"Little Brass Bird" is a stop-motion web series set in a magical clock shop. The stars of the show, played by two plush toy characters named Robin and Rhoderick, are fighting to save their humble little clock shop from encroaching corporations and modern development.

When the real-life Robin and Rhoderick brought their series to Kickstarter, they did a superb job building a community of supporters and bringing people into their creative process, offering custom plush toys modeled after backers that ended up becoming so much more.

Robin and Rhoderick shared with us a few insights into the origins of "Little Brass Bird":

A huge part of Little Brass Bird's charm are the delightful handmade plush toys who are the stars! How long have you been making these toys, and when did you realize that they had an important story to tell?

Although we both come from very different artistic backgrounds, our fateful meeting while working for Shawnimals, LLC. in 2006 was the real beginning of Little Brass Bird. Many of the stories, characters and jokes told in our episodes are loosely based on experiences we've shared together through the years. Thus, our look-a-like dolls and real names play as the main characters along with our cats; Lego, Jack and Chibi.

Many of our trademark characters, like Half Cat, were first manifested as doodles in college note books. After re-discovering our notebooks years later, these doodles started developing as we discussed silly stories involving our drawings.

In 2007 Robin began to write a children’s book based on an anthropomorphic clock shop involving our doodle characters but never finished. We decided to take the characters from her unfinished book and turn them into a line of plush toys. However, after several craft shows and events including Depart-Ment and Pitchfork Music Festival, we found that many people liked the designs but couldn't commit to buying the characters partly because they didn't know what they were. That's when a fire lit in our bellies. By combining Rhodrick's film experience with Robin's character designs and combining our real life stories with our characters' silly imaginary stories; we decided to create a web series featuring each of our characters one episode at a time.

You did such a fantastic job of bringing backers into the experience of Little Brass Bird through your rewards and updates. Did backers end up helping shape your overall creative vision?

The success of our Kickstarter project has helped inspire us. However, we didn’t fully realize the potential of the show until we began designs for the $200 pledge custom plushes. After conversing with backers through email, we received a plethora of information to create caricatures of their looks and personalities that could fit in the show. In fact, the custom designs were so fun and interesting that we decided to make the show customizable by anyone involved, whether it be guest artist, musician or contributing fan. We love the idea of mixing our character designs with the audience's character designs, making for a very organic show. Since then, Little Brass Bird has become a community show that not only entertains its viewers but also involves and gives them a chance to voice their own ideas!

Anything else you wanted to share?

We have been asked many times why there are such long gaps in between episodes. Our answer is quite simple; there's only two of us. Many people don't realize that this operation is only being conducted by two malnourished art school graduates in their tiny 1 bedroom apartment. So, you can imagine how difficult it can get trying to produce an animated show, and start up a designer toy business only during off-hours from your day job. Although our lack of sleep and over exhaustion has contributed greatly to the madness of our writing, we're slowly working on taking this project on full time and dedicating all of our energies to Little Brass Bird.