James Phyrillas of Schaffrillas Productions. PHOTO BY BILL ULRICH
Originally appeared in the Reading Eagle on January 21, 2020.
James Phyrillas is sitting in his living room wearing mismatched socks. Today is his 22nd birthday, but he already has the present he always wanted; the Silver Creator Award, given by YouTube to video makers who have reached 100,000 subscribers. The award, a silvery monolith with a YouTube play button carved into it, sits on a shelf with Christmas decorations and Greek Orthodox icons.
Across the room, Phyrillas isn’t cutting a cake - he’s cutting his latest online video opus. The video, a parody mashup of the cartoon “Ed, Edd n Eddy,” is one that Phyrillas has been working on for the past several years. The timeline on his editing app is sliced up into ribbons. He scrolls along, going through the chaotic sequences of animation that he redesigned with nothing but a mouse, his imagination and the wonders of the Internet.
“It’s been ages,” he says. “I’m trying to remember what the jokes were for a lot of these. A lot of references that don’t make sense.”
That about sums it up. YouTube Poops, irreverent parody videos that remix pop culture characters to create humorous new stories, are Phyrillas’s bread and butter. They’re also partly the reason why he has over 600,000 subscribers on YouTube. It may seem odd that a senior at Temple University majoring in economics and minoring in communications has spent much of his free time “Pooping” online, but Schaffrillas Productions has allowed him to be creative and make money doing it. Every month, he gets a check from YouTube; the more people click on the ads that play before his videos, the more he makes.
“If I knew it would take off like this,” he said, “I would’ve gotten a better name, something easier to spell.”
When he discovered that he had just hit the 500,000 subscriber milestone on YouTube, he did what many young online celebrities do; post his reaction on Twitter.
“I’m in class otherwise my reaction would be louder,” Phyrillas tweeted along with his amazed expression.
Searching for Schafrillas Productions online leads to the results you’d expect from an online star; “Schaffrillas Productions face, Schaffrillas Productions age.” You may say that people want to know more about this YouTube star, although if Phyrillas heard you say that, he’d be in disbelief.
“YouTube definitely isn’t real celebrityhood,” said Phyrillas, who often thinks of how anyone can become instantly famous online. “A lot of people with similar numbers to me think they’re actual celebrities. YouTubers definitely aren’t household names.”
He cites his theater background, love of performance and sense of humor as reasons for his success.
“I wholeheartedly believe that I stumbled into success by accident, but I feel blessed,” he said.
In 2015, Phyrillas and his friend Chris Schaffer were juniors at Antietam High School. They needed a place to put the videos that they made for their digital media class, and Schaeffer came up with a name that combined their surnames. They started off simple; offbeat comedy shorts and reenactments of their favorite “SpongeBob Squarepants” episodes. Phyrillas never expected the channel to be home to anything other than that. Then came the Poops.
“It connected a lot to how I felt about stories,” Phyrillas said. “I think YouTube Poops are very underrated on YouTube. Some are nonsense with bright colors but others tell stories. I think that’s the coolest thing ever.”
Phyrillas was always interested in remixing culture. In elementary school, he discovered his love of creative writing, writing short stories set in the worlds of his favorite books and TV shows.
“It just felt fun to take someone else’s work and adapt it in my own way,” he said.
He’s a lifelong fan of animated movies and cartoons - the perfect source for YouTube Poops due to their exaggerated visuals and heightened antics. Phyrillas’s videos are classic YouTube Poop - fast-paced and comedic, with absurd storylines, sprinkled with references to his favorite Broadway musicals. The ongoing plot of his videos is the story of Oscar, the fish played by Will Smith in the 2004 Dreamworks movie “Shark Tale.” In Phyrillas’s vision, Oscar rises through the ranks of the movie’s shark mafia, whacking his enemies “Godfather”-style.
“It’s such an absurd project, I can’t believe it honestly got made,” Phyrillas said about “Shark Tale,” which also starred Robert DeNiro as a shark don and Martin Scorsese as a pufferfish. “Turning it into a gritty story about Oscar’s rise to power was something that intrigued me. I thought it was a better story than the actual movie.”
Taking little bits and pieces of dialogue and editing them into a new script is just something that fascinates him. He compares it to the scene in “Ratatouille,” where Remy the rat eats a strawberry with cheese and discovers a whole new flavor. His video “Revenge of the Senate,” one of three YouTube Poops he made from “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith,” is pure Phyrillas. Ian McDiarmid’s deliciously campy performance as the Emperor was one of many unintentionally funny moments that Phyrillas could milk for comedy. The Poop features cameos by everyone from SpongeBob to Donald Trump.
Phyrillas makes his videos with iMovie, which nowadays is the equivalent of trying to win the Indy 500 with a horse and cart. Those limitations serve as inspiration.One of the most important techniques for a Pooper to master is masking, the process of cutting out a character from the background of their scene so he can be inserted into another scene. It’s useful if you want to, say, put Shrek’s face on the Emperor’s (a gag used in “Revenge of the Senate”). iMovie’s masking is choppy, but Phyrillas made it into his trademark.
“It doesn’t look pretty but it does look distinct,” he said, “and I thought it was an interesting video style. The focus was always on the humor and making people laugh and telling stories.”
As time went on, Phyrillas grew tired of YouTube Poop. Editing them takes time, time he didn’t have. He discovered a new angle for his channel, making analysis videos critiquing films. Just like before, he didn’t expect success. But in Aug. 2018, something happened; his video about Disney villains got one million views in one week, doubling his subscriber count.
“It wasn’t like this mind-blowing thing to me because I had moderate success on the platform, but a million views in a week was crazy,” he said. “I never took time to reflect on how crazy it’s been.”
Analysis videos, he realized, are what people wanted to see. He never cared about what was popular - he just made the videos he wanted to make. He never wanted to be a megastar like Pewdiepie, the Swedish YouTube personality with over 100 million subscribers. After the success of the villains video, he rethought what YouTube could mean for him..
“I carefully decide what I want to make videos on,” he said. “There are so many movies I want to talk about, but don’t have mainstream appeal.”
He tends to focus on the blockbuster franchises, “Star Wars” and “Avengers,” often criticizing the “reheated” reboots and sequels that come from Hollywood nowadays and rely on nostalgia to succeed. Often, that same nostalgia boosts his videos in popularity. His video praising “Megamind,” an animated film that came out in 2010, when he was 12, got three million views within weeks.
“I pay attention to trends on YouTube,” he said. “I saw a lot of people were talking about ‘Megamind’ in comment sections and forum posts. I saw videos about ‘Megamind’ were doing well. I didn’t expect the massive success [my video] ended up having but I knew it’d be successful.”
A YouTube video’s popularity is a fickle thing. Some videos hit all the right notes, highlighting whatever trend is popular at the moment. Videos involving non-YouTube celebrities always top the trending videos tab, leading frustrated independent creators to joke that the website is now nothing more than a platform for late night talk shows. Others are carried on the wings of the algorithm, promoted to thousands of users seemingly by random luck. YouTube hasn’t always been Phyrillas’s friend. His videos use copyrighted characters, but are not illegal because they are highly-edited parodies. That doesn’t mean that movie studios have avoided taking down his videos over perceived infringement.
“It’s really a lot of little things that build up,” he said about the nuisances of YouTube. “Copyright strikes, there’s so many people that abuse the system. I don’t really run into as many problems as other people, but it’s frustrating that we can’t rely on YouTube systems. They seem more benefited towards corporations, that’s just kind of a shame.”
When it comes to the precarities of making money from YouTube, there’s one elephant in the room; the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. The 1998 law forbids tech companies from collecting information from children under 13 without their parents’ permission. In Sep. 2019, Google, YouTube’s parent company, paid a $170 million fine after an FTC investigation of YouTube’s collection of children’s data. That November, YouTube announced that all starting in 2020, all videos will be put into two categories: For Kids and Not For Kids. For Kids videos will make less money and a severely limited scope. Due to the sophistication of his videos, Phyrillas doesn’t believe that the new guidelines will affect him. He wants to move on to making live action films. In his spare time, he works on original scripts.
“While COPPA’s a good law and I feel like children should not be targeted by advertisements,” he said, “I just feel like it’s misguided and there’s a lot of content creators who don’t target their videos to kids specifically and get flagged anyway. I feel like there should be more of a focus on people who genuinely make content for all ages.”
The idea of a video being labeled For Kids just because it has animation would particularly rankle Phyrillas, a firm believer that animation can be enjoyed by all ages. However, it's the constant copyright battles and the types of videos that the YouTube algorithm privileges that really upset him and many other creators.
“Honestly I’ve had to bite the bullet with a lot of those and leave them taken down,” he said. “I didn’t have the energy to keep fighting them. A lot of people do fight and I’m very happy for them.”
These issues have turned Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s controversial CEO, into the bete noire of many video makers. If he had a one-on-one audience with Wojcicki, Phyrillas would say: “People come to YouTube for the creators, the regular people, that just make these amazing videos a ton of people relate to. So focusing on celebrity culture, that’s not what YouTube has ever been about.”
It’s that authenticity that young people want to see - and imitate - from their favorite online celebrities.
“They’re less phony. They’re just ordinary people who make stuff online. That’s what people really connect with.”