The other day I came across The Interview Codex by Deathink and The-Great-One, where I picked up on a random interview to read. I ended up reading Hikarian's story. The interview covered a lot of topics and it inspired me to read about her creative process. I went to bed that night, thinking about my own animations. After realizing I've been here for over 10 years, I started wondering about my personal developments. There may not be a lot of projects to show for it, but there's definitely been progress, and my style has developed dramatically over time. I decided to put all of that in perspective over a couple of days.This is however by no means an autobiography. I'm writing this so that I may uncover my strengths and weaknesses.

Each of these blog entries discuss the following topics:

1. Reasons To Create (Philosophy, Motivation & Inspiration)
2. Creative Developments (Visual Style, Skills & Habits)
3. Outcome (Experience, Dedication, Achievements & Continuity)

=== A FRESH START ===

When I just discovered the internet, DragonballZ was probably my favorite show. Through a search engine that wasn't google, I used to look for websites about the series. This is how I first stumbled across pixelated animated gifs, taken from videogames. They fascinated me thoroughly! I was hoping to make something like that myself using MS paint, but of course that didn't work. I did play around with RPG Maker though, making sprite sheets that would be animated within the software. Also, - inspired by the animations I had seen on Newgrounds - I made a frame by frame movie once, using stick figures I drew in MS Paint, and then dragged those images into Windows Movie Maker. Those were my very first attempts at animation. When I showed this to my causins, they had a chuckle. That's when they introduced me to Flash.

I picked up flash pretty quickly, though there was a lot for me to learn. For instance, I didn't know what layers were, so my first project was a huge ass animation - complete with backgrounds - using only one layer. It contained very badly drawn videogame characters from Super Smash Bros and some very crude humor. I made everything up as I went along. From what I remember, it was mostly inspired by the Arfenhouse series. It got blammed twice.

But then I learned about Layers and Symbols, and that's how I started on Dragonball Future. I drew an original character in the style of Dragonball, and had him avenge an alien species for destroying his planet. Three episodes made it through the portal. I thought I was doing pretty well!

• Reasons To Create: I had no reason to create anything at this point, but submitting stuff on the internet was oddly addicting somehow. My biggest inspiration sources were DragonballZ, videogames and flashes made by other Newgrounders.
• Creative Developments: I was lacking in every aspect. My visual style was odd and unpredictable, I was limited to the standard color pallette, and I didn't even know what Frame By Frame meant.
• Outcome: I got some flashes to pass judgment and made friends with some of the helpful reviewers. I had a lot of fun, and wanted to continue doing this.

Newgrounds is the alpha and omega of my heart, and all that I could ever hope to want from an unlike community. Free of the shackles of political correctness, and of big buck productions that saturate western media today.

- VicariousE

"I published New Ground from my parents' basement in Perkasie, PA, sending sporadic issues to around 100 members of a club on Prodigy. I was 13 at the time, which explains why I have so much faith in today's thirteen year olds."

- TomFulp

"I know that Jobs told the world that flash sucks, but he is dead, and his idiocy should die with him."

- fuckoffasshole

"So much awesome on Newgrounds... I could literally login everyday for the rest of my life and find at least one more talented person to fav..."

- CrabbWalker

"Newgrounds as a brand is associated with some really strong and respectable stances on creator's rights in light of how youtube and other platforms treat people, because Tom has always been a creator who runs a website for other creators as opposed to a businessman running a service marketed to creators. Tom wouldn't sell NG any more than he could sell a childhood pet."

- FUNKbrs

[INDEX]  

1. A FRESH START
2. THE FIRST STRUGGLE
3. THE COMFORT ZONE
4. THE UNDERDOG
5. FUTURE PROJECTS

I'll just start another list of gems to get myself motivated.

I just turned 24. Which is cool, considering that's my lucky number :)

By god, I'm getting old...

Original image by Bryan Lee o'Malley

So yeah, I'm making another list of gems overhere. Also, here's something I've been working on this week:

I wanted my 100th news post to be somewhat special, but meh. Screw it. Instead I'm just going to leave this song overhere. Initially, this was an experiment I did a little over 1 year ago. Please forgive me for raping Muse.

Also, congrats to Cyberdevil for being an official Newgrounds veteran! I never knew it to be possible to find the old Newgrounds profiles with the WayBackMachine, and had given up on it. Thanks to him, I gave it another go and found my old profiles. Better yet, I found the old flashes I had Wade delete for me!

view/131198

view/131631

view/131838

First of all, a happy new year everyone! I hope 2013 has been a great year for all of you, and I wish the best in this upcoming year. Last year was a great year for me here on this website, and it very much inspired me to get more involved. So yeah, that is one of my resolutions.

One of the things I've been doing lately, is spend more time in the flash portal. Initially, I just wanted to change my level icon, but I soon came to realize I've been missing out on lots of cool gems. I haven't found a lot of them just yet, but there's a couple of animations that got my attention, for whatever reason that may be.

Whatever you're doing, I hope you're having a wonderful time!

Have some Lindsey Stirling.

[NEW IN 2013]

It was still January when Newgrounds released Swivel and changed the lives of every animator on this website. Around the same time I visited Writersblock's page and found out he published a book! He said he'd love it if someone were to make a booktrailer, and so I took the bait. I never had a flash of mine featured on frontpage before in the 9 years of membership, so it was a pretty special moment for me when the finished product did just that. Shane's book very much inspired me to get back to writing myself, so I started fleshing out the concept I had for the comic I wanted to make. This was also the year I pretty much got the hang of actionscript 2.0, and created a whole bunch of experimental little projects. I still have a long way to do, but yeah. Somewhere in October - the 21st to be exact - I hit a 10 year milestone here on NG, and celebrated this occasion with a series of newsposts. Tom made mention of it in a newspost.

 

Also, here's a fun fact: Newgrounds released a rich-text editor for blogposts today.

[FLASH & COLLABORATIONS]

Towards the end of 2012 I got restless, as I had not been sufficiently productive for quite some time. While lurking Newgrounds, I found out about Writersblock's book. I bought it, read it, designed some characters, sketched some of the cool scenes from the book and then put all of that together. We set a deadline for the first of June and I missed it by 2 weeks. It took another 2 weeks to get the voice acting done. A month overdue, but it reached frontpage, and hopefully made a lot of sales! I took a break after that, but started messing around with a Halloween-themed game concept during October. It didn't really go anywhere. Actually, I had been messing around with actionscript for the span of the entire year. Some of my favorite experiments included a  bullethell thingy which I made from being inspired by do-don-pachi, and an audio knob (5.7 MB), much like the ones from fruityloops or whatever other digital audio workstation.

[AUDIO]

In the previous years I had been very private about my creations and it really started to eat me. I decided to drop a few tracks on here, and gradually started to realize that I didn't want my songs to be hidden any longer. The album I've been working on will remain private for now (I should really finish it sometime), but I promised myself to upload other stuff more frequently.

[OTHER YEARS]

• 2003
• 2004
• 2005
• 2006
• 2007
• 2008
• 2009
• 2010
• 2011
• 2012
• > 2013

[NEW IN 2012]
Newgrounds kicked off the year with a fresh redesign. While the new look was nothing short of amazing, it took some getting used to. The new audio visualizers however, I immediately fell in love with! Then, a few months after the redesign was launched, everyone's favorite cat Sherbert passed away. A sad day in the history of this website. In real life, I moved out and didn't have internet for a while. That's when I opened flash and decided to mess around with actionscript 2.0. Since I'm used to javascript, I picked it up pretty quickly. I'm still not great at using it, but I did improve a lot since then! Apart from another attempt at making art for the NG calendar, I didn't do very much this year. I was however a bit restless and wanted to make stuff! I watched Scott Pilgrim The Movie during summer, and read the inspiring comics towards September. A couple of weeks later I was struck with a great concept for a story, and decided I should be making it into a comic. What followed was a lot of brainstorming.

[AUDIO]
I was meaning to create a serious album this year. I got pretty far in the making, but haven't finished it. The album title was going to be "What The Hell Was I Thinking", and would be entirely inspired by my delusions in 2006 (which partially thrived on the belief that the world would end in 2012). I was chasing after the feel of this song, and I must say I got very close to recreating the atmosphere of those days. I should really go and finish the rest of the album sometime.

[OTHER YEARS]
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
> 2012
2013

[NEW IN 2011]
This year was much less eventful than the year before. Looking back now, I don't think the circumstances were very motivating for me to work on anything. A mix of all sorts of things created a distance between me and my beloved Newgrounds. But worth noting is that I met Wallpaperman in Amsterdam a second time. He visited around the time those riots broke out. I took a notepad with me so that we could work out some ideas for a New Pot Jam, but we didn't actually do much when he got back home. As we sat in a coffeeshop, I drew a picture. Later on I scanned it and then traced it in flash. Initially it was meant to go into Pot Jam 3, but since that never happened it became my userpage image when the redesign was launched in 2012. Anyway, towards the end of 2011, Luis PM'd me that he would maybe come to Holland. Too bad this never actually happened. I also designed and printed a couple of T-Shirts for personal use. I might do more of that in the future.

[FLASH & COLLABORATIONS]
As I said before, I didn't do a whole lot. I wanted to give Pico day a shot, but never got very far. And I tried to get some friends in real life to make flash or games with me, but those attempts sort of failed as well. The same could be said for a project me and Wallpaperman were working on. In this project we were supposed to share the screen. Thinking back now, I should have tried finding some new partners over at the flash forums. That, or sign in on MSN to see if my old buddies were still around. Or, you know... Send a PM through Newgrounds?

[AUDIO]
I made Slow & Hungry as a submission to the NAC'11 Zombie Apocalypse competition, and apparently missed the announcements when I placed 4th. Pretty silly. The loop I made after that was a quick experimental thing I did for a Halloween contest, because I was too late to make anything decent. A lot of my work this year had much potential, but I never finished any of it. Even if I had, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have uploaded any of it to Newgrounds. I now realize that Newgrounds always was my reason to keep creating music; I had an audience. Ever since I stopped doing that, I lost my will to finish anything. I learned my lesson here.

[OTHER YEARS]
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
> 2011
2012
2013