Hellyer's Puppet Workshop

Unfortunately i am having to bow out of Upstaged before it has even started. This is due to a combination of prior work commitments and late notice on their part. If i have really pushed i could have made it work, but to be honest it wasn't worth the effort. What makes this early exit even more annoying is the BBC just activated their rating system today and i was ranked 19th overall out of 150+ contestants.

On a better note YouTube have released their partner program in the UK and i have cleared the first two stages of approval for that... so who knows i may yet become a YouTube partner!

Take care - Dave

Things are moving on slowly with the BBC3 Upstaged project. There are only 90 contestants so far (correct at time of writing) yet it takes forever to get your material approved on their web site. Needless to say this has been frustrating for many of the performers who are waiting for their content to clear. Those who were fortunate enough to get their videos cleared first are receiving good viewing figures on the site... whereas those whose videos took longer to clear are receiving very few views. It strikes me that the BBC didn't do too much research of other video hosting sites as because the video content is actually quite hard to navigate. There are three options for filtering the videos: newest, top rated and most viewed. That will only serve to propel the people with lots of views even higher up the chart... but hey, that's life i suppose. I guess as a regular YouTuber i take for granted the many search options: most viewed, most discussed, most rated not to mention the fact that you can filter by sort (comedy, entertainment, travel, blogs, education etc etc). The thing that made me laugh most was i posted my pitch video on YouTube the same night as on Upstaged, it took 14 hours to clear on Upstaged and only 14 minutes on Youtube - lol

Brand new characters will be coming to you from the workshop very soon... i am working on a very exciting project at the moment. It's my very first character with animated eyebrows. I will post pics in the next couple of days.

all the best folks - Dave

Well the UPSTAGED website is live and lots of people have started uploading their pitch videos etc. Well i am no different, please take a minute to check out my pitch below.



I am not holding out much hope of getting through to the next round because nothing in me wants to go round begging for people to vote for me... it just seems tradgic. If you want to check out BBC3 and the UPSTAGED project please do, but if you don't i won't be the least bit offended :)

take care - Dave

I heard about a BBC3 show called UPSTAGED which is happening online on the BBC website and their TV channel BBC3. Basically it's a talent/popularity contest where the winner wins £10,000. It seemed like a good enough idea to me so i signed up today. If you want to check out my profile on their site you will find it HERE! I will be uploading a pitch video shortly, but i need to decide my final plans before i do that.

That's it for today really, check out the site if you get the chance...

all the best - Dave