Well, its been a long long long time since I did one of these posts, since my last major game release in fact.I hope everyone has been keeping well.

Today I would like to announce that my new game, Shooty and the Catfish: Fully Reloaded has finally launched and is available to download (though donations are obviously appreciated) from itch.io

Download Here

This project was originally announced as an animated series that was being developed with Network Frederator before taking a turn into game development in 2015 with the original announcement trailer from back then still here for the viewing on Newgrounds

The game has obviously changed a lot since that original concept trailer but thats what happens when a development cycle is dragged out over 7 years I suppose. It feels like creating anything at this point in my life is a real struggle (I miss making animated shorts), let alone a full game BUT I got there in the end.

You can expect the average playtime to last between 4 to 5 hours and you will see quite a few familiar newgrounds faces along the way, and im not just talking about characters from my own shorts either.

Anyways, thanks for reading this far if you have, thanks for checking out my game, and thank you Tom for giving me a platform not just to talk about it on but to inspire it with over 20 years worth of content.

Take it easy and stay safe everyone!

Well, I finally did it, I made a game, and I released it. You can check out the trailer here!

So, if that has your attention, the game is currently available for free download on itch.io right here!
https://visitorsfromdreams.itch.io/flatwoods

Now, if your the patient type I am working on a html5 port specifically for here on newgrounds, I just need to work out some resolution and optimisation issues as the game was built to run at 720p. I will hopefully have it up this time next week.

But until then!

Thanks for the support everyone!

I cant believe it has been a full year since I last made a news post here, but I guess with 2015 coming to a close now is as good a time as any. 

ANIMATION ONLINE is obviously were I have spent the best part of the last 11 years focusing my time, and this year has seemed to be a very vocal year about it.

Personally, its not really a scene I feel I am attached to anymore. The last couple of years have seen all the animators who moved to Youtube complain about how hard Youtubes changes have made it for them after a couple of years of sustainable income. These same people refuse to submit content to sites like Newgrounds because they are afraid of splintering their viewerbase, cant because of contracts with MCN's or just simply dont care anymore. Its all been very negative no matter which way you look at it.  Or they just give up and make Lets Plays. EVEN I TRIED IT! (and had fun with it outside of all the time wasted rendering)

This year was the year I stopped watching "internet cartoons" (and making them apprerently as I only released 2 shorts, and one was a remake of a short from 2004...). I unsubscribed to almost every animator I was following on Youtube (and even had a massive dispute with Frederator that allowed me to exit my contract 6 months early in exchange for all my ad revenue, which I gave them happily to break free from there clutches), and... Well to be honest, despite posting my work here, I dont ever really watch content here on Newgrounds either (I do still occasionally check out games however). I think the site is EASILY the best it has ever been, but content that interests me just never really gets uploaded here. This feels especially aweful to admit after being featured on front page so much more in recent years. Its something I really appreciate, but my videos tend to do so poorly regardless I always feel bad about it, like that front page spot could and SHOULD go to a video that will generate ad revenue for the site.

Rather then complain about these things however, I think it was time I admitted to myself, im not a teenager anymore. The real problem with cartoons in recent years is the content, its all the same stuff as me and my friends were making 10 years ago. For a long time I thought that was a bad thing, but for some reason it never really occured to me that there are constantly new kids and teenagers watching this stuff, hearing these jokes and seeing these shorts for the first time. It all just comes down to the fact that I feel like I have outgrown everything that the Newgrounds and Youtube animation scenes have to offer, it is time to move on and leave all this stuff to a new generation of creators. It all feels very hollow and creatively bankrupt to me, but im sure if I was 30 years old back in 2004 when I started making web content I would have felt the same way. Of course it feels stale to me! Ive been seeing this stuff over and over for 10 years. Its not made for people like me. Its made for people with fresh eyes. These days I spend a lot of time watching original animated content on Vimeo, stuff that isnt for everyone, but its what im interested in, and its just not content I can find anywhere else. (Remember when people posted content like this a lot? Its a shame this sort of thing is so rare now) 

I plan on spending 2016 on 2 projects. One short game and one short film. Making the move to television animation (which happened last year to those in the know) means I am working rediculous hours for very little pay, but the work is fullfilling which while fantastic in its own right, has taken away much of the drive to create my own content I had left, so I want to keep things simple.

If I can get the short film finished in 2016, I am hoping I can get it to cerculating the short film and animation film festival cercuit for a year and it should see a release here on newgrounds in 2018 once the festival cercuit is done. It will be a very heavily expanded version of what I attempted with last years short White Eyes, applying all the technical knowledge I have learnt since starting in Television animation as a compositing artist.

The game on the other hand, I fully expect to release here. This isnt the project I uploaded a trailer for last month, but a much smaller project that will hopefully work as a learning tool for that bigger Shooty and the Catfish project. It will be a visual novel or sorts and is being developed with RPG Maker MV. Something I know now supports HTML5 export, but I dont know exactly if anyone has attempted to upload any games built in the engine to this site yet (know of any examples Tom?). Its an interactive short story based around the story of the Flatwoods Monster. No ETA on it yet, but its already got parts of it completed.

In the end, I guess the real reason I wanted to make this post is because I have had a large number of animator friends come up to me in the last week and tell me how terrible a year they have had, or jealous of the success of other animators who focus on making video game content or parodies or whatever else. Im tired of it, I dont know why your all coming to me, im as washed up as washed up gets, but I can tell you why you feel like you had a crap year. Its because you were trying to make content for everyone but yourself. You were all so obessed with views and how many subscribers or followers it would get you that you forgot to make something you genuinely cared about or were passionate about. I know because I did the exact same thing.

Its not a mistake I will be making again.

Hello there, I guess it has been a while since my last real update. Thankfully, this update is all good news!

As many of you know, I moved to Halifax Canada from Melbourne Australia around June, and since moving here, finding work has been… difficult at best. I spent some time working as a whale watch tour guide which ended a bit over a month ago because it was seasonal, and my second job was as a social media manager for a small surplus store way out in an industrial estate. 

Anyway, during this time I was struggling to create anything, my work hardly inspired me and thanks to the stupid amount of time I had to spend in transit each way I generally was feeling burnt out constantly. I did manage to push through my short White Eyes, but it was incredibly difficult and I really had to force myself to finish it. There were more times then I can count where I honestly just wanted to give up on everything.

One thing I did do with that project was experiment a lot with After Effects, nothing particularly amazing or taxing, but just little things, and it really taught me the layout of the program and what does what in a lot of ways. This is important.

You see, several months ago, about 3 or 4, I tried out for a studio as a character animator. I will be the first to admit, my animation skills aren’t particularly amazing, my personal work consists almost entirely of pose to pose work and I do very little character animation, so it should come as no surprise that I failed the test and didn’t get the job.

Fast forward a few months and I get an email from them asking me about how much After Effects I know seeing as I had told them I dabbled with it. I was upfront and said while I know my way around the program I am hardly what you would call a wizard, but they liked me enough to send me a test shot for a project with a rough outline of the effects they were looking for to see what I would come up with. I did some experimenting until I had something I liked and then sent it back. Turns out it really impressed them and within a matter of a couple of days I had a job offer.

So now I am on a 15 month contract at this studio doing visual effects on a 2D feature animated film and I am incredibly excited. As a kid I dreamed of being an animator on cartoons, but I never thought that I would ever EVER be working on something like a feature film. To make the offer even sweeter I am on a salary and they will most likely be sponsoring me for permanent residency. So there you have it, I am a full time visual effects artist now!

But where does that leave personal projects? Well, thats where the picture below comes in. I have spent the last 12 months experimenting with a lot of different styles trying to show a diverse range of skills and abilities. But now, with this job (and the reel footage it will create, maybe I was destined to be a visual effects artist?) I feel like I can finally focus on the content I want to make, in the visual style I love doing most, and thats what you see above. 

I have my next few shorts nutted out, ones in my head, ones on paper, and the final is scripted. They will all be using the art style above, because well… thats the style I love working with most, and I cant wait to see how far I can push it. I will have more information on those shorts in a couple of weeks when I do a video update about them and my plans for 2015. In the mean time, thanks for reading, thanks for following me, and I guess I learn’t that no matter how hard things may get or how bad they may look, you cant give up. So don’t.

Well, its out, the last Gerkinman short I ever plan on making. No more Gman, no more Nimbin, no more Sp00nage. Its been a good decade but its time to move onto new stories, new characters, new ideas and new formats.

See you again when I have something new to show.

Peace out.

Not that anyone would have noticed my absence lately. Anyway, im working on a short and I have been for the last 5 months. Its called White Eyes and its going to be the last Gerkinman short I plan on making (yeah we will see how that goes). Originally I wanted it done within a month but then I moved overseas and had to start working 2 jobs and then personal problems happened, I started using After Effects along with Flash which meant a lot of learning and its all been a bit of a shit show. Point is, im working on something, and I hope to have it out on December 2nd since thats my birthday, and what better time to kill off the character that brought me here in the first place than my birthday 10 years after his debut.

Peace

Yup, another new toon. I was up all night finishing this sucker, and whats more, Ive decided to release it here on NG almost a week before its scheduled Youtube release! You can check it out below!

Ive had to upload it a few times because for some reason during the processing process parts of the video are artifacting, which is sort of frustrating, it seems to get worse with each upload. Hopefully these little kinks will be ironed out tho.

I also released a not parody of flappy birds a couple of weeks ago for anyone who missed it!

The comments are generally funnier then the short itself.

In other news, my youtube channel is continuing to grow thanks to frederator, if you dont want to read about it then just watch this video.

If your interested in behind the scenes videos on the creative process behind my shorts then thats the place to go as I have stopped uploading speed paints and speed animates here due to negative feed back. Also, as you can see in the above thumbnail, Nimbin is coming back after a five year hiatus. You can check out the speed animate for the new title sequence (which was based on the sequence from the original 2004 pilot) below.

After Nimbin I will be taking a break from animation to do the art for a new game im working on, unfortunately its being made in RPG Maker so I wont be able to release it here, but it is based on the original Gerkinman series from 2004 and im excited to see where it goes.

Also, the Game Over Gerkinman channel is still chugging along, views have dropped off significantly, but with so many other youtube channels out there covering games thats too be expected. If your the kind of person who wants to listen to the likes of Coolboyman, Blordow, Carbonwater, Th1rt3en or Caseymobile talk about video games then be sure to give us a subscribe as we are trying to give you guys at home the best and most interesting content we can!

You can check out our Alex Kidd in Miracle World one shot below!

Or you can check out the start of our series on Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire below!

And thats pretty much it, sorry for having such a big blog post, but I only do them when I have new content out... so... yeah...

Thanks again for your time and Ill see you lovely people again when the new Nimbin episode I Am The Walrus is out!

Peace!

Yup, its another one of those 10 years posts! And to celebrate 10 years of being here on Newgrounds I decided to make a sequel to my 2004 short Sp00nage. The original short had an all star cast but wasn't really all that well recieved, which was fair enough, it wasnt a great cartoon. At the end of that short was a trailer for a sequel, a sequel that never saw the light of day until now! 

Watch out, because Sp00nage isn't the only thing returning from 2004! But more on that as it comes.

In other news, for those who missed the last blawg post, im part of the Frederator Network now. As much as Tom hates us plugging our youtube channels (and understandably so) I cant help but plug my channel as their is a lot of content on it that just wouldnt sit well here on NG. Next week a commentary version of the original Sp00nage and Sp00nage 2 will be hitting the channel, but until then, heres my most recent update video as its quicker then reading.

Finally, id just like to plug my gaming channel, which is what the old Gerkinman channel has become. I started a video podcast series with a tonne of other Newgrounds creators such as Blordow, Coolboyman, Th1rt3en, Carbonwater and many others. The series is set up sort of like a lets play, but instead of being done live, the videos are done more as a discussion over the top of the pre recorded footage and im hoping it is something that grows and more people get involved with over time. You can check out the first 3 episodes (based on 3 seperate games respectively below)

And thats pretty much it folks, sorry for the long post and I hope I havent bored you. Im hoping to become more active on this site again, and I gotta let Tom know, this new blogging set up is absolutely delightful!

Peace out!

Hey guys, it sure has been a long time since my last post hasn't it? Lots has been going on so please forgive me.

So whats news, well I guess the first call of order would be whats in the updates name. I was approached by Channel Frederator to become part of their network, and I decided that might not be a bad idea. All it really means is that they will be helping to promote my animations from time to time, but that alone is a big thing for me since getting a following has been something I have struggled with since the mid 2000's (oh how I miss the glory days sometimes).

So what does that mean for Newgrounds? Well, ill still be releasing my stuff here, and I do have to thank Tom for promoting my last major short "The Client Is Always Right". I had been acting like a total knob up until that point but he still chose to feature it which I am very much appreciative of. Ill behave myself from now on. But yes, I will still be releasing my work here on Newgrounds regardless of the partnership, although I might wait a month between the Youtube releases and the releases here.

As far as what I have on the way, I have a couple of projects, Im currently animating a sequel to my 2004 high school drama piece Sp00nage (called Sp00nage 2 creatively). Its coming along well and I hope to have out by the end of the year. Im also working on a 7 episode series which was originally picked up by Machinima but then dropped for reasons I was never told. The series (called Shooty and the Catfish) is an observational comedy largely based on the mentality of gamers I see online fused with an Adventure Time sense of whimsy. When it will be coming out is too far away to tell.

That reminds me, im rocking 2 youtube channels now. My original channel http://www.youtube.com/user/Gerkinman is now going to be used exclusively for gaming content. MEANWHILE all my animation, animation news and short films will be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/VisitorsFromDreams. I know it seems kind of a dick move to promote your Youtube channel on this site, as Tom has pointed out, but things like update videos and behind the scenes content will only really work on youtube, so if you like that sort of stuff then please, by all means, subscribe if you haven't already.

I think thats about it. Yeah. Im done. Have fun kids! If you have any questions then shoot in the comments section :)

- Daniel

So I'm sorry Tom, your site is pretty cool. You have managed to create and maintain a website that has continued to house some of the best content creators online for 15 years. Regardless of where the site is now in regards to the rest of the internet, Newgrounds has single handedly launched the creative careers of more game developers, animators, musicians and voice actors then any other website online could probably ever hope for. And whatever ends up with happening with the site, thats going to be its legacy. No other site caters to such a wide variety of content creators online, let alone even coming close to starting as many careers in so many diverse and completely different areas of entertainment and media. Thats Newgrounds legacy, and thats your own legacy. Nobody can take it from you and nobody can tell you otherwise. You changed a lot of peoples lives, some will be thankful, some might not even realise that you gave them the platform that allowed for it. But in the end, it was your vision back in 1998 that allowed for it, and thats an achievement you should always be proud of.

About a month ago I went on a huge tirade on the Newgrounds forums about how the system is broke, it wasn’t catering to my needs, blah blah blah. I only just went back into thread so I could link it to someone else and noticed a post from someone I really look up to. Not because of his work (which is top notch by the way) but rather his approach to things. Despite large measures of success, he keeps a level head and remains modest, he doesn’t brag or anything like that. And its really got me thinking, or really, makes me want to write about how I have been feeling about my work for the last couple of weeks.

I have been animating for 11 years now, and aside from a little popularity in 2004 that I managed to get for myself by being friends with other more popular people, my work has never particularly appealed to anyone. I started drawing when I was very young, as did most people who no doubt end up as animators and illustrators. In 2002 I got my first computer and a copy of Flash 4 and started animating. I didn’t have the internet at the time so animation was something I did purely to help myself forget about the bullying and fact that I was a social outcast. It wasn’t until late 2003 that my household made its way onto the internet and then 2004 that I discovered the likes of Newgrounds or DeviantArt.

Over the next 10 years I produced over 150 animated shorts (many from DeviantArt and SheezyArt that have been lost to time). Some were parodies, some original, 99% of which were and are terrible. I no doubt spent a lot of time complaining about how I was unpopular and that I deserved more and probably went on and on about how it was holding me back and so on. This was a pretty common thing, not just with me, but with a lot of people at the time, and I get a lot of young kids adding me on skype now asking why they’re not popular (why they are asking me I don’t know). BUT im starting to wonder if my reasons for thinking I should be popular were a little different to other peoples. I mean I have been working in advertising for about 7 years now, I started when I was fresh out of school, I was handed brands like Coca Cola and Mitsubishi with absolutely no advertising experience and somehow went from strength to strength in the field. What area of advertising? Animation and online, the same area all my cartoons were going.

I was, and still am making good money out of it, so I think deep down I must have really been confused internally about why companies were willing to throw money at me and trust me with their brands when I couldn’t get people in my own target demographic to look at my own work. I think its something that has been bothering me for years, but also something I have been ignoring. All the while funding thousands of dollars and hours into equipment and time that ends of with very little to no payoff aside from the satisfaction of having completed something. So here is where we come full circle.

A month ago I went on a huge tirade on the Newgrounds forums about how the system is broke, it wasn’t catering to my needs, blah blah blah. I had the similar complaints about Youtube and Vimeo as well. Now I realise that it wasn’t that they weren’t catering to my needs, but rather I wasn’t catering to theirs, particularly for the last few years. Ever since I have been able to finance my own films I have been making the films that I want to see, and the fact of the matter is, not everyone has the same interests that I do, not everyone has the same sense of humour that I do. Having complete creative control means I can make it exactly how I want it and how I want things isn’t something that can be pushed onto other people, and its certainly not something I can just expect people to want to like and share and tell their friends about.

Ive admitted to myself that my animation would never take me anywhere. Im not a good animator and have no interest in technical proficiency even if I do have a great appreciate for it when watching the work of others. Im also not a particular good story teller. My sense of humour is rather disconnected when compared to most peoples and my sense of design is limited at best. I have been doing this for 11 years, I draw every day, have filled countless art books and barely improved since I was in my teens.

So I guess that just means i’m animating stuff for myself, which really, is something I wish I had realised a long long time ago. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t have become the bitter prick who blames everyone but himself that I have become.