This is Part 2 of the 5th anniversary retrospective on FrogMan the Series, see part 1 here if you haven't.
2013
All right, so 2012 didn't end as I had planned it to. In fact for a bit there it was looking kinda bleak, but by the last few days of the year I was feeling pretty okay and enjoying myself and was looking forward to 2013 and what it would bring, and boy would it bring a lot. In non-FMTS related stuff (and some FMTS stuff) I managed to release 1 short a month for a good bit this year, so this was definitely one of my most productive years, sort of a new golden age for me I suppose.
Anyways, in January of 2013 I randomly started thinking about Pico Day and wanted to make a cartoon for it since it was one of the biggest NG holidays, and since I wasn't really happy with the state of NG at the time, that's what I decided to make my cartoon about, a way to fix the problem with Newgrounds. What was made was FrogMan and Pico. I had finished the script and from January to March or so, I storyboarded the whole thing minus some stuff in the montage, and then from that point to Pico Day I animated the first scene. Of course, before I finished the first scene the lap top I had borrowed from Alex's Mom for nearly 2 years finally died. I was able to finish up the scene at Alex's house though, during the Pico Day weekend.
This scene looks kinda sloppy compared to the rest of FrogMan and Pico, especially against the shot I went back and added to the first scene in the full film. It's all animated frame by frame though and there's A LOT of movement, even if it's just two guys talking. It must've been good 'cause it got me my first solo daily award and was on the front page for a few days. It was a pretty great time.
I had originally wanted to get the full thing done for Pico Day 2013, but couldn't, so then I thought I would just finish it and release it whenever, but then I decided I could just finish it and it'd be best to actually release it on Pico Day, so now Pico Day 2014 was my deadline. I'll let y aknow how well that worked out later.
FMTS Short 2 "Cinco de Gayo" (NSFW)
The 2nd FMTS short, and this time it actually was meant to be an FMTS short, as indicated by it being in the title for some reason. By now I knew that ep 6 wasn't coming out for a while, so I had to fill the gap somehow, so I wrote a couple FMTS shorts, and this was the first of those. It's also my first kinda explicit thing in a long time, and it's glorious.
It starts out innocent enough, FrogMan's making tacos for Cinco de Mayo, but then Wise Frog has to ruin everything! It's always fun to animate more adult things, and it was certainly fun to animate Wise Frog fucking a tray of tacos and then cumming, as stated by jorler, "an obscene amount of semen".
Reception to this was kinda mixed. People liked the animation, but were kinda turned off by the "adult" joke, though most people seemd to be able to look past that and some people were even on the same page as me and thought it was funny. As for me, I still think it's hilarious. Dick jokes and using cum for comedic purposes will never get old to me.
FMTS Short 3 "End of Summer; End of All"
All right, so coming off of Cinco de Gayo, here we have a less explicit, and kinda almost family friendly FMTS short. Yeah, there's still some crude humor and language from Wise Frog, but it's not that explicit.
So fun fact, this short wasn't meant to see the light of day, 'cause I really didn't like the writing in it. Now though, I think it's funny, and anyone who didn't like the writing didn't know what the fuck they were talking about.
So when this was originally uploaded, it passed judgement with a decent score, but then quickly fell to being WAY underrated, and I still don't understand why, 'cause there's no way people not liking the writing would cause it to fall as much as it did, I'm still thinking it's the fact that the loop in the beginning went on for a little too long, which I still don't think it goes on for too long. I guess people are just that impatient. Anyways, aside from that bullshit, there was still some positive reception to it, from people who actually know what they're talking about anyways.
In the end, I like it, it was fun getting to animate Whiskey the Cat for the first time since 2009, and there's some really nice animation in this, and it took a while to make and is kinda decently lengthed. There was originally supposed to be more of a plot, but again, I didn't like where it was going originally. It's fine now though.
Oh boy. This one's just full on porn... sorta. It's quick and to the point, and for that, I say it's funny. I don't know, there's just something about Wise Frog smacking a chick out the window with his huge cock that just makes me lose it.
Anyways, as you might've noticed, I linked to the youtube version because it's the only standalone version of this short on the internet, because it's too short for me to upload here, and it was made as part of the Fucked Up Date collab, so if you want to see it uncensored and on NG, then watch it there.
2014
As 2014 was the 10th anniversary of the origin of the FrogMan character and stuff, I had dubbed 2014 "the Year of FrogMan" and it shows, there was a good bit of FrogMan-related stuff released this year, starting with my favorite of the FMTS shorts, Easter's 4/20.
Now that title might be a bit confusing, most would think it means that Easter owns 4/20, but no, it's "Easter is 4/20" because in 2014, Easter was on 4/20 and I could not pass up an opportunity to make a cartoon about it, and what a cartoon it is. I think it's great, both writing and presentation. This is certainly the best animated and best looking of anything related to FrogMan the Series, and although it was really close to getting completely fucked over by asshats voting 2 while underjudgement, it managed to get 5th place and the score went up dramatically. GEE, I WONDER WHY.
So after finishing the first scene of FrogMan and Pico, I took a bit of a break from it since I had a year to finish it. I start working on it again in December, starting on the 2nd scene. Then after finishing the first shot, I decided to switch over to working on the 3rd scene, so from January to March I animated scene 3, and then Pico Day was coming up fast and I knew I wouldn't have the whole thing done in time again, so I had to rush through scene 2 and enlist the help of MistyEntertainment to get this scene done in time for Pico Day. It turned out pretty good for how quickly it was finished though.
And now the first 3 scenes were done, only one scene was left and it was the longest and most complicated, containing dialog, a montage, a musical number and more dialog. The deadline was now Pico Day 2015, would I make it in time finally? Spoiler Alert: Yes.
FMTS Ep 6 Abandoned 2nd Attempt
Finally, I can talk about the production of episode 6, not because it's finished, but because this version of it is out. So, this is actually the 2nd version of episode 6, and the one I'm workign on now is version 3. Where's the 1st version? It never saw the light of day and I kinda deleted the file 'cause it was shit and was only like one or two shots. It wasn't anything special, it looked like ep 5 from what I remember. I think I started working on episode 6 in September of 2012, and then scrapped what I had and started again way later. As you can see by this here, I finished the first scene, the opening credits and some of the 2nd scene, and the rest of the animatic for that scene is included as well because that was all I had of it visually. The audio for the rest of the episode was also recorded but yeah, didnt' get used 'cause this got scrapped.
So this version looked kinda promising, but why did it get scrapped? Well, a few reasons, but first I'll discuss exactly what I had to go through when workign on this. So I was working on this in December of 2012, and I had finished the first scene. I really wanted to get the episode done by the end of the year, and although it looked like I was making great progress, it definitely wasn't going to happen. Still though, if i had kept it up, it probably could've been out within a couple months. So during December of 2012, we were living in a shitty trailer park and my little sister was being a teenager and constantly had like 30 people over, eating all of our food and doing tons of other shit. There was never any quiet or peace so it was really hard to work on episode 6 when I could've been, not only that but I was also starting to get depressed for reasons I'm not gonna discuss, but I got over it after a while because I was gonna be singing at Disney on the 23rd, and I was reassured that things are fine, mostly. So after that point, we managed to get my sister to stop bringing all of her "friends" over, and I decided to use the rest of that Christmas break to relax and hang with Alex. For once I was having fun. After that point episode 6 got little to no attention though.
As I said during the discussion of FrogMan and Pico scene 1, the laptop I was using died, and I didn't get a new one until maybe May of 2013, and even then I couldn't work on episode 6 'cause I didn't have access to the file. I did eventually get access to the file but it just sat there as I pondered on what to do.
In this state, episode 6 was looking really outdated. Artistically I had gotten so much better, and the writing just wasn't up to par with my standards, so eventually I decided, after much hesitation, to scrap the nearly 3 minutes I had done of episode 6, in favor of a completely new version, re-written to be less explicit and funnier.
And now that is what I'm working on. There was some really gay shit in episode 6, but now it's all gone because it just wasn't funny. I don't know why I thought it was funny in the first place. So I rewrote eps 6 through 12 because every episode just wasn't up to my standards, and after that Alex and I got to record our lines for eps 6 and 7 together, and I think that has helped a lot of the line delivery in the episodes. Animation work on ep 6 officially started again during June or so of 2014, and went on to maybe September, with a brief break inbetween. Then, I took a longer-than-anticipated break to work on other things, mainly FrogMan and Pico. Now though, after again, over another year since restarting, I have began to continue work on episode 6, and I wanted to have it out today, but that didn't happen, but it'll definitely be out by the end of the year™. I've just been really bad at planning and keep losing motivation, but it's all I"m working on now, and goddammit, I'm gonna finish it.
And here's a preview of episode 6, looking good right? Even in the time since making this, I have improved a lot, but thankfully it won't be too jarring of a difference being next to the rest of episode 6. I think the text bit goes on for a bit too long, but other than that this is a nice scene and I think works well as a teaser. Looking back now, I feel bad having a 50 second teaser because the episode probably isn't going to be as long as I had originally thought. Oh well, hopefully it will be worth the wait.
So, this isn't technically FMTS-related, but FrogMan has a cameo in it and it's an important short so I'm gonna talk about it anyways, and who knows, maybe it should be an FMTS short.
Anyways, so this took way longer than it was supposed to to make, 'cause it was supposed to have more limited animation so I could get multiple things out that month, but I went a bit overboard and yeah. I guess it paid off though, because FUCK ORIGINALITY was a surprsie hit. Either it's because of the title and its point and humor, or the fact that the thumbnail has a bunch of video game charactesr in it, this short got 4th place and amassed over 3k views in a short amount of time and was unexpectedly one of my most successful cartoons of the year. And I like it too, a lot of the aniamtion still holds up and it has a good point and it's executed well.
FMTS Short 6 "The Fight Before Christmas"
All right, so it's been a while since an FMTS short came out, and this one was even meant to come out for Christmas of 2013, I just kinda stopped working on it for a year. The end result is great though, some nice fighting animation, and some of my best drawings are in it. It might be a little offensive for the ending though, but come on, it's just a silly little thing.
This is the most recent FMTS short, and boy is it short. It's only 10 seconds long and was made for the Sketch Collab 2014, and again, I'm linking to the youtube version for the same reasons as for "Date", but if you'd rather watch it here, and don't mind watching the whole collab, then check it out there.
This collab was being worked on for a while. I made my part in one day in June, and the collab didn't come out until the 30th of December!
2015
And finally we come to the most recent thing related to FMTS, my current magnum opus "FrogMan and Pico". Started in 2013, this short film is about Pico thinking that Newgrounds is in bad shape but FrogMan showing Pico that Newgrounds is probably doing better than ever, or at least it would be if the new generation of artists would be more widely embraced.
I've talked a lot about FrogMan and Pico already, and you can read all of that in some of my news posts and the decription of FrogMan and Pico itsel. I've called this film my "love letter to Newgrounds" multiple times, and the fact that I managed to release it for Pico Day 2015, Newgrounds' 20th year, was an accomplishment. For the longest time I was afraid that the film wouldn't do well and I had wasted 2 years making it for nothing, but once I finally released it, it was met with nothin but praise and I couldn't be happier. It won 3rd place movie in the Pico Day contest and was on the front page for a week. I just wish more people had seen it because it has a valuable message that everyone needs to see, Tom Fulp said it himself.
Well, this post has been pretty long winded and stuff, so I think it's about time to close it up. I'm currently working on episode 6 again and I intend to have it out by the end of the year. I'll have a better estimate of when it'll be done once I finish the animatic and have an idea of the runtime. I am determined this time to finish it thoguh and nothing's gonna stop me.
Well, happy 5 years FMTS. Sorry I was kinda neglectful to you for a bit there, but I'm working on it. Hopefully it isn't too much longer before your first season is done.
And hey, thanks to anyone who read this entire thing, I'm guessing it's a lot 'cause it took nearly 4 hours to write. Extra thanks if you actually decided to click any of my links and check out what I'm talking about!
I guess now I'll leave you with my current plans for FMTS:
- Release ep 6 by the end of 2015
- Release ep 7 and 8 during 2016
- Release ep 9 through 12 during 2017
- Release FrogMan origin film for Summer 2019
Yes, after season 1 of FMTS is done, I will be working on a feature-lengthed FrogMan origin film, based on the original "Adventure of FrogMan" comics. I've been wanting to do this for a while, and since 2019 is the 15th anniversary of FrogMan, it seems fitting.
Here's a teaser poster I did a while ago, it will be redone later when I'm settled on final designs and stuff.