My name is Todd Cameron and I am a Schitt’s Creek obsessed toy artist from Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada and the creator of The Little Schitts. When the pandemic began in 2020, I found myself out of work at my business of DJing weddings and hosting karaoke shows. I decided to combine two of my passions, Schitt’s Creek and vintage Fisher Price toys, and attempted to create a stop motion video of the Schitt’s Creek classic, “A Little Bit Alexis”. After several weeks, I finished my creation and uploaded the video onto my social media accounts late one night. The next morning, I was blown away to see that not only had the official Schitt’s Creek account retweeted my music video captioning it “Storytelling at its finest,” but so had Dan Levy, calling my work simply “A masterpiece.” A few days later, Alexis herself, Annie Murphy saw my video and called it “friggin’ cool”.
After many years of creating fun projects for my friends and family to enjoy, even having gone viral before, I had never seemed to be able to get over the hurdle of referring to myself as an artist. This attention from my favorite show and a comedic hero of mine was enough to allow me to finally self-identify as an artist. I mean, who cares if I wasn’t making a living from my art or that I didn’t have an official studio. I realized that I got much joy from creating things and that those things brought much joy to others. That was enough.
Soon after, I got to work creating more Schitt’s Creek fan art projects. I formed a Schitt’s Creek tribute band called The Schitts, just long enough to release one song, called “Simply the Schitt”.
I also taught myself video editing to create a number of Schitt’s Creek edits. My first project was to chop up dialogue in order to create an “A Little Bit Alexis” style video for each of the other Rose family members.
Next up, having always been a bit let down that there was never a Halloween episode of Schitt’s Creek, I decided to take six spooky movies and splice them together with scenes and quotes from Schitt’s Creek.
In February of 2021, I came across a vintage Fisher Price Sesame Street set and had the thought that it somewhat resembled the building shapes of The Rose Apothecary and the Café Tropical. I thought that it would be fun to have a Schitt’s Creek playset to play with my 2 year old son and so, I pulled out my dremmel tool, my super glue, and many other supplies and got to work on renovations. While this work was being completed, I started to look at other vintage Fisher Price buildings in my collection and began to see how these buildings could be renovated as well to resemble other known buildings from Schitt’s Creek. Before I knew it, 6 months had passed and I had created the town of Schitt’s Creek from vintage toys. I just needed some vintage toy residents.
I was walking through a local thrift store one day, I came across a bag of egg like figures that I recognized from my childhood. They were Little Tykes Toddle Tots and I instantly knew that these cute rounded characters with their non-descript faces and simple features, could be customized to resemble the citizens of Schitt’s Creek. After painting on recognizable clothing, carving and painting proper hairstyles, and adding a few accessories, my crew was ready.
I presented the set to my son and he was overjoyed, especially with Bob’s Tow Truck. It was so much fun to see him using characters I had made from my favorite show. We played with it for a while before I uploaded photos to Facebook and Instagram the next morning.
Instantly, the photos series began to go viral on Facebook on Twitter. I had thousands of shares, comments, likes and messages from fans of Schitt’s Creek around the world. It was overwhelming but such a great feeling to know that I was spreading love and smiles throughout the fandom. Then I had another idea. What if I used the set to recreate scenes with still photography as well as stop motion videos and continue the smiles and laughter? I had to give it a go and so “The Little Schitts” were born!
I took some photos of classic scenes and also began my Little Schitt’s stop motion adventures with the Amish field “There’s a bug on your dress” scene. People were really enjoying my art and were responding very favourably. Then after a week since the creation of The Little Schitts, I received a DM that absolutely blew my mind. It was from Netflix Family and they wanted to do a collaboration with me which I later found out was a project to give my Little Schitts treatment to the gang on Stranger Things to be used for promotional material for Netflix! I couldn’t believe that my pandemic project and fun art project was being recognized by one of the biggest entertainment players in the industry. After this announcement, my story appeared on CNN as well as Today.com, Scary Mommy, Yahoo News and many other outlets.
A short while later, Shawn Patterson, the Academy Award nominated creator of the song, “Everything is Awesome” from the Lego Movie, found a video of mine on Twitter and took it upon himself to add a backing track to the scene. He then contacted me and we ended up collaborating on a few Little Schitts scenes!
Since then I have been continuing to put out new content almost daily and have received so much support from the fandom. I enjoy recreating scenes exactly as they are as well as often putting my own comedic interpretation on scenes. Some of my favorite pieces are inspired by scenarios mentioned during the show but never shown. People have told me that my art has brightened their days during trying times and that means the world to me. I have also had several celebrities from the show enjoy my art with likes, comments, and shares.
Perhaps one day, I will run out of inspiration for The Little Schitts, but until then I plan to keep the smiles and laughter going. I’m having far too much fun to stop.
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