An animated documentary channel
Big stories start in odd places: their mother's laundry room, a ruined waffle iron, a man who was terrible at business, a glitch.
Chapter 01The channel
Animated documentaries about the strange, small beginnings behind big stories.
We find the odd moment where something huge began (a back room, a bluff, a bug) and follow it all the way to the epic. Companies and the rivalries that shaped them, inventions, history's odd turns, the people behind them, and sport.
The stories we tell
Chapter 02Newest first
4 films so far, 48 minutes of odd beginnings. New ones land regularly.
Browse all films
A small team in Dundee was making a game where you played the cop. Then, as one of them remembers it, the police cars broke.
the glitch? one developer's memory.
Two candy empires, one aisle. And the chocolate inside the very first M&M's came from the other side.
named after a horse? legend.
A 24-year-old walked into a Japanese shoe company and, by his own account, made up a company on the spot. That bluff became Nike.
the bluff? his own account.
Two brothers started making shoes in their mother's laundry room. Twenty-eight years later their feud split a German town in two.
the bomb-shelter line? family legend.
Chapter 03The map
Every film starts somewhere specific: a back room, a kitchen, a shop that keeps closing, a rainy office. Each dot is one of our stories. Keep scrolling to visit a few.
4 films3 countries
Film 01Adidas vs Puma
Bavaria, Germany
Two brothers, their mother's laundry room, and a machine that ran on a bicycle.
Film 02Nike
Oregon, USA
A track coach, his wife's waffle iron, and a sole nobody had tried.
Film 03Hershey vs Mars
Pennsylvania, USA
Milton Hershey's first candy shop. It failed, and so did the next ones.
Washington, USA
Frank Mars starts making candy in his kitchen.
Film 04Grand Theft Auto
Scotland, UK
A cops-and-robbers game where you played the cop, until the police cars broke.
Chapter 04The rules
Great origin stories collect myths. We keep the good ones in, and we tell you which ones they are, on screen, the moment they appear.
The whole feud boiled over with one sentence. In a bomb shelter.
family legend: not in any document
real frames from our films
Archives, court records, patents, parliament, the founders' own words. Every film lists what it stands on, so you can check us.
66sources cited
across 4 films
Email us, or leave a comment under the film on YouTube. Tell us which film, the moment (a timecode helps) and link the source that shows we got it wrong.
if you're right, we'll pin the correction.
Corrections go to hello@oddepic.com
Chapter 05The craft
Every scene is drawn flat, in layers: sky, set, props, weather, light. Then a camera moves through them, the way the multiplane cameras of hand-drawn animation did.
The camera moves: near layers slide faster than far ones.
Dundee, 1995. A scene from our Grand Theft Auto film, rebuilt for this page.
Big stories rarely start big. They start in a laundry room, a kitchen in Oregon, a candy shop that keeps closing, a rainy office in Dundee. We go looking for that odd moment and follow it all the way to the epic.
New films on YouTube. Subscribe and the next odd beginning lands in your feed.