Hi! I'm Toast Sandwich, but you can call me Lillian or Lilly. I've been making stuff online since 2020, but as long as I can remember, I've been creative, whether it be making comic books in kindergarten or making a feature length musical as a senior in high school! I have a wide range of creative interests, including comedy skits, feature length films, standup comedy, music, drawings/animations, writing, comic strips, podcasts, and websites. Right now, I'm going into college to study media arts.

My Creative Philosophy

I am someone who has been making stuff online for a while now, and while I have had a few small successes (getting featured on Jacksfilms for example), I have mostly been creating art for an incredibly small audience of a few dozen people. However, while some people might be deterred at only gaining less than 200 subscribers after nearly six years of work, this does not demotivate me from making art, and I contribute this to my personal philosophy when it come to making art, which I will express here to clarify it to you and me.

1. Make art for the sake of making art. Chasing success will destroy you.
2. Do not be afraid of making art that is amateur, unpolished, rough around the edges, or too weird for other people.

To expand on my first point, as I have grown as an artist, more specifically as I have grown as a filmmaker, I have more often compared myself to other YouTubers turned filmmakers, who have been able to make much more expensive and well put together features. Since I am younger than all of them, this often does not lead to me directly comparing myself to them, but to me imagining a path in which I start honing my craft well enough to be on their level and to be given the opportunities they are given. While some of this is nice, escapist fantasy where I get to make my dream projects and get paid money for it, this daydreaming has also led me to feel ashamed of my art because it is not as high quality as movies made by people with more experience and money. When I put it that way, it sounds ridiculous, Which is good. This kind of thinking is unproductive and diminished the pride I should have for the art that I have made. The videos, movies, drawings, songs, and websites I've made might be amateur, strange, and rough, but oftentimes, that is what gives them their charm.

This leads me to my second point. All of my artwork is amateur, but if it wasn't, there would be no artwork. I don't think that all artwork needs to be amateur, or that polish is something to always be avoided, or that you should make your art bad on purpose. I just feel that making stuff that always feels a little unprofessional is how I operate, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Take The Schmusical, for example. It's my favorite thing I've ever made. It's much bigger in scale than any other work I've made, and will likely remain like that for some time. But it has a $0 budget, was shot on my phone, and does many things a traditional movie would never want to or be able to do (stuff designed for the audience to dislike, blatant copyright infringement, etc. etc.). Many of these moments where we do stuff that a movie that took itself more seriously or needed to make money couldn't do are my favorite parts of the movie, and even though that means that I can't sell the movie, I'm okay with that. I'm not going to edit out the scene where the entirety of Buddy Holly plays over a freeze frame just so that The Schmusical can become monetized. The movie would lose it's soul if that happened, which is why I want to embody everything I make with that aesthetic of doing what I want, how I want, regardless of what anyone else says.

Anyways, I think that these are some helpful guidestones for making art and knowing which direction to go in when making it. They certainly aren't original ideas, but I'm glad, because they are ideas too good to come from someone with as small of a reach as me. If they are helpful to you in anyway, awesome. Also, thanks for scrolling to the end of this page. As a reward you get