Queensland actor hits 20 million views on TikTok with clever illustrations
During Covid lockdowns, actor Sam Cotton came up with some funny illustrations of inanimate objects around the home, and have quickly become a TikTok sensation.
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During the stir-crazy, long days and weeks of the 2020 Covid lockdowns, Sam Cotton, trapped in the confines of his Sydney apartment, made friends with his doormat.
And his Wi-Fi modem, bedside lamp, cushions, fridge, feather duster and bathroom toiletries.
Isolation and lockdowns did a lot of weird, mostly unpleasant, things to the world.
But it also sparked the quirky creativity of the Queensland-raised actor who gave life to his “ani-mates’’ – a hybrid of real life video footage edited with hand-drawn animations.
Cotton’s very short videos feature inanimate objects from around his house and beyond – the likes of tea bags, fruit and vegetables, bins, the bathroom drain, toilet, even entire buildings, and often Cotton’s favourite bird, the seagull.
With drawn-on animation including hats, eyes, hairstyles and arms, the objects/birds come to life with their own personality and Cotton’s witty voiceover.
There’s the “tell my family I love em’’ onion that is cut up for dinner; Terry the tea bag being water tortured; the fruit that cries out as their stickers are ripped off; the creepy talking public toilet, and the roll-on deodorant who hates his job (“it’s the pits”).
The clips have become a runaway success on video sharing platform TikTok where he has almost three million followers, with his most popular “Chippy ticket” post (a bird writing out a “chippy ticket” traffic infringement for the cost of four chippies otherwise “I’m going to have to shit all over this vehicle”) clocking up more than 20 million views.
Cotton, 35, an actor who grew up in Brisbane, says he began tinkering with the style in the 2020 Covid lockdowns when he “receded into my imagination”.
“It was the lockdown. It was just looking around and not having mates to talk to,” he says.
“So I decided to start talking to objects – it sounds crazy but that’s what happened. I decided to make mates out of inanimate objects. I thought it would be a fun thing and it snowballed from there.”
Two years on and Cotton, a successful actor with credits including television series’ Rosehaven, The Family Law and Diary of an Uber Driver, is in negotiations with a major US studio to develop a television show based on his ani-mates.
He also has produced a children’s graphic novel called Chippy Chasers featuring 245 pages of finger-on-iPad, hand-drawn illustrations with four main characters – Stanley, Stacey and Steve-o the seagulls, and Wormy, the worm.
The seagulls plan an Ocean’s Eleven style heist to steal hot chips from Brock’s Chips, the most famous chip truck in Australia.
Cotton, who has lived in Sydney for the past two years with his fiancee, voiceover artist Maddie Levins, says he has an affinity with seagulls over their love of hot chips which is his own favourite food.
“I love hot chips just as much as seagulls do. And it would suck not being able to go out and buy hot chips and have to try to steal them. I feel bad for them,” Cotton says.
“Every time I see seagulls down at the park, I’m always rooting for them to steal the chips. That’s what sparked the idea for my book.
“What if they evolved and became more strategic about stealing chips? What if they planned it out and it was like a heist? That’s essentially what the book is – an Ocean’s Eleven type heist but it’s birds and chips.”
Cotton was born in Nambour but grew up around the northside of Brisbane from age six. On weekends, he would usually head to Maroochydore, on the Sunshine Coast, to stay with his maternal grandparents, Des and Barbara Scanlan, who lived there and where he formed core childhood memories from fishing and exploring around the Maroochy River.
His grandmother collected art with a wide variety of styles – from Albert Namatjira paintings to Pro Hart – and Cotton, who says he has always been into art, has drawn “since I can remember”.
Cotton says he was an introverted kid who drew comic books and got lost in his imagination, creating his own little worlds.
He grew up with a healthy dose of television cartoons, soaking in the likes of The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, Pokemon and Cheez TV.
At age 12, Cotton narrowly survived a terrifying small plane crash with his family on isolated Quail Island, east of Clairview, 190km north of Rockhampton.
Along with his mother Theresa, his grandmother Barbara and older brother Michael, Cotton was trapped in the six-seater, twin engine Beechcraft Baron when it overshot the airstrip on landing and burst into flames.
The family was lucky to be saved by the island caretaker who happened to be nearby and Cotton says the incident had a lasting impact.
“It was a weird thing where I became aware of my mortality at an early age and that maybe made me a bit introverted or maybe it was a reason why I went into myself a bit,” he says.
“I am still massively introverted and I battle against that. I don’t know why I chose acting – it’s ridiculous, it’s always tough for me.
“I think I always felt that I had a bit of a knack for storytelling and that was a way to go about it.”
Cotton says he fell into acting at a time when he was “a bit directionless”. At 17, after his mum found a pamphlet for Search for a Film star competition on the Gold Coast, he entered, and won, auditioning as notorious underworld criminal Chopper Read.
The win got him an acting agent who sent him for auditions and his first role was in a 2006 horror film called See No Evil, playing the killer when he was younger in flashback scenes. “Before I knew it I was in amongst it. And then I guess that’s what I was doing,’’ Cotton says.
“I’ve been lucky to work. I enjoy acting, don’t get me wrong, but it has taken a while for me to battle against that introverted side to enjoy the job.
“I’m excited now because this (ani-mates) has opened doors that are leading to other acting jobs overseas. Hopefully it links up my acting and drawing and makes it all work together.
“It was a big aim for me to get my own show picked up. That was a big incentive behind putting my stuff online. I was hoping that would happen.’’
Cotton loves escapism.
He created his ani-mates as something he could escape into and he hopes his quirky way of feeling empathy for inanimate objects, food and birds, will make people look at things differently.
He says if he makes you think about an object a different way or it brings a small smile to your face as you strip the sticker off your banana, then his job is done.
“I know it sounds crazy but I’ve always been really empathetic towards everything,” Cotton says.
“I always saw things from other people’s perspectives. And I’ve always had that in my mind also when it comes to inanimate objects or birds, especially seagulls – I’ve always put personalities on them.
“I love anything you can escape into and in this day and age there is a lot of stuff that can get people down. It’s my hope that my characters might make people start to look at things differently.”
And so as you prep dinner, with a chopping knife in hand, remember that vegetables have feelings too.
Chippy Chasers by Sam Cotton, published by Penguin Random House Australia, is out now.
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