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Today marks the 5th anniversary of when I uploaded the first episode of FrogMan the Series to the internet.  Episode 1 was uploaded back on September 1st, 2010 to Youtube, and December 21st, 2010 here on Newgrounds, because the episodes weren't made in flash and I didn't know how to immediately get them on the website.  In fact, episodes 2, 3, and 4 didn't make their ways to Newgrounds until over a year after they were first released!

Anyways, I wanted to do something special since 5 years is kinda  big deal, but I don't really have anything unfortunately, so I guess a long, drawn-out news post will have to do!

FMTS has had a pretty sad run in recent years; there hasn't been an episode in over 3 years now!  However, in that time I've released 7 FMTS shorts, a few other projects involving the FrogMan character, and of course a bunch of stand-alone shorts not related to FMTS in any way, so it's not like I've done nothing over the past three years, and if anything, I've probably been more productive these last three years than ever.  I do regret not putting more time into the full episodes though, although I'm kinda glad I didn't get back to it until I did, 'cause when I was supposed to be making episode 6, my skils just weren't up to par.  Sure, when episode 6 finally is released, there will be a huge gap in quality between it and episode 5, that would've been a more smooth transition if I had just continued with the original version of episode 6, but more on that later.

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Let's now take this time to look over everything FMTS-related I've released since the series began!

2010

FMTS Ep 1 "A Series is Born"

The first episode of FrogMan the Series!  I remember starting it during the summer of 2010, and finishing it well before the deadline of September 1st.  I don't remember what my plans for the series were, but I feel like I was trying to get an episode done a week, but yet this episode wasn't released until September 1st, so idk.

Anyways, this episode sucks.  I mean, it's okay comedy-wise, but everything else about it is just bad.  Making it helped me continue to make more stuff though.

Also, this episode was animated in Anime Studio Debut 6, which was a horribly limiting program, and I feel a lot of the blame for the shit animation can be placed on that program, or at least my inability to use that program if it is capable of doing fbf animation, which I don't think it was 'cause I tried everything to get it to work my way.  While I didn't really know anything about how to actually animate back then, I still had some basic idea I guess 'cause I managed to make a few short cartoons including the original FMTS pilot and this by using MS Paint and movie maker, and that's kinda like straigt ahead animation.

Anyways, because this episode was made in Anime Studio, and there was no way to put a preloader into my movie (from what I remember) I had to find some alternative way of getting it up on Newgrounds, so it didn't immediately get up here.  Eventually, we found a program that could convert video to .swf and even give it a cool little video player skin, and episode 1 was finally able to get up on NG.  Eps 2 and 3 are a different story...

FMTS Ep 2 "Every Hero Has a Chick"

I think I started episode 2 immediately after finishing episode 1.  This episode was also the last one finished over the summer, and the last one finishined before its actual deadline.  Finishing this episode was also the latest I had ever stayed up at that point, I stayed up until 7AM, finished the episode, and then had to take out the trash because I was still up, lol.  But then I slept.  I've stayed up way later now, of course.

Episode 2 is slightly better than episode 1, 'cause there's more movement and stuff, perhaps too much movement at points.  I feel as though some scenes go on for way too long, because of a lack of everyone, other than one character, doing something, like the very first scene, when they're in the kitchen, FrogMan and Wise Frog are having a conversation and Terrible Toad and Toady are just sitting there, lifeless.  It's so hard to watch.

Also the elephant in the room is that this episode is kinda sexist.  While the Chinese Doll has more of a purpose later on, Chick Frog is essentially just an object for Wise Frog to do horrible things to.  This was apparently going to be the original direction for the entire series aside from a few instances of actual character stuff, but thankfully I'm not a 15 year old anymore and I have re-written a lot of the future episodes to make sure everyone's a more likable character, and Chick Frog has an actual personality.

Also, this is the first episode to have some scenes cut for being too "explicit" for youtube, and these deleted scenes were supposed to be DVD exclusive extras.  This was a plan since the beginning, some episodes would have DVD exclusive scenes for various reasons.  It's been nearly 5 years since this episode premiered, and maybe only 2 or 3 people have still scene this episode in full.  That's something.

FMTS Ep 3 "Gangsta Frog"

I don't remember anything about the production of this episode, other than finally getting fed up with Anime Studio and switching over to flash... and brining the habits I had gotten from AS with me. Ugh.

So yeah, not even half way through the episode, there's a complete and drastic change in how everything looks.  It's really jarring, and honestly, the Anime Studio drawings looked better, though maybe there wouldn't have been much of a difference if I had just used a smaller brush in flash and knew about brush smoothing...

So yeah, out of all the "classic" episodes, those being 1 through 5, I always cite this one as my favorite, at least for writing.  Although nowadays I can see how it would offend some people, I still think it's the funniest episode so far.   Still though, there's a reocurring problem in eps 2 through 5 that I have hopefully fixed with the re-writes of the rest of season one: too much profanity.  Like, I don't know how much profanity is in each episode, I could check but meh, but it's definitely way too much.  I can't believe some of the stuff I thought I could get away with on TV, under a PG/TV-14 rating.  The original version of episode 6 had 90 uses of fuck.  That's a lot.

Anyways, I've always liked the ending to this episode, 'cause there's some nice dialog between Wise Frog and the cop, and some great gags that no one ever notices.

And so concludes 2010.  3 full episodes of FMTS were released, two of them even being over 9 minutes long!  Their quality is shit though, so releasing over 20 minutes of stuff in a couple months at the end of the year probably doesn't mean as much as it would nowadays.  Still, 2010 was productive.  The series got off the ground and things were looking up... until the last couple days of the year.  Then bad stuff happened.

2011

Music Video - "When You Fucked Grandpa" (NSFW)

Okay, so on December 30th, 2010, my father passed away and not too long after I moved in with my older brother and was there for about a month.  In that time I got one thing done.  This was that one thing.

I think I had gotten a little bit of work done on episode 4, but throughout that entire time I really didn't work on anything due to lack of motivation.  I managed to crap this out during one day of extreme boredom though.  This was made from start to finish in one 11 hour sitting.  I don't know why I made this, I don't know why I spent 11 hours on it, but it exists.  It's actually not that bad- okay, it's really bad- but it looks decent.  Yeah, the line quality is shit, but I actually TRIED to make something good with it.  I'm sure if it wasn't a music video about Wise Frog fucking Terrible Toad, more people would like it.  There's also a really gay bit in it that I can't watch.  Fantastic.

Also, fun little bit of trivia: I wanted to see what would happen of the uploader of an age restricted video on youtube was under the age of 18, so I uploaded this to youtube and flagged it myself.  Instead of getting age restricted, it got removed, and my channel got a strike.  Serves me right.

FMTS Opening Credits V2

The 2nd version of the opening credits.  The 1st version of the opening credits, which was used for eps 1 through 3, was never uploaded separately.  This version was used for eps 4 and 5.  These opening credits are better than the 1st, though it still uses the same shit quality FrogMan Rap, it looks better... kinda.  Everything is drawn with the pencil tool for some reason and it still looks kinda bad, especially in the beginning of episode 5, but it was another necessary step in my evolution as an animator I guess.

FMTS Ep 4 Teaser

The first and only teaser for episode 4, and the first teaser of any episode!  This was also only uploaded to Newgrounds, for whatever reason.  I think as a kinda promotional thing to bring people to the episoes on youtube since I still couldn't figure out how to get them here.

Anyways, this teaser's nice.  It's one of my favorite scenes from episode 4, 'cause it has a gag that's kinda underappreaciated, that being Wise Frog roasting a marshmellow on the burning tire.  These episodes seem to have a lot of underappreciated gags.

FMTS Ep 4 "The Hero-Villain Race"

Hey look, another episode, that was a bit of a break, huh? I'm sure it won't be too much longer until the next episode is out! HA HA HA! Oh God...

Anyways, episode 4 is nice.  It starts out and HOLY SHIT LOOK AT DAT QUALITY- okay it's not that impressive but it still looks nice compared to the previous episodes.  This was also the first episode to be animated entirely in flash.  I still couldn't get it on Newgrounds though because I made each scene an individual flash file.  Anyways, although it's still animated the same way as the previous episodes, it looks nicer than episoe three because everything is drawn with a smaller brush, though I didn't immediately figure out brush smoothing.

I really don't have a lot ot say about this episode I guess.  I like it, I used to not like it, but people said they liked it so I went back and looked at it and yeah, it's not bad.  There's some attempts at actual animation in it and although they look bad, at least I tried.  There's also some really nice looking parts and the voice acting has kinda improved maybe.  The race scenes are also pretty cool to watch, even if looking back they're kinda lazily done, this episode just feels like it's almost an actual cartoon.

And that was 2011, nothing happened!  Like, seriously, aside from these couple things, the only other thing I made in 2011 was an ad for Boring Co., and this which is kinda related to FMTS I guess.

So why was 2011 so goddamn unproductive?  I guess it was just hard trying to cope with everything that was going on.  Oh, wait no, the big thing was that my computer died, yeah, that happened, I always forget about that.  MORE ABOUT THAT DURING THE PRODUCTION OF EP 5 THOUGH.

2012

FMTS Ep 5 Teaser #1

It's just a simple teaser for episode 5, kinda close to when episode 5 actually comes out, which is kinda odd since episode 5 was in development for over a year due to problems, but again, more on that when we actually get to episode 5.

FMTS Ep 5 Teaser #2

This wasn't actually uploaded to be a teaser to ep 5, it was actually uploaded to see if I could get away with using that song and uploading it to youtube without triggering their shitty content ID system, and yeah, I was able to, yay for me.

Looking back at this, fuck I hadn't realized I uploaded this uncensored, lol.  I'm surprised it hasn't been flagged yet for that liscense plate.  Anyways, this teaser is really fucking laggy for some reason so it doesn't really do a good job of showing it, but this is probably the most important scene in ep 5 because it shows just how much the art had improved from the time I had originally started working on ep 5 and the time I was able to get back to work on it.

At the end of the YT description I supposedly promised that the wait for episode 5 wouldn't be much longer, and sure enough, two months later, it was released.

FMTS Ep 5 "The Vacation Part 1: The Sweet, Sweet Beginning"

Finally, episode 5 of FMTS.  I have to start this off by saying that I recently went and uploaded video versions of eps 1 through 5 to NG, and this version of episode 5 is actually the BEST version available, because youtube doesn't allow you to replace a video file.  When this was originally uploaded to youtube, one scene lagged so bad because I guess it was too much for flash to render properly, but now thanks to Swivel, and its ability to render each frame individually, the scene can finally be seen lag-free!

Okay, so the production of episode 5 was a disaster, between eps 4 and 5 there was a gap of over a year.  I've gone into full detail many times about what happend, but essentially I started working on ep 5 in the Summer of 2011, then got addicted to Minecraft and didn't work on it much, then stopped being an idiot and went back to working on it, and then my computer died, causing me to not be able to work on it for  A LONG TIME.  I didn't get to be anywhere near a computer I could kinda call my own until October of 2011, when Alex's mom let me "borrow" her laptop, and I still didn't immediately get back to work on it, 'cause we were doing Minecraft shit and that was apparently more important.  Oh, also I guess I didn't have the project file, that's a big issue too.  I did eventually get all the files transferred and the episode was finished and released in June of 2012, on both youtube and Newgrounds, and it even got daily 7th here, though I never found out until over a year later 'cause I was curious, and even though it only got 7th place, it got over 3k views at the time, and that was pretty cool.

Episode 5 was the best thing I had made at the time, and it's certainly a good example of how much someone can improve artistically in a year.  While a lot of episode 5 is still kinda bad looking now, at the time it was near-perfect and even started to look like an actual cartoon near the end.

I had promised that the wait for episode 6 wouldn't be nearly as long as the wait for episode 5.  Three years later and it still isn't done.  But we'll get to that later.

FMTS 2 Year Anniversary Video

So this is a bit different.  It's not really animated, just a shitty drawing and a song with shitty audio, a rushed piece of shit excuse of a 2 year anniversary video.  It could've been better, but hey, at least the 2nd anniversary got something.  Every other one hasn't :/

FMTS Short 1 "Frogs of the Round Table"

Frogs of the Round Table is interesting.  It's the first FrogMan the Series short, although at the time it wasn't considered part of FMTS.  It's based on a garbage "animation" I did in 2009, which was based on a 2007 comic I made.  This is a remake and obviously it's better, though the colors are kinda shit but eh, I've improved.  Everything else about this is great though, aside from some quiet audio.  It's interesting that I started this up almost immediately after ep 5, and there's such a huge leap in quality.  I started incorporating some actual frame by frame animation into the later bits of ep 5, and this here, is entirely frame by frame, or at least from what I can remember.  Doesn't mean it's done well though, but it looks good enough.  The part with FrogMan stabbing Terrible Toad in the shower was also the first time I storyboarded an animation, so there's that.

Frogs of the Round Table was originally just a quick, standalone thing to tie people over until episode 6 came out, but little did I know that it would be the first in a very long list of things that would fill the gap between episodes 5 and 6...

FMTS Opening Credits V3

The 3rd version of the opening credits.  This one doesn't suck!... mostly.  The FrogMan Rap is greatly improved, and so is the animation.  The FrogMan Rap sounds more like an actual rap, because the audio was finally re-recorded and it even has a newly made backing instrumental.  This was also the first thing I animated with my at-the-time new tablet.  This version of the opening credits was supposed to be used for the rest of season one, but unfortunately will never actually be used for an episode.  It was only ever used as the opening credits for the abandoned version of episode 6, and the youtube versions of most of the FMTS shorts, which in retrospect was a bad idea.  At least it got some use though.

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All right, so this was supposed to be a lot longer, but for some reason I couldn't have the whole thing in one news post, even though it isn't longer than the character limit, but I'm not waiting around any longer so I'm just gonna split this into two posts.  Join me in part two here.