Today, December 13, 2013, marks five years since I signed up to this site, of course I've been coming here for almost a decade but I didn't sign up until a few years later when I was thirteen (BECAUSE I ACTUALLY LISTENED TO THE RULES) and apparently that's when my interests in animation were their strongest, so good timing I suppose, heh.
My reasons for coming to the site were probably like anyone else's, video game parodies, playing the flash games, porn, and trying to get a fanbase off of my shitty content. Came for the porn and parodies, and stayed for the original content and getting my name out there. I don't remember the first thing I saw on newgrounds, but I remember my friend showing me this in the front of our tiny public library, and I remember it being the most funny thing in the world, so that must've been one of the first things I saw.
The next several things were pretty much all video game parodies, or parodies in general, 'cause you know, de kiddehs like that. I remember watching mostly action and comedy things, and I can remember watching The Real Mortal Kombat, The Decline of Video Gaming series, and all of the Ultimate Naruto Fanflashes. Looking back, the Decline series still holds up, but the others... eh, not so much. My first pornographic experience was on this site as well! (who's wasn't? heh) My friends and I were having a manly sleep over and they decided to visit newgrounds... late at night... and well, long story short we ended up watching this. Of course I didn't know what to think of it, I was only 9 or something. Still though, if it weren't for these experiences, I probably would have never found out that these things were actually made by regular people, and that I could make something like them too. And now we transition into right before I actually joined the site.
For as long as I can remember, I have been creative. I would always make comics and unwritten stories with my own characters, and around 2007 I decided I wanted to try animation. Later that year and throughout 2008 I experimented and researched, almost fairly positive I could do the flashes I saw on newgrounds in microsoft paint (yeah, I was kinda retarded, though I did eventually get to that quality until abandoning it altogether). By this time I was already signed up to the site, and I was leaving shitty reviews on things like "DID YOU MAKE THIS IN PAINT?" and other stupid things. I had heard some things about some program called "flash" and how some older versions of it came installed on older versions of windows, and since my computer was pretty old I was hoping it was on there, and no, it wasn't. My computer didn't have internet either, so it's not like I could go find a download for it anyways, heh. So at that point I decided to try to replicate these flash animations in paint, and holy fuck am I glad I didn't have internet to upload them anywhere. They were that bad, and were basically slideshows. Out of the five or so original "animations" I had made back then, none of them exist anymore, I quickly deleted them after seeing how shitty they were. I didn't give up though, and eventually I managed to get my shitty ms paint drawings to move. So throughout 2009 I worked on my first "animated feature" entitled "The Epic-ist Movie Evur" and it was basically the shitty slideshow animations but with some movement, but fuck was I impressed with it. So impressed in fact, that it's actually online :O. RIGHT HERE FOLKS, GET YOUR VOMIT BAGS READY. There was even going to be a sequel, but LOL, FUK DAT.
So as you can imagine, I hadn't uploaded anything on newgrounds yet, and for good reason. I didn't have flash. BUT, I did download a free trial of flash cs3 really late in 2009 and I finally started working on stuff. I made my first flash animation and submitted it! I was so excited! You can view this AMAZING flash right HERE. BET YA DIDN'T FUCKING SEE THAT COMING. So after that travesty, I held off on submitting things for a bit until I could actually make stuff worth a damn. I submitted a couple things in 2009 and early 2010 that got blammed as well, and my trial of flash ran out eventually, so I couldn't submit any more anyways. So it was back to paint for me, but this time with some knowledge of how flash animation works and I actually managed to produce frame by frame animated... uh... animations. I can remember making 3, with ms paint and movie maker. 1 was some short I made to show my talent to get into a talent show, 1 was the original pilot for FrogMan the Series, which was my entry for the talent show (yeah, guess who didn't win), and the last one was this thing. It's not that bad actually. The art is pretty meh but the animation is kinda fluid, especially for ms paint and movie maker.
So now it's like mid-2010, summer time, and once again I have the urge to stop using ms paint and an actual animation program (insert joke about flash not being an animation program here). So my sister (who was also interested in animation at this point) bought some cheap program called anime studio for $50 and my god did I hate that piece of shit. Maybe I was just being retarded, but my god, I don't understand how people can even call that an animation program or why it's called anime studio. You could only draw on the first frame, you could only have 2 audio files per project, you couldn't export HD, and it couldn't even do real animation, only tweeny cheap bullshit. This was a "debut" version of anime studio though, so I'm not sure if the pro version actually had the features that an animator needs, but for fuck's sake, if you're going to charge money for a program, why limit it that fucking much? Anyways, with that putrid program, I made the first 2 and a half episodes of FrogMan the Series, 2 and a half because I got fed up with that shit and "acquired" flash and started using it half way through episode 3. The series actually premiered on youtube, and I was going to upload them on newgrounds as well, but for whatever fucking reason, anime studio couldn't export to .swf so I had no hopes of uploading to newgrounds. Over the months I tried to get them on newgrounds, experimenting with several video to .swf (what kind of backward conversion is that?) methods and finally, with some program I can't remember, episode 1 was made into an .swf with a fancy player gui and everything, so that was submitted a couple months after it was uploaded to youtube. I tried uploading the other episodes on newgrounds, but apparently the ones I uploaded didn't work and they got blammed. I eventually fixed the problem I was having, I actually had flash at this time and I took the videos and converted them to .flv files and then embedded them into .swf files from within flash. A very fucking convoluted process, and in the end the filesize was too big for newgrounds size limit so i couldn't upload them anyways. I did continue making all of my stuff in flash though, so I didn't have that problem afterwards. AND NOW COMES 2011, OH WHAT A BAD YEAR THAT WAS.
So having to be forced to use nothing but anime studio, I basically forgot all the fundamentals of animation that I apparently learned and my flash animations I was making around this time were all with layered characters and bad animation, plus I had no clue there was line smoothing in flash. ANYWAYS, first thing I submitted that didn't get blammed and was actually made in flash, was porn! HELL YEAH. Not the good kind of porn though, it was a music video for the song "When You Fucked Grandpa" by Blink-182, and I used FrogMan characters in it because it was just so appropriate. I'm not even going to link to it, just so I don't scar anyone. But if anyone is curious, then by all means go to my userpage and find it. I don't remember why, but I did go back to my animating fundamentals and stopped using shitty layered characters, momentarily anyways.
I started working on episode 4 of FrogMan the Series, using shitty layered characters, but quickly I switched to characters on one layer, and having a bit more "animation" and I discovered brush smoothing. I also made this around that time I guess. I eventually did finish episode 4 in 2011, but I couldn't upload it to newgrounds, because going on my crappy habits from anime studio, I would split each scene into its own movie file and I had no easy way of combining the files into one .swf file. The rest of the year was pretty inactive on my part, for both youtube and newgrounds, though I did work on episode 5 of FrogMan the Series like a month or so after finishing episode 4, and I worked until around July when my computer decided to die on me, AND OH BOY, THAT'S WHY THAT YEAR WAS SO BAD. I didn't have a computer again until around late october, and only because of the kindness of my friend's mother, letting me use her old craptop. I mainly used it for internet stuff, 'cause I couldn't access the hard drive from my desktop to get the files for my animations. So I took a very long hiatus, unwillingly.
Then came 2012, when I started expanding my creative horizons into the world of machinima. I had written a machinima series and we were ready to spend the year filming it and releasing it regularly, but fuck was I ambitious. We got most of the first episode done, except for 2 really big scenes. Eventually all hope was lost and the footage was deleted, so that never happened. There have been some attempts to work on it again, but yeah, it will probably never happen. Besides, something better happened instead, I was finally able to access my old hard drive and got the flash file for episode 5! And you bet your ass I worked hard on it. I worked for a couple months, on and off, losing motivation and hope, thinking that it would never get finished. But finally, during the summer, I worked non-stop and it was finally finished in June, where it was uploaded to both youtube and newgrounds (by this time the upload size limit was increased, so I actually managed to upload the other 3 episodes and some of my other old stuff to newgrounds beforehand). Episode 5 was received very well, it even got a score of above a 3 (a first for me) and daily 7th place, garnering over 2,000 views. I couldn't believe it, and still to this day I can't believe it but I'm happy with the reception it got. Episode 5 really shows the evolution of an artist. It started out using characters on one layer, with limited animation, then going back to using layered characters with limited animation, and then finally utilizing frame by frame animation, and the character and background art was a huge improvement overall as well. It was definitely the best thing I had made at the time.
Throughout the rest of 2012, I experimented with more frame by frame animation and eventually got pretty good. In October I submitted Frogs of the Round Table, which was based on an old comic of mine, and although it didn't get in the top 10 (even though it had a 3.5 at the time) it still managed to get a decent amount of views and got me a few fans. After working on some abandoned school stuff, the rest of 2012 I worked on and off on episode 6 of FrogMan the Series. I got really bummed during the holidays though, so production was really slow.
Eventually the new year came and I decided I was going to make this year different. I knew that Pico Day was a big holiday on newgrounds, so I wanted to do something special for Pico Day 2013 to show my love for this site, and in January I wrote FrogMan and Pico, a 12 minute animated short film. Throughout the rest of January, February, and some of March, I storyboarded the short film, and for the rest of March and April, I animated it non-stop. I did take a little break though to start on an entry for the open round of the Newgrounds Annual Tournament of Animation 2013 though. Unfortunately for me, the craptop that was so generously given to me finally bit the dust around this time, so I couldn't finish my NATA animation, episode 6, FrogMan and Pico, or any other project I had started. There wasn't anything I could do, so I submitted my NATA entry as is, obviously it didn't make it, but god damnit, at least i tried. I was almost done with the first scene of FrogMan and Pico, and I wasn't going to let this stop me, so I managed to get to my friend's house and use his computer to finish the first scene, like a day before it was due. And so, on Pico Day, I submitted the first scene of FrogMan and Pico. It was under judgement for quite some time, so I was getting worried, but finally it passed judgement (I don't remember with what score, but it was higher than anything else of mine) and throughout the day it was in third place for highest score, I couldn't believe it. Then it was almost time for the daily awards to be given out, I had a score of around a 3.52, and I was in third, but then, right before, my score dropped to a 3.39. But, I still managed to get an award, with daily 4th, and THIS got 3rd. Suffice to say, I was a bit pissed, but whatever, I still got my first award on newgrounds and I was happy. I even got on the front page, and to me, that's a higher honor than a digital trophy. So now that I was bestowed these honors, I finally felt accomplished, and then the horrible summer of 2013 came...
Since I didn't have to worry about a deadline on a 12 minute animation approaching, I could lay back a bit and do what I wanted. Instead, MistyEntertainment decided to make an animation about Cinco de Mayo for school, so I decided I wanted to make a Cinco de Mayo animatoin too, and thus, Cinco de Gayo came into existence. If you clicked that link and actually watched it, congratulations, you can now say you've seen a frog fucking a taco. I thought I could get away with what sexual content it had and still make some money off of ad revenue, but apparently not and after several months of the ads pending, they were finally denied, lol. No more porno for me... well, unless I REALLY want to. So not only did I not make any money off of it, but around this time the judgement system was pretty broken, so it was under judgement for 3 days, along with some amazing stuff that was submitted for NATA. This was a terrible time, high scoring things were coming out of judgement but because they were under for so long, they couldn't get awards, so really low scoring stuff was passing faster and getting awards, and 1 time there weren't even 10 things that had passed judement one day. This is probably the lowest scoring day I've seen.
I didn't really care too much, and I had made the commitment to submit one short a month at this point, so in June I made Pikmin Tree and submitted it, thinking that something video game related would pass in enough time, it was also my first non-dialog-driven animation, so it was a bit of an experiment. Again, it got a decently high score, but because of the broken judgement system, it was under for a long time, and got nothing. Apparently Pikmin animations weren't hugely watched at that time. I tried again with video game stuff, and this time submitted Zelda- Mole Mitts, being actually somewhat funny and Zelda is a more recognizable franchise, and surely enough, it passed in enough time and got me another daily 4th place. For August I was working on a summer related thing, but it was becoming a bit of a longer project so to holdover for the month I submitted a director's cut of a short I made for Flash Library. I don't remember how it did in the portal. Then in september I submitted End of Summer; End of All, and although I had taken some shortcuts with the animation to get it out faster, there was still some pretty ambitious stuff towards the end, and for whatever reason, despite my near month and a half of work, it wasn't very well received... I'd rather not talk about it ._.
But then came October. Not learning from my mistakes from last time, I decided to make a short called Hallo's Ween for Halloween. I tried to make a 7 minute cartoon in a month. I don't know how I would pull it off, but I actually was until I got lazy. I got about 3 minutes of it done with the help of Misty, but then I just got lazy and decided to make The Pumpkin Patch instead, but it still got finished AFTER Halloween. I did post a teaser for Hallo's Ween in October though, so yeah...
So the last thing I've done this year (there will be more on the way) is a short for the Fucked Up Date Collab, which I actually animated a while ago but the collab was finally finished recently. And although the reception to the collab hasn't been the best (and understandably so) it seems to be getting a bit of views... yeah, quite a bit...
I'm not sure what I'm doing now. I was going to make a Christmas short to end out the year, but who knows with my shitty scheduling. Also there's some other things I really need to take care of...
But yeah, that's pretty much a summary of my 5 years of being a member of Newgrounds. I'm sure I forgot something, but eh, it probably wasn't important :3.
It's been a great 5 years, and here's to another 5, and even more!