I'm not going to lie to you, my biography is kind of boring, so if you don't feel like reading this wall of text, you're not really missing much. You're still here, huh? Well, I guess if you're here to watch a bunch of cartoons on the internet you aren't exactly strapped for time. My name’s Seath and I'm an artist and amateur animator. Although, if you haven’t figured that out by now, we may have solved the mystery of WHY you’ve got nothing better to do than watch cartoons. You know, like get a job…or a life… I know, I’m one to talk, right?
To be honest, I was never really that interested in animation when I was studying art in college, but I started to get into it after coming up with an idea for an animated internet series. Not THIS series, a better one, about my experiences with my D&D group and the nights we spent having wacky adventures, disrupting any attempt our DM made to get us to pay attention and laughing our asses off as our insolence drove him to smack us upside the head with an oversized fly swatter.
In fact, the very room that I'll use for all of my rants (pictured below) is a set based on my own basement I was planning to use as the setting for all of our sessions, right down to the oddly colored cucumber walls and the Ghostbusters poster I’m quite certain will get me sued.
To be honest, I was never really that interested in animation when I was studying art in college, but I started to get into it after coming up with an idea for an animated internet series. Not THIS series, a better one, about my experiences with my D&D group and the nights we spent having wacky adventures, disrupting any attempt our DM made to get us to pay attention and laughing our asses off as our insolence drove him to smack us upside the head with an oversized fly swatter.
In fact, the very room that I'll use for all of my rants (pictured below) is a set based on my own basement I was planning to use as the setting for all of our sessions, right down to the oddly colored cucumber walls and the Ghostbusters poster I’m quite certain will get me sued.
Hey, if you want to spend days in court and pay all kinds of legal fees to get the fifty bucks I have to my name, go right ahead.
Alas, as you get older and the harsh realities of life beat you down a bit, you learn to dream a little smaller. Sometimes the workload just comes to be too much for one person to handle, or friends who were in line to help with voice acting fall out of favor and before you know it you have to rewrite the first episode for the tenth fucking time, not to mention changing the over-arching story to compensate for their absence and having to rethink how everything relates to each other all because everyone you know is a DRUNKEN ASSHOLE! Or something like that. No, I'm not bitter.
For now, I’ll have to put that idea on the backburner and settle for this admittedly less awesome show in an attempt to make a name for myself here on the internet and maybe develop a fan base so that if I ever manage to get my other show up and running I’ll already have a group of followers ready to watch it and tell all their friends about it. I figure this is easier than drawing big fight scenes and epic magic spells and shit. I mean it’s pretty much just me talking behind a table waving my arms a bit. But most importantly of all, I won't have to rely on my deadbeat friends to help me.
Well, I guess that’s pretty much – WAIT! I never talked about what this whole thing’s about! It’s a bit different than your typical internet series: Angry Video Game Nerd, The Spoony Experiment, Zero Punctuation which typically focus on bad movies and video games. Granted, I’ll undoubtedly discuss that kind of stuff along the way and may even dedicate a portion of the site to more conventional reviews at some point down the line, but for now I’m focusing more on critiquing the inadequacies and incoherence of mankind. Translation: people are stupid and I’m going to make fun of them.
What kinds of things will I talk about you ask? Anything that I have a strong enough opinion about to discuss in an intelligent and hopefully entertaining way for an extended period of time. That being said, I know people sometimes like to e-mail these types of shows with ideas for episodes and such, and while I would be open to requests, as I’ll inevitably run out of ideas at some point or another, it would be impractical for me to oblige everyone as I simply don’t have the time and, more importantly, I may not have a strong enough stance on your suggestions to develop a strong argument. I’m not saying you shouldn’t contribute, but I’ll probably only have time for the ideas that get an overwhelming number of requests, so don’t hold your breath.
As for this whole “cartoon” thing I got going on here, think of it as my “hook”. That little extra something that’ll make my crap stand out from all the other crap out there. I mean, it’s still crap but look at all the pretty colors! As far as I know there’s really no other show like this that’s completely animated. Well, Zero Punctuation, maybe, but that’s really just a bunch of still images in rapid succession giving the illusion of movement…yes I know that’s all animation is, but it’s different. If you’ve ever watched Zero Punctuation, and you should because Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw is one of the only people on Earth intelligent enough to recognize that Silent Hill 2 is one of the greatest games ever made, you’d know that his animation is more sudden and sporadic, while mine will be nice and fluid. It’s not bad, just different. By the way, I’ll probably go off on random tangents like that a lot, so you should probably get used to it.
In addition to looking pretty, using drawings rather than sitting in front of a camera allows me to do pretty much anything I want. I’ll never have to dress up in goofy, poorly-made costumes or use cheesy visual effects.
For now, I’ll have to put that idea on the backburner and settle for this admittedly less awesome show in an attempt to make a name for myself here on the internet and maybe develop a fan base so that if I ever manage to get my other show up and running I’ll already have a group of followers ready to watch it and tell all their friends about it. I figure this is easier than drawing big fight scenes and epic magic spells and shit. I mean it’s pretty much just me talking behind a table waving my arms a bit. But most importantly of all, I won't have to rely on my deadbeat friends to help me.
Well, I guess that’s pretty much – WAIT! I never talked about what this whole thing’s about! It’s a bit different than your typical internet series: Angry Video Game Nerd, The Spoony Experiment, Zero Punctuation which typically focus on bad movies and video games. Granted, I’ll undoubtedly discuss that kind of stuff along the way and may even dedicate a portion of the site to more conventional reviews at some point down the line, but for now I’m focusing more on critiquing the inadequacies and incoherence of mankind. Translation: people are stupid and I’m going to make fun of them.
What kinds of things will I talk about you ask? Anything that I have a strong enough opinion about to discuss in an intelligent and hopefully entertaining way for an extended period of time. That being said, I know people sometimes like to e-mail these types of shows with ideas for episodes and such, and while I would be open to requests, as I’ll inevitably run out of ideas at some point or another, it would be impractical for me to oblige everyone as I simply don’t have the time and, more importantly, I may not have a strong enough stance on your suggestions to develop a strong argument. I’m not saying you shouldn’t contribute, but I’ll probably only have time for the ideas that get an overwhelming number of requests, so don’t hold your breath.
As for this whole “cartoon” thing I got going on here, think of it as my “hook”. That little extra something that’ll make my crap stand out from all the other crap out there. I mean, it’s still crap but look at all the pretty colors! As far as I know there’s really no other show like this that’s completely animated. Well, Zero Punctuation, maybe, but that’s really just a bunch of still images in rapid succession giving the illusion of movement…yes I know that’s all animation is, but it’s different. If you’ve ever watched Zero Punctuation, and you should because Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw is one of the only people on Earth intelligent enough to recognize that Silent Hill 2 is one of the greatest games ever made, you’d know that his animation is more sudden and sporadic, while mine will be nice and fluid. It’s not bad, just different. By the way, I’ll probably go off on random tangents like that a lot, so you should probably get used to it.
In addition to looking pretty, using drawings rather than sitting in front of a camera allows me to do pretty much anything I want. I’ll never have to dress up in goofy, poorly-made costumes or use cheesy visual effects.
Case and point.
To be fair, this is a photoshopped image as opposed to a costume and in the proper context, this moment of The Spoony Experiement was pretty fucking hilarious, but the point stands. However, I encourage anyone who hasn't heard of Noah "Spoony" Antwiler to look him up. Hopefully this shameless endorsement will quell any urge Spoony might have to take action against me for using this image without permission. (I regret nothing!)
Anyway, animating this relatively simple project is also good practice for future, more complex projects and if I can make a little money along the way, that will go a long way as well. Now, I’m not going to start begging for money or anything, but if you DO want to donate to my cause, it’s always appreciated. I'll get one of those handy donate buttons imbedded into the website at some point or another.
If you’re wondering what I plan to do with donations so you know in what ways your contributions are helping, I’ll tell you: booze. I’m just kidding, well a little bit anyway. Seriously, though, I’ll use donations to pay website fees, to buy upgrades for my computer which will allow faster and easier animation thus enabling me to pump out videos more frequently; I can use them add new features to the site. For example, I’ve toyed with the idea having a “Let’s Play” video section for which I would need to buy a few gadgets (like a Dazzle) so that I can record game footage with better quality and without using emulators. I can also use donations to produce merchandise if there’s any interest in that kind of thing down the line, but most importantly they’ll help me to support myself for the time being until I can acquire enough fans to start selling advertisement space. That’s where the REAL money is, which brings me to my next point.
I’m sure there are plenty of you out there that don’t like to donate to these kinds of things, which is perfectly understandable as I probably wouldn’t want to either. So, if you want to help out but don’t want to spend money, there is one other thing you can do for me that’s nice and free, and in some ways is preferable to a monetary donation. TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW! Even if you don’t think your friends and family will like it, tell them about it anyway, and tell them to tell everyone they know and so on and so forth. The faster I get a significant amount of traffic on the site each day, the faster I can start selling ad space and maybe even start doing this shit full time. So get the word out! As long as I continue to receive donations or ad revenue, I WILL continue to update the site with something, whether it’s this particular show or my D&D thing or whatever. Again, I never donate to these kind of things, so I wouldn’t expect you to, but then again, I’m an artist, I don’t have any money.
I think that’s everything now. I wanted to keep this short and I’ve already been going on for what feels like an eternity. Whatever, I guess I ramble a lot, you should probably get used to that too.
Anyway, animating this relatively simple project is also good practice for future, more complex projects and if I can make a little money along the way, that will go a long way as well. Now, I’m not going to start begging for money or anything, but if you DO want to donate to my cause, it’s always appreciated. I'll get one of those handy donate buttons imbedded into the website at some point or another.
If you’re wondering what I plan to do with donations so you know in what ways your contributions are helping, I’ll tell you: booze. I’m just kidding, well a little bit anyway. Seriously, though, I’ll use donations to pay website fees, to buy upgrades for my computer which will allow faster and easier animation thus enabling me to pump out videos more frequently; I can use them add new features to the site. For example, I’ve toyed with the idea having a “Let’s Play” video section for which I would need to buy a few gadgets (like a Dazzle) so that I can record game footage with better quality and without using emulators. I can also use donations to produce merchandise if there’s any interest in that kind of thing down the line, but most importantly they’ll help me to support myself for the time being until I can acquire enough fans to start selling advertisement space. That’s where the REAL money is, which brings me to my next point.
I’m sure there are plenty of you out there that don’t like to donate to these kinds of things, which is perfectly understandable as I probably wouldn’t want to either. So, if you want to help out but don’t want to spend money, there is one other thing you can do for me that’s nice and free, and in some ways is preferable to a monetary donation. TELL EVERYONE YOU KNOW! Even if you don’t think your friends and family will like it, tell them about it anyway, and tell them to tell everyone they know and so on and so forth. The faster I get a significant amount of traffic on the site each day, the faster I can start selling ad space and maybe even start doing this shit full time. So get the word out! As long as I continue to receive donations or ad revenue, I WILL continue to update the site with something, whether it’s this particular show or my D&D thing or whatever. Again, I never donate to these kind of things, so I wouldn’t expect you to, but then again, I’m an artist, I don’t have any money.
I think that’s everything now. I wanted to keep this short and I’ve already been going on for what feels like an eternity. Whatever, I guess I ramble a lot, you should probably get used to that too.