How I got into animation / recording audio part 2

I never had any intention of ever animating a damn thing.

I drew with a #2 pencil up until college, where I was forced to use different media, like paint and colored pencils. I resisted at first, but I eventually took a liking to oil paint. (more on that later).

I really never thought much about my career in art, but Kutztown University was recommended for its "art" program. I even had to take an art/design test to get in. Some 9/10s of people were apparently turned away. Here, I'll break down what the art program there is really all about: Kutztown has an amazing design/advertising program. If you want to be a graphic designer, go there. Kutztown also has a very comprehensive "fine art" program. If you want to learn to paint or build really cool furniture, go there.You'll still be poor as shit, but that's another topic for another day. If you want to be an "Illustrator", as in a guy who draws what people tell him to and you get paid for it, Kutztown's illustration program is a really half-assed mess. You don't learn a damn about the business end of it...a VERY important part.

Sadly, that was the category I fell into. The way the program is set up, all future illustrators/designers take the same basic intro to art and design classes. THEN you can decide where you want to focus more on your remaining 3 yrs. (or 5 if you're a really lazy asshole).

By my third year I was thinking I'd be one of these caricaturists that draws big stupid faces for magazines like Time and Entertainment Weekly - basically all your popular news and entertainment magazines, and thusly dropped all my remaining design classes. When I had to layout a newspaper for an assignment, I pretty much decided design was not my deal.

Here's some of my oil paintings from a few years ago...sadly, they're probably the last I'll ever do. (i think my humor is also painfully out of date on these)

Ok, long setup so far. NOW, one teacher in the art building conned the dept. into allowing him to teach a single, one semester animation class. Needless to say, a friend and I missed it our second year and got in our third.

It was a totally crackpot class and I loved it. Professor Shantz pretty much allowed us to do whatever we wanted. We only had to do 7 animations that semester and minimum time for each was 10 seconds. A few of us went totally overboard and made 6 minute animations WITH voices and music.

Now, before you roll your eyes at that statement, just know this was a time way before I we had flash at our disposal. I believe this was the year Tom made Pico's School. (I never even knew about flash at this point, let alone could afford it.) The only animation equipment we had at our disposal were two old pencil test machines in this weird windowless little room in the art building. I swear, you'd never even find this room is you weren't told exactly where it was. Anyways, wether we were doing stop motion, or hand drawn stuff, we had to shoot it frame by frame, in order, no mistakes. All in one sitting. It was regularly 85-90 degrees in this room and a typical 5 minute animation took easily 6 hours to shoot. The professor even had the balls to put one of those bed pans out in the hallway (yes the ones old people shit in when they don't want to get out of bed). I shot late at night, so I could run down and piss on the side of the building if i had to. The machines only had a 2 minute pause on them...if you didn't make it back in time it began recording like a typical vcr, and you were totally fucked.

It was truly a grueling test of endurance just to make a damn cartoon, but in the end it was worth it. We had our classmates rolling, something my illustrations could never do.

As for the sound - we didn't even have a real guide, we had to figure it out ourselves. In the end, we managed to rig a tv, 2 VCRs, and an 8-track tape mixer together. We'd first watch the animation on the tv, and record our audio live into the tape recorder so it synced up. Then, we'd feed the video from the one vcr into the other and the sound from the 8-track into the vcr as well. Here's a crappy diagram.

Here's the first animation I ever made with a voiceover. I won't make any excuses, I was totally inspired by Bill Plympton and it doesn't make a god damn bit of sense. It's also the ONLY semi-serious one I made for that class. I hate it.

After college, because of Professor Shantz, and the fun time I had in that class I tought myself flash and after a few rough years under my belt, here I am. (drawing simple little black and white dudes that tell dick jokes what)

Look, I never expected so many people to ask me.."HEY! your audio recordings sound pretty good how do you record em?"

The TRUTH is a very dark tale indeed.

While you could spend a few hundred dollars minimum for some recording hardware/software, I myself spent less than a 100 total.

I'll get the most embarrassing part out of the way first:

My hardware is a Socom 2: Navy Seals headset I bought USED at a gamestop. For TWENTY bucks. No, never thought I'd be recording audio with it. I bought it for the game, which I also picked up used several years ago. (yes the PS2 game). It is however made by logitech, a pretty decent hardware company.

When my first mic broke (several years ago) I was dreading trying to find another mic since you really don't know what you're gonna get until you try it out. I then noticed the Socom® headset was usb so while laughing and crying at how pathetic this was I plugged it into my G5 tower. It instantly read it as a logitech headset and holy shit the sound clarity was pretty good. So that's what I've been using ever since.

Why don't I just get a better mic you ask? I have this OCD thing where I hate change..once I find a routine that works, I don't like deviating. When the headset breaks, I'm sure I'll get a better one.

As for software I use this really decent little program called Sound Studio 3. It is mac only, and it's a reasonable 80 bucks. I believe I bought Sound Studio 2 for 50, but it has been getting more and more features so I think the price hike is fair (especially with the going cost of every other program out there like flash).

I'm no audio engineer, so luckily it's relatively simple with a nice interface and does practically everything I want.

So there you go. 100 bucks well spent.

(I pulled the below image from the downloadable bioshock art book)

Hey, maybe I'm the only one, but I felt a little bad about slaughtering hundreds of SLIGHTLY crazy artists, musicians, scientists..some of the brightest, most creative people who ever lived. I mean so what if they had glowing hooks for hands and disfigured faces right out of an episode of the twilight zone.

Here I am, this practical nobody throwing DEAD CATS at them WITH MY MIND. AND KILLING THEM WITH SAID CATS. WHAT.

I don't even know why they all had stoves and refrigerators in their apartments. If using their plasmids was so much god damn fun, why didn't they just cook meals with em.

Also, I got a little tired of eating granola bars and washing em down with whiskey, only then to be a drunken, tired errand boy for the resident psychos. (who could shoot hornets and tornados from his hands. WHAT.

I have so many questions about they world these people made for themselves. In the end none of it makes any fucking sense whatsoever, but I know over-analyzing would ruin the mystique of it.

Yeah, about half of Tankmen 2 was done months and months ago, but I was never completely happy with it, so I kept putting it off.

I've done my best to rework it (and am currently reanimating a bunch of shit to match the new dialogue) and should be done sometime mid-next month (or before).

oh and that guy on the right is Ted. He's a sniper and likes wearing his night vision goggles during the day I DON'T KNOW WHY DON'T ASK

NEW WALLPAPER

WELL.

I'm back from comicon and pleased I can enjoy the crisp coolness of air conditioning once again. Sweating for 5 straight days is a total burden BUT I'M NOT COMPLAINING.

I met a few NG people for the first time.. The Swain is a really swell guy. He stayed by the booth and promoted newgrounds like a champ while I was snivelling like a faggot in the back because I was all tired. Krinkels may look crazy from a distance, but he's also a guy you'd be happy to back up in a bar room brawl. Well, I WAS thinking he was pretty level headed, then I asked him how he can tolerate animating those madness cartoons of his, due to the thousands and thousands of movements..then he was like "fuck tweening, I keyframe that shit" and it blew my mind so hard, let me tell you. Yes I'll say that again, MADNESS CARTOONS ARE KEYFRAMED WHAT THE HOLY FUCK. That's so god damn amazing to me, and I respect that fear him even more. Luksy was also a nice guy. He explained how he hated my 300 Queers cartoon and gave it a terrible review. I made sure to make him feel awkward about it, then told him I kinda hated it too. I then made fun of his slovenian accent for a straight hour like a total dick. He makes great games, as you can see so I didn't have much else to hold against him. At dinner we also hung out with the creator of fancypants adventures and many other ng regulars. Hell, I even liked a certain 14 yr old uber-fan who seems to be getting a lot of flack in the comicon webcan thread, but believe me, if you saw how hard he was selling newgrounds to the passers by..either successfully or annoying them, it was hilarious. You can't not be amused.

ALSO

I'm PLEASED AS PUNCH (whatever that means), that I dont have to look at anymore out of shape naruto ninjas, fat barbarians, nerds with 8 ft. foam swords (that would be slaughtered in a flat second in a real battle), as well as all the geeks in tights, whoever the hell they were supposed to be.

Anyways, now I'm rambling...I'm back and I got work to do.

ADIOS MUCHACHOS

Everybody else on staff are making posts about comicon, so I guess i will too.

I'll admit, I've only owned maybe 3 comic books my entire life.

- the issue superman was killed
- Spawn #1
- some random x-men comic

and a friend once gave me a copy of Savage Dragon #1 but I burned it because I thought the idea of a dragon-man with a big stupid fin on his head fighting crime as a cop was REALLY GOD DAMN STUPID. Even as a kid I couldn't suspend the disbelieve...sorry dragon fans.

I grew up in an area with no comic book stores (yes, even 15 yrs ago they were scarce). If one was closer, who knows maybe I would have carved out a part of my cold, barren heart for them.

anyways, it should be fun I guess. If I'm not at the NG booth, I'll probably be over at the Udon booth sucking their dicks or something. (figuratively speaking tee hee)

and one request - DONT ASK ME TO DRAW ANYTHING. I can't draw quick little sketches like some of these other fellas, if you ask I'll fail super hard and I'm not looking to humiliate myself.

that is all, I will see you there.

Alright, so it seems like the new weapons were overall pretty well recieved.

I literally had them finished a year ago and haven't seen much of them till the redesign launched. Thanks to Stamper for some polish and the scythe icon.

I know alot of you are fanatics when it comes to leveling up and I've seen some debate on certain icons such as the tomahawk and gloves....or possibly the order of certain icons.

It was a total bitch putting all of these in some kind of order. What's more powerful..a pipe or tire iron? A golden executors axe OR a skull mace? Also, this is silly to admit but I always though the Level 30 gold sword from the old design was a spear head due to its width...so I redesigned it as a spear. I also think of level 58 as a full suit of golden armor, not just a golden helmet..and level 59 sort of like you've now been infused at the molecular level with...lots of power who the fuck knows, I just wanted to make it cool.

I'd like to revisit these in the future and tweak a few more to my liking. This probably won't happen soon, but maybe when things calm down a bit and nearly all bugs are squashed. Feel free to tell me what your favorite / most hated icons are, or any problems you have with the ordering in the comments below.

I hope my little welding tankmen had you all on the edge of your seats. I KNOW IT DID WHO AM I KIDDING.

Anyways

I've got two bytesize animations up in rotation with more on the way.

This guy below you is named John and ever since he was struck by lighting, he denounced his current religion and has been upsetting his friends and family with his "new" beliefs ever since. I have another episode with this guy in the can that should be in the second rotation of bytesize movies.

throw out your opinions IF YOU DARE.