Cartoon Idea to Production and Promotion
Posted: Wed Jan 29, 2025 6:29 am
Several years ago, Megaplan made its own cartoons. The project was troublesome and expensive. Each episode is a separate business process: script preparation, storyboard, character drawing, a bunch of approvals. And recently, director Rustam Turaliev agreed to let Megaplan behind the scenes of "Doctor Gnus" - an animated project on YouTube, where the main character-doctor tells interesting and complex things in an entertaining way.
The channel currently has almost 2.5 million subscribers, and its episodes get 2-3 million views per year. Today's article is a first-person account of how a project with a multi-million audience was born and is developing in difficult conditions. It will be useful not only for animation fans, but also for anyone who manages a creative team and wants to learn more about promotion on YouTube after monetization is disabled.
Rustam Turaliev
You can not only read the interview with Rustam Turaliev, but also listen to it in turkey whatsapp list our podcast “Sounds like a plan” . This is a new section of the podcast — interviews with those who make their projects and skillfully monetize them.
Where it all began
I have been doing animation for quite a long time. Our studio TURRUS has been around since 2006, and since about 2008 we have been making animation — mostly custom advertising. And I came to YouTube in 2014 with my black-and-white cartoons — to test the waters. In 2018, we returned there with the color animated series “The Crew” and “We Are Alive” . When YouTube started to produce results in terms of monetization and feedback from viewers, we realized that we could build a business on this.
Then the idea crept in to invent a character who would have his own voice and who would tell something, preferably something interesting to everyone. It is clear that advertising can be made for children, but, to be honest, I am not a fan of children's content. And at that time there was a boom of all sorts of educational channels. I wanted teenage, more adult content. Well, and I understood that the sphere of interests should be broad, so that it would be easier to draw ideas from there. Popular science came up.
The question remained, how could this be shown: on the one hand, interestingly, on the other, humorously, so that there would be both fantasy and useful facts. Let's say we know how oil is extracted. But do we know how many people died before they learned how to extract it industrially, who was the first to understand how to drill, how many explosions and collapses there were? They thought that it would be funny to show some scary things, but it is not scary to do it.
If we put aside moral principles, then, until technology existed, people were like expendable material. But there was no point in showing people themselves, and we decided to introduce "expendables". We already had characters from our other series that were ready in style. All that was left was to come up with the main character.
Between Dr. Aibolit and Professor Moriarty
Before that, the team had been discussing how cool it would be to come up with a teacher who would tell funny stories to the class, diluting them with black humor. At some point, the teacher evolved into a crazy professor who conducts experiments using living expendable material. They called him Gnus, because according to the plan, he was supposed to do nasty things. And when they added a nasty nasal voice to him, which I managed to generate, the name Gnus came naturally.
In 2020, we got to the implementation. I remember coming to the office in January to look at the artist's first sketches. They seemed too childish: it didn't feel like such a friendly character could easily send 1,000 expendables to their deaths. Then I tried to depict the professor myself in my favorite black-and-white style, and then the artist brought it to mind. We decided that since Gnus is smart and knows everything, he must be at least a researcher. And we came up with a doctorate for him.
The sketches for the cartoon took into account many technical features that allowed us to work quickly and systematically. At that time, we already knew for sure that in order to successfully launch the project on YouTube, we needed to go out at least every week. The main task was not to bury ourselves in animation, because it is not promising to make each episode for a long time, for example, a month.
Taking all these factors into account, we tried to make animation. Gnus has limited animation: changing poses, moving his mouth and eyes. And so that the viewers wouldn't get bored, we decided to do the experiments in color. The expendables from previous cartoons were reduced in size - perhaps so that they wouldn't be so pitiful. But Gnus's assistants, or sisters, who also migrated from previous videos, remained the same height, because both in character and in their positioning in the series they are taller and stronger than the expendables.
The channel currently has almost 2.5 million subscribers, and its episodes get 2-3 million views per year. Today's article is a first-person account of how a project with a multi-million audience was born and is developing in difficult conditions. It will be useful not only for animation fans, but also for anyone who manages a creative team and wants to learn more about promotion on YouTube after monetization is disabled.
Rustam Turaliev
You can not only read the interview with Rustam Turaliev, but also listen to it in turkey whatsapp list our podcast “Sounds like a plan” . This is a new section of the podcast — interviews with those who make their projects and skillfully monetize them.
Where it all began
I have been doing animation for quite a long time. Our studio TURRUS has been around since 2006, and since about 2008 we have been making animation — mostly custom advertising. And I came to YouTube in 2014 with my black-and-white cartoons — to test the waters. In 2018, we returned there with the color animated series “The Crew” and “We Are Alive” . When YouTube started to produce results in terms of monetization and feedback from viewers, we realized that we could build a business on this.
Then the idea crept in to invent a character who would have his own voice and who would tell something, preferably something interesting to everyone. It is clear that advertising can be made for children, but, to be honest, I am not a fan of children's content. And at that time there was a boom of all sorts of educational channels. I wanted teenage, more adult content. Well, and I understood that the sphere of interests should be broad, so that it would be easier to draw ideas from there. Popular science came up.
The question remained, how could this be shown: on the one hand, interestingly, on the other, humorously, so that there would be both fantasy and useful facts. Let's say we know how oil is extracted. But do we know how many people died before they learned how to extract it industrially, who was the first to understand how to drill, how many explosions and collapses there were? They thought that it would be funny to show some scary things, but it is not scary to do it.
If we put aside moral principles, then, until technology existed, people were like expendable material. But there was no point in showing people themselves, and we decided to introduce "expendables". We already had characters from our other series that were ready in style. All that was left was to come up with the main character.
Between Dr. Aibolit and Professor Moriarty
Before that, the team had been discussing how cool it would be to come up with a teacher who would tell funny stories to the class, diluting them with black humor. At some point, the teacher evolved into a crazy professor who conducts experiments using living expendable material. They called him Gnus, because according to the plan, he was supposed to do nasty things. And when they added a nasty nasal voice to him, which I managed to generate, the name Gnus came naturally.
In 2020, we got to the implementation. I remember coming to the office in January to look at the artist's first sketches. They seemed too childish: it didn't feel like such a friendly character could easily send 1,000 expendables to their deaths. Then I tried to depict the professor myself in my favorite black-and-white style, and then the artist brought it to mind. We decided that since Gnus is smart and knows everything, he must be at least a researcher. And we came up with a doctorate for him.
The sketches for the cartoon took into account many technical features that allowed us to work quickly and systematically. At that time, we already knew for sure that in order to successfully launch the project on YouTube, we needed to go out at least every week. The main task was not to bury ourselves in animation, because it is not promising to make each episode for a long time, for example, a month.
Taking all these factors into account, we tried to make animation. Gnus has limited animation: changing poses, moving his mouth and eyes. And so that the viewers wouldn't get bored, we decided to do the experiments in color. The expendables from previous cartoons were reduced in size - perhaps so that they wouldn't be so pitiful. But Gnus's assistants, or sisters, who also migrated from previous videos, remained the same height, because both in character and in their positioning in the series they are taller and stronger than the expendables.