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TheInterviewer's News

Posted by TheInterviewer - October 7th, 2020


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Interview No. 169

Interview By: @The-Great-One


PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 ]




Q: Closing Scene and See Ya Later are two similar songs that have some inspirations from Hayao Miyazaki. You joined the Anime Society around your college years. Which anime would you say have given the most inspiration to your music?


A: With regards Closing Scene and See Ya Later, they were also inspired by Joe Hisaishi’s musical scores. Incredible composer! Indeed I was a member of the Durham Manga and Anime Society throughout my 4 years at university. In terms of the anime which have been the most inspirational to me... that’s a really tough question. It’s different depending on which of my musical projects I’m thinking about, and of course there are a tonne of anime soundtracks which haven’t explicitly been much of an influence but I simply love too!


For Better Than The Book, The Pillows’ soundtrack to FLCL and the show itself were an incredible influence! If we’re talking about J-rock in general though, then there’s a fair few bands which have been featured in anime I’ve not seen which are probably an even bigger influence. Kishida Kyoudan & The Akeboshi Rockets are amazing, as are OreSkaBand. Actually one of the biggest expanders of my musical taste which introduced me to a tonne of great bands was the AMV HELL series. That showed me Ellegarden which was a huge influence on BTTB!


For Jabun, no doubt Yoko Kanno’s Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex soundtrack was a big inspiration to me, especially in terms of sound design. Some of the newer stuff I’m working on is heavily influenced by this, and Yoko Kanno’s a fantastic composer whatever she’s working on! Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell and Innocence soundtracks were fantastic too and Hiroyuki Sawano’s soundtrack to Attack on Titan and Kill La Kill have definitely influenced my soundtrack work as Jabun. There’s waaaay too much great anime related music I could talk about!




Q: The Legend of Zelda series is a favorite of yours. What is it about the games that you like? Does the music by Koji Kondo have any influence to your work? If so, then how?


A: Ah man, I do very much love these games! The name Jabun even comes from one of the characters in Wind Waker, that giant fish which you can’t understand unless you play through the game a 2nd time! One of my early experiences of the internet was joining a Legend of Zelda forum back in the day called “Great Deku Tree Forums” and Jabun was my chosen username. It kind of just stuck as an online persona after that, and later as my musical artist name.


I love the stories and characters in the LoZ series and the franchise has brought me to tears on many occasions. It's so heartfelt and moving. I love the gameplay; the puzzles and dungeons, the direct platformer type combat, rather than the turn based battle style of Final Fantasy. I love the worlds they’re set in and the cross-game tie -ins and references, the mini-games too. My first LoZ game of my own was Oracle of Ages for the Game Boy Colour and it blew me away! Although I didn’t have a GameCube at the time, I remember watching my friend sailing around the vast ocean in Wind Waker too during my early teen years. It was so peaceful and relaxing, and man oh man, Koji Kondo’s music was beautiful! I don’t think his compositions have directly influenced my own musical work but I certainly enjoy it. I’m sure if and when I get to doing more orchestral work at some point, the music of LoZ will definitely have some sort of influence!




Q: You entered the Avid and Talenthouse competition at one point. While following this story I did not see you post if you had won or lost. What can you tell us about this competition? What were the results?


A: Oh whoa, I don’t actually recall this competition at all (just looked it up on my news posts and apparently it was back in 2013?)! Since I don’t remember, there’s really not much I can tell you about it... apologies. I definitely didn’t win though that’s for sure! I’ve entered a fair few online contests in the past and the only one I recall placing in was 3rd place in the US judge selections for the Korg Monomania Monotron synth sound design contest back in 2011. That was fun! I made a helicopter sound which apparently went down very nicely!




Q: Besides your work with Cyberdevil, the first song I ever heard by you was entitled Better Than The Book - Artificial Ignorance. When would you say you were first introduced to Ska? Could you define it for our readers? What was your take on it when making this song?


A: Oh! Going back a couple of questions, actually I’ve got to give my most influential anime for Better Than The Book without a doubt to Digimon: The Movie for introducing me to ska punk when I was a child! The soundtrack to that movie (the English dub) was incredible: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Less Than Jake, Smash Mouth, as well as a tonne of kid friendly but incredible pop punk courtesy of Jasan Radford, Jason Gochin, and Paul Gordon! I didn’t even know what ska was back then, but loud guitars, walking basslines, off beat skankin’, and blaring horns blew my tiny mind and would stick in my head for the rest of my life! The Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack was similarly an inspiration and introduction to ska punk. Zebrahead even worked on some of the Sonic games!


So I guess I was first introduced to ska when I was 12 or so, but back then I didn’t really know anything about it. I’d also heard bands like Madness and that was pretty catchy though I didn’t know much of that either. It was only later that I’d learn more about Ska’s history and it’s certainly an interesting one!


First of all (to the best of my knowledge), Ska is a genre of music which started in Jamaica in the 1960s. At its core, it’s generally characterised by a traditional rock band arrangement with an added brass section. A typical ska band could be 1 or 2 lead vocalists, a guitar (or 2) and bass, drums, and a 2-5 part horn section (for a 3 piece, maybe a trumpet, tenor sax and trombone for example), maybe organ too. You’d often have the instrumental players doubling as backing vocalists too. There’s definitely a crowd vibe about it in my experience. Sound wise, off-beat “skankin’” guitars, walking basslines, and “bubble” organ were signature sounds of the genre which resembles fast upbeat reggae. Ska in Jamaica would later evolve into the slower more well known reggae. 1960s ska is referred to as the 1st wave of ska, or Traditional Ska.


In the ‘70s and ‘80s, immigration would bring Jamaican culture and ska music to the UK, where it would merge with the current UK punk scene to become what was known as 2-Tone, or 2nd Wave Ska. This is where bands like The Specials and Madness come into the picture.


Fast forward a little more to the late ‘80s and the popularity of 2-Tone would cross back over the Atlantic to the USA to influence American pop punk and bring about the rise of ska punk bands. More upbeat and hyperactive than ever, with groups like The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, Less Than Jake, and Reel Big Fish, Ska Punk would come back into popularity throughout the ‘90s as the 3rd wave of ska. This and beyond is where most of my ska influences come from.


Ska’s popularity peaked around the turn of the millennium before falling back into obscurity as a “dead to the worldwide mainsteam” genre in the ‘00s, though the underground scene is very much alive and there is still a big ska punk community in Japan and other places too. With things rising under the surface and sub genres such as Ska-core gaining momentum there’s been talks in recent years of a 4th wave coming, but we’ll have to wait and see! Ska is certainly gaining popularity as the butt of jokes recently (Brooklyn 99 anyone?), but it’s all in good fun!


In terms of my take on ska, especially in Better Than The Book’s Artificial Ignorance, it’s all about having fun, telling stories of life, and often putting a smile on bad situations (within reason). If you watch almost any slice of life anime, you’ll no doubt hear those off-beat skankin’ guitar chords and cheerful melodies in the background music at some point! It’s a form of catharsis for me, a letting go of negative feelings (in Artificial Ignorance’s case, about having your trust broken) and just having fun while venting those emotions. That philosophy goes for a lot of my tracks as Better Than The Book. Ska is the music of life, at least that’s the impression that I get!




Q: sorohanro is not an unknown name here on the site. He is the creator of the theme song for The Interviewer. You have had the chance to work with him on two songs, Forward and Two. What can you tell us about working with Mihai?


A: As one of my first clients as a mastering engineer Mihai taught me a lot about working with people in a professional way. Forward and Two were tracks I mastered for him, but jazz was not a genre I had much experience working with at the time, and it was a difficult dive in for me. While I ended up making some fairly decent masters which fulfilled the requirements he’d asked for, I was unsure of myself and it wasn’t my best work, and although fairly happy with the results he called me out on it honestly. It turned out that rather than focussing on my lack of jazz knowledge and trying to compensate, I should have been following my gut of what I thought sounded good, rather than trying to match reference tracks I had no experience with. That was a hard to hear but very valuable lesson that improved my mastering technique greatly and one I cherish from Mihai. He was very nice about the whole thing too, and although it’s not on Newgrounds, he ended up getting me a fair amount of work mastering some other projects he was close to after that. Working with Mihai was a great learning experience and I’m really happy to see he’s still making music and doing well. He’s an honest and encouraging guy with a big heart. Very easy to work with too!




Q: A favorite of mine by you is entitled Mr. Knife. It was made for a Tiny Tim style animation. Who approached you for this song? How much did you know about Tiny Tim before making it? What was the process in making it?


A: Haha, seems like a lot of people like this one! So Mr. Knife was originally supposed to be used in the animation “The Best Pokemon” (https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/650456) by Dieseling but because of timing and changes to the production it didn’t end up making it into the final animation. I knew a little about Tiny Tim before writing this, mainly from horror movies, such as Insidious. “Tiptoe Through The Tulips” and “Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight” were the only tracks I really knew, and I still don’t know much about him apart from that.


The process for making Mr. Knife was a fun and experimental one! Tiny Tim was very much known for his ukulele, but I didn’t have one, so to try and emulate that sound, I put a capo high up on my acoustic guitar and shoved a sock underneath the strings by the bridge to get that classic muted tone. Laying down the bass, drums, percussion, and additional strings was quite normal, and writing the lyrics was good fun. For once, I think they came quite naturally! Singing was just a case of singing very high to try and impersonate Tiny Tim’s falsetto style and that was ok too, although not something I do often. The real magic of the production though came in the mastering. I wanted to have it sounding more era specific so I added effects to degrade the audio like an old worn record. Without changing the pitch too, I sped the track up juuuuuust a tiny bit, enough that it wasn’t super noticeable but so that the vibratos of my voice seemed just a bit more quivery than natural, raising the hairs on the back of my neck in uncomfortableness. It’s almost like a vocal uncanny valley. I was super pleased with the way this one turned out!




Q: What was the evolution behind the song GG [Good Game]? What was the Guitar Guitar Remix Contest?


A: So GG started as simply the entry to the Guitar Guitar Remix contest but later evolved into what would become track 08 on my 2nd full-length album as Better Than The Book, Hopes and Dreams. Guitar Guitar is a big music shop chain over here in the UK and they were running an online contest back in 2015, though I can’t remember what the prizes were. The challenge was to create a track which used the samples they gave you, which if I remember correctly were all from one of the Teenage Engineering Pocket Operators (the Sub I think), and a Korg Volca Bass synth. You could do anything you wanted with them, so I used them in the backing electronics and laid down some guitars, bass, and drums in a very Better Than The Book pop punk style. The whole thing was written, recorded, mixed, and mastered (and the artwork drawn) in less than 36 hours, so it was a pretty rough rush job and I didn’t have time to write any lyrics. Instead I played a synth lead to fill in the space of the vocal melody. No wins for me again this time but it was good fun!


Years later, I finally wrote some lyrics for it so the whole track got an overhaul with extra parts added and a new mix / master for 2019’s Hopes and Dreams album. I also did a silly MLG dank meme remix April Fool’s prank with it in 2018 “MLGG” when I was working on the album. That went down a treat!


For the Better Than The Book live band, which was formed at the end of last year (2019), I stripped down the arrangement to a traditional 2 guitars, bass, drums, and vocals set up. It was easier than having to rely on live synths or a backing track and I think it works really nicely, though with the whole COVID-19 situation, we’ve been unable to go out on the stage and play it yet... might be a while now...




Q: What can you tell us about working with Cyberdevil on Better Than The Book - Head Above Water? How did this project start and when did you both know it was done?


A: It was a blast! I approached Cyberdevil about the project while I was writing and working on the Two Years On album and asked him whether he’d like to lend his voice for a guest verse on a track with the working title “HipHopPunk”. It started out as just a simple groove on my MPC which I’d been sitting on for a while, and while I was working on the instrumental, we discussed it and drew up some contracts for royalty splits and all that jazz. I can’t remember whether I sent him just a work in progress instrumental to work with, or whether it already had my vocals on it (probably did have my vocals), but I’d set aside a verse for him and he came back with an outstanding and inspirational first draft rhyme for it. It was glorious! I think there may have been a couple of small edits, but CD had really nailed it! We made sure his lead part was sounding the best it could then I wrote out some suggestions for any adlibs and he adlibbed a couple of extra bits too I think. After he’d finished recording all his parts (this was all done over the net btw) and were both happy with the performance, I took all the material to get it mixed ready for the album. Unlike our previous work together where I was more writing for him, this time he was the guest on my track which was a slightly different dynamic. As soon as he was happy with his performance, it was really (bar a few checks that he was happy with things) up to me when to call the track done as it needed to be consistent with the rest of the album. I think Head Above Water was one of the final tracks to be finished on Two Years On, due to the collaborative nature of fine tuning things, but the time taken was well worth it! It was truly an honour to have Cyberdevil featured on one of my BTTB records!




Q: My absolute favorite song by you and what I believe to be your best work is entitled Better Than The Book - You've Got A Lot To Say. I especially love the lyrics here, they resonate with me on a different level. It is not necessarily a sad song, more bittersweet than anything. Where did the idea for this song come from? What was the process you took in writing and recording it?


A: I really appreciate those words man, it really means a lot. As a warning to those reading, the story behind this song isn’t a pleasant one and those of you who know me closely already know what it means to me. Sometimes writing a song isn’t particularly because I want to, but more that I have a compulsion to. There are times I can’t cope and need to be able to express myself in order to gain something positive from negative experiences and You’ve Got A Lot To Say comes from the absolute darkest moments of my life.


That said, you are correct, I think bittersweet might be the right term for the mood of this song and I wanted to keep the overall subject of the lyrics vague and relatable to as many people as possible. You’ve Got A Lot to Say is about being there for someone you care about and them in turn being there for you in the hardest of times. In this case the lyrics are me speaking to my girlfriend and trying to comfort her (and myself) after the sudden and tragic death of her mother. The song is dedicated to her mum in the album credits.


My girlfriend’s mum was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late summer 2017 and it was a long and heartbreaking journey until she passed that September. We were with her by her bedside when she passed and although I’m glad we were able to be there in those final moments, it was an experience I wouldn't wish on anyone. The whole family was devastated, and although You’ve Got A Lot To Say existed already as vague instrumental ideas before then, the track took on a whole new meaning to me after that. I wrote the lyrics while we mourned, and when it came to recording the song the following year it was painful, but something I needed to do to process all we’d been through. My voice is being pushed to its limit, and bending those 12-string notes in the solo until the guitar was screaming was tearing up my fingers, but it couldn’t be done any other way. I can’t really explain it. It was catharsis. It was processing something I’d seen that I couldn’t really understand and that had changed me drastically. It was trying to show I cared, to show tribute and respect, and also move on. It was putting a fragile piece of myself out into the world so that if anyone found it, they might find some comfort, and something good could come from something so terrible.




Q: You not only play and sing the music, but you write it as well. In a song, which would you say you tend to focus or prefer more when composing your song or listening to music, the melody or the lyrics?


A: I think it’s a delicate balance between the two. For me the instrumental parts come much easier to me than the vocals when I’m writing, and the lyrics are often the most difficult part. I feel like the melody usually comes naturally to the words though, it’s almost like the words are telling you how they want to be expressed once the lyrics have a tangible form and are set in stone.


When I’m listening and composing music though, I think the lyrics are less important than the overall melody and vibe of the track (but can still have a lot of importance). I want my lyrics to mean something so I tend to really focus in and work hard on that when writing and let the melody come naturally to them, but if the melody and track feel bland afterwards, then it’s just a poem with music, but not a great song. I think the key job of a good music producer is to let the lyrics and song tell you how they want the track’s arrangement and mix to express them in the best possible way. Great lyrics are always something to aim for, but if presented poorly they can’t make the impact they could have, so if I had to choose, I think less “good / deep” lyrics presented amazingly actually works better, certainly from a commercial point of view. I think there are plenty of examples in the modern chart music industry with questionable lyrics which take this idea to the extreme.


Of course ideally it’d be nice to have great everything, but sometimes “great” lyrics aren’t what’s needed or the most important part of the song. I think about how many songs I don’t even know what the lyrics mean because they’re in a foreign language, but they’re amazing pieces of music! Melody and music are universal; lyrics are usually language locked.


Long story short, I focus more on writing lyrics because I find them difficult, but overall I think melody and music and the appropriate presentation of a song is most important.




Q: What is in your opinion, the definition of music?


A: Music is the expression of melodic and/or rhythmic sound with a purpose. It could be almost anything from minimal ambient background soundscapes to pretty much ignore while you do something else, through to loud and heartfelt anthems that make you want to sing along and dance. Of course not all “music” is to my taste, but I think it’s important for people to be able to express themselves!




Q: When writing a song, where does the first words come from? When does the pen strike the paper and when do you know it is done?


A: I’ll assume we’re just talking about lyrics here. Often when I have song ideas, a line or 2 will just come to me, almost always at the most inconvenient time and I’ll have to jot it down before I forget. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve jumped out of the shower with a towel around my waist (if that) to grab my phone and quickly record a voice memo for a song idea. The process after those initial ideas is a long and difficult one though. I’ll usually grab a guitar and start demoing out a preliminary song structure and make a blank lyrics sheet to fill in with ideas. Once I have the song structure set in stone and a basic instrumental demo (at least rough guitar, but usually some bass and drums too and any other key instruments), I’ll gather ideas for lyrics and slowly fill in the lyric sheet. Sometimes it’ll be a verse which comes first, or a chorus, or something else, and often I’ll have multiple versions of the same section, sometimes completely different, other times maybe only subtly different. I’ll record ideas over my instrumental demo and work on the track exchanging lyrics until I’m happy with it all, then leave it for a while and come back to it and see if I’m still happy with it. If it’s a yes, then I know the song is done and it’s time to record it properly once all the song writing for the rest of the tracks on an album or EP project is complete!




Q: What advice do you have to give to aspiring musicians here on Newgrounds?


A: Practice and learn your craft and tools, and only focus on / put your energy into what you need to as to not overwhelm yourself. Collaboration / working with the right people is a good way to break habits and get you thinking differently and grow as a musician, though be selective about who you collaborate with, you need time to grow with independent study too. Try not to let criticism get you down, but don’t ignore it if it’s structured (of course you can ignore any non-constructive feedback). You’ll eventually get the hang of what things to take to heart and what things to ignore. I’m a firm believer that the apparentness of good music production and songwriting is a delicate balance of personal artistic taste and technical ability.


Doing cover songs is a great way to practice your recording, production and performance technique too without the added pressure of songwriting. It’s super useful for experimenting in new styles and genres you’re unfamiliar with too. Dissecting and recreating tracks from scratch is a very good way to learn how other people produce and structure their songs too from an arrangement and writing point of view and will no doubt improve your own songwriting / production vocabulary.


Another great thing to do is to use reference tracks when you’re mixing / mastering (or even writing). Take a track that you think sounds amazing in the genre you’re working in, and have it playing in your session so you can A / B how your production sounds compared to theirs. How is the vocal and drum level? Do I need more highs on the guitars? I notice a high synth pad adding excitement to this section; shall I try adding something similar to my track in this section which feels a little bland? etc... Remember to turn the reference track down to match the level of your own mixing session.


There’s also a big saying in music production “don’t mix with your eyes” meaning to use your ears to make decisions when producing and not relying on the numbers shown on your equipment. It’s a saying with good sentiment, but remember that meters and scopes are there to help you make decisions too, and as with all tools are incredibly valuable when used correctly. Make friends with your peak and RMS meters, your spectrum analysers, your gain reduction meters, and vectorscopes! They might not add anything to the sound, but when you’re having trouble hearing something, it’s these and your eyes which can help you see and hear things more clearly. They’re great for making objective comparisons to reference material too!


Take your time on projects, but make sure to finish and share them, and allow yourself to make mistakes. There may be times where you don’t know where to go from here so ask for advice from someone knowledgeable that you trust. You don’t have to do everything alone. Full disclaimer: I very rarely release a track (especially an album/EP) without sending it to a trusted source first for them to tear it to pieces so I can build it back up again even better (from a technical mixing/mastering point of view). It’s easy to get lost in your own projects after working on them for a while so a fresh set of trusted ears is always useful. Remember to take breaks too. Also remember things don’t have to be “perfect”, but of course strive for the best of your ability. You’ll know in the back of your mind if there’s something that doesn’t feel quite right in a song or a mix, so don’t be lazy, ignore it, and rush to release it; fix it and keep working until you’re happy with it. Try not to think of every new project as having to be your magnum opus that has to be the best thing ever. Each project is a stepping stone on your journey, and it’s ok to sidestep or even go a little backwards before going forwards again. Remember that when making music, unless you’re doing it for a client or collaboration where it’s someone else’s vision you’re having to interpret, do it for yourself and make it the best track YOU think it is. If other people enjoy it, then that’s a bonus! Remember to start small too. Don’t have your very first project be a 1+ hour album! Start with some singles or an EP and work your way towards bigger things. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose motivation otherwise.


Finally, you don’t need to be the best or have the best gear. You just need to do your best and make the best of the tools you have and have access to at the time. As you grow, you’ll realise when maybe it’s a good idea to save up for some clearer headphones or monitor speakers, but make sure your purchases are actually for a good reason, not just “because you think it’ll make you sound better”. Of course I believe it’s good to reward yourself for good work and new instruments / equipment can help inspire new routes of creativity, but make sure you make good use of what you have and invest in yourself wisely. A £1000 hardware compressor is going to be pretty useless if you’ve not learnt how to use the free compressor in your DAW (and there are some great free 3rd party VSTs)!


Of course it goes without saying too, but just be respectful, honest and open with people. It goes a long way and while people won’t usually thank you for it, it keeps doors and paths open.




Q: What can we expect from Jabun in the future?


A: Better Than The Book was supposed to be taking to the stage for live shows this year, but 2020 was a bit of a write-off with the whole lockdown situation and so I’m not quite sure when that’ll be on the cards again. On the bright side I’ve had plenty of time to write and compose more music so there’s a tonne of stuff to come in the pipeline!


In November I’ll be announcing my 2nd album as Jabun which will be released mid December, and another Jabun album will be released early next year as well, probably around March / April 2021 (that one’s still in the works). They’re both experimental explorations of sorts quite different from what you’ve heard from me so far so I hope people get a kick out of them!


I’m also sitting on another 70+ minutes of more traditional Jabun demos for another album (maybe split it into 2?), as well as 20+ minutes of rough demos for the next Better Than The Book project. I’ve been drowning in admin work for that December release lately though, so writing’s on pause until I’ve cleared all that away, but I imagine there’ll be either another Better Than The Book or Jabun album (or both) coming at some point in 2022 (maybe late 2021 for one of them if things go smoothly)! There’s lots of stuff going on with these upcoming releases (as well as recently released ones) over on my Patreon page (https://www.patreon.com/NickStanding) if anyone wants an early sneak peek! I’m sure there’ll be more collaborative projects to do at some point too!


It’s always a busy time over here! I honestly can’t see an end to it, nor do I want to!





Jabun is a rare talent that you don't see in too many musicians nowadays. He is a musician of many hats which is what a lot of musicians used to be like. His songs are not factory produced by writers who are looking for that zany lyric or melody that will stick in people's minds. He makes music that not only he likes, but he thinks people will like. He is truly one of the best here on the site. I know this interview was in three parts, it is the longest interview I have done to date, and I felt it needed to be. Jabun's story needed to be told and I wanted you to experience the journey in hopes that it would inspire you. If you're a musician just starting out, I hope you learned something today and will take it with you.




PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 ]




The Interviewer is a part of Dohn's Desk Productions

SUPPORT ON PATREON | SUPPORT NEWGROUNDS ]


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Posted by TheInterviewer - October 7th, 2020


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Interview No. 169

Interview By: @The-Great-One


PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 ]




Q: During your time at college you did open mic nights, studied music production and recording. What can you tell us about your experiences during open mic nights? Any songs from this time period become a part of Newgrounds and future albums?


A: To clarify for the overseas people, this was during university rather than Sixth Form College. The open mic nights were really good fun and a great way to get out in front of people and perform in a reasonably low stakes environment, especially as these would have been my first solo public performances. You’d get a free drink if you performed and the crowd were generally very friendly. It was this punk pub / bar in Durham called The Angel which was a 5 minute walk from where I lived at the time. One of my housemates organised a fair few of the nights so I tagged along and played. It was a pretty regular thing, maybe a few times a month!


During this time I wasn’t really writing any music of my own so I just performed cover songs: some blink-182 and other pop-punk and rock stuff, nothing which would later go onto Newgrounds or be in future albums unfortunately. It wouldn’t be until a year or so later that I’d start writing music again, though I was regularly studying recording and audio production at the time.




Q: What can you tell us about your work on Better Than The Book - One Small Step. What does Better Than The Book mean as a title for your projects? What were some of the difficulties you had to face when making this first album?


A: Hehe, this is a question I get a lot! The name Better Than The Book formed in defiance of the frequently used phrase, “the book is always better than the movie”. Blanket statements like that are a pet peeve of mine even if they’re often true, so I liked the sound of that against-the-grain title for a musical project, especially something with the rebellious associations that punk has. Better Than The Book was originally used in passing as the name of a fictional ska punk band in a story I was writing in my late teens before I started writing my own ska and pop punk music. One of my first songs as Better Than The Book “Watching Airships” which is on the One Small Step EP, makes use of imagery from that story, and when it came to releasing my first demos in summer 2012, I took the name from that made up band and made it into the one for the project! Funnily enough, Better Than The Book has done much better than that book!


One Small Step was my debut EP, and my first release as Better Than The Book. It was written and recorded in the summer of 2012 while I was still living with my parents after moving back from university. I used 1 mic, an sm58 which was the only mic I had at the time, one bass and one guitar, and it was all recorded in my parents’ living room. The drums were this ultra cheap set of samples that cost me less than £15 for the whole set if I recall, and I’ve been using them for Better Than The Book and much of my production work ever since. The whole EP was recorded in Ableton and I didn’t have an audio interface at the time, or even anything to control the level of the single going into the line input on the front of my laptop, so I had to turn the amps up to the right level to get a good signal to noise ratio, and be super careful with my mic technique to make sure I didn’t clip on the input. I think my only costs when making the album (apart from time and electricity) was to buy a pop shield for my microphone, maybe £20 or so? It was an absolute shoestring budget production!


I had help from my friends too. There were some gang vocals which I called my friends to come and help me record, and one of them, Andy (different Andy to the Crow’s Wing Andy) ended up playing guitar on “Woof Woof, Nag Nag” too. He was a closer friend to my brother at the time and apparently my bro had been playing WWNN on the piano to him while I was still at university. I told him “if you like it so much, you can play guitar for it” and the rest is history! I think he’s doing gang shouts of every track too and we had some great times jamming out those tunes! Funnily enough, his band at the time also placed in that top 3 for the battle of the bands when I was in Lupus Atrum! Neither of our bands were the winners, but it sure is a small world (or maybe just a small town)!


When it came to mixing, I just had my iPod ear-buds and a set of old Logitech computer speakers for listening. This was before I was making any money from my music and I hadn’t splashed out on a set of studio monitors or even headphones yet. I remember doing the final tweaks to the mixing and mastering in the living room sat on the floor in front of my dad’s hi-fi stereo speakers with my laptop (a 2008 Dell running Windows Vista, which I’m still making music on to this day) resting on one of those things you put your feet up on when you’re sitting in a chair. It was such a haphazard and cheap production, but what I didn’t have in tech I made up for by asking for advice when I needed it. One of my dad’s friends, Martin, was a music producer and had been subtly supporting and nurturing my recording side since I was a teen. He got wind of the project, so when I thought it was done, I sent him the preliminary final masters and he had a few pointers to get it sounding better with minimal effort. I followed his advice and called it done! It was an amazing first big project to undertake and I learnt a heck of a lot from it, especially from working with other people and listening to people’s comments. It’s also the only BTTB release that was cut to CD: a limited pressing of 50 copies. I’m sure I still have half a dozen somewhere I‘ve not yet managed to shift!




Q: Architecture of Modernity is a cover of the song Architecture of Modernity by the band Lights, Camera, Attraction!. What made you want to make this instrumental cover? How did you come to join this band? What was your experience with them?


A: I was really into chip-tune at the time and this would have been a little while after I joined LCA. It was really just a bit of fun, but also doing covers like this was a good way to really get to know and learn the songs (of which I had a fair few from their past discography to get through). Architecture of Modernity was the opening track of their debut EP “Everyone’s An Architect” and I thought it was great! It was also a nice bit of extra content to give to fans while we were preparing / working on the next EP!


I’d been a fan of LCA for quite some time before I joined. They were one of the big local pop punk bands, and my friend Sam (of Crow’s Wing and later Lupus Atrum) played bass for them. The Andy who played on Better Than The Book’s Woof Woof, Nag Nag, was their sole guitarist, and I knew the drummer, Lee, from secondary school. The vocalist, Ben, I only really knew as part of the band. Around the end of 2012 I think, Sam picked up a contract playing bass on a cruise ship tour’s functions band and asked me whether I’d want to fill his spot in LCA. I was delighted to take part and pretty soon after I was accepted as a full member of the new line-up! I played bass and sung backing vocals, as well as launched a few samples from my MPC during our gigs. We played a lot in Brighton and the Sussex area and it was a blast! We even played a couple of tracks from my One Small Step EP too, though slightly edited for LCA’s arrangement.


Once I was settled in a bit more we started writing together and made plans for a 2nd EP which would become “From The Ground Up”. I contributed to a fair few tracks and ended up producing that EP for them which was a brand new challenge. Working with live drums again, as well as lots of (bedroom) studio time, but it was good fun at the early stages. Midway through the production though, the practice studio we went to for rehearsals was shut down and we had to find a new place to jam. The new place we eventually settled on was at first a dream come true! Amazing acoustics, much closer to home, and cheaper, but I really didn’t get on with the guy who ran it. It’s not like we were at each other’s throats, but we were on very different pages. After a few practices he wanted to get a bit more involved with the band, acting as a producer and from there it was downhill for me. We did a few recording sessions with him while I was mixing our upcoming EP, and they were ok but we never got any finished products to show for it. To me it was all just a waste of time. LCA had a bit of a bad habit too when it came to unnecessary spending, and I on the other hand wasn’t doing so well financially at the time. Towards the end of the EP’s production it seemed like the rest of the band were getting pretty jaded, about the project in general as well as gigging. We’d be spending all this cash on practice studio time at a place run by someone who basically took the fun out of the project for me, then not really putting that time to good use.


It came to a point where I was in the position of either staying in this band which didn’t seem to care what it (or I) was doing, or be able to maintain a long distance relationship with my girlfriend, which I very much did care for. Pretty much a no-brainer... I committed to finishing the EP I’d started and still look back at it and much of our gigging and jamming with fond memories, but I’ve no regrets leaving LCA, and it seems like it was the best decision for all of us. They bounced back a while later with a new bassist and I got back to Better Than The Book with new vigour to pursue my debut full-length album Two Years On where I could express myself at my truest. It was a sad and uncomfortable time for a while, and it took a long time for Andy and I to really become good friends on the same terms again. I know this doesn’t apply for everyone, but leaving a band is like a break-up to me. It was years later when I finally called Andy again to go out to our old favourite coffee place to rekindle our friendship. He’s playing drums in the BTTB live band now so I’ve no doubt things are very good again!




Q: What can you tell us about Serenade #1: It's Much Too Late?


A: There’s not much to say about this track, just that it was an acoustic cover of “It’s Much Too Late” by Alice Cooper, one of the tracks from the Dragontown album. Alice Cooper was a huge influence of mine back in the Crow’s Wing days and this track is one which I’d taken to playing on the guitar for quite some time. I think it’s a great song.


Originally I’d planned on making more of these cover song videos, but I guess it kind of just fizzled out after the first one. At the time I would have been working on Better Than The Book’s One Small Step EP and things just kept getting busier after that! I also wouldn’t say I’m too confident speaking when it comes to video, even to this day still not so much. Apparently I’ve always been a good band front man but I really don’t know how I keep ending up in that position! I feel like I’m better suited to a support role!




Q: When you first hit the scene on Newgrounds you announced yourself as an Audio Mastering Engineer. What possessed you to want to offer your services to the Newgrounds community?


A: It was more like when I re-joined Newgrounds as a community after a period of absence, than when I first started. It was spring 2015 when I really started putting myself out there as a Mastering Engineer. At the time I had a few years of experience mastering singles and albums, a fair bit of it being freebie work or my own work, and a little bit of paid work. I was gaining confidence in my own ability though I still had much to learn, and the best way to learn was by doing it for other people. Having grown up as a music producer on Newgrounds, I thought it would be one of the best places to start offering my experience and services. It wasn’t just a case of improving my own abilities too. The thing I wanted most was to help people express themselves in the best possible way. When I mastered tracks, I wasn’t just giving them the finished product, I’d let them know my process, things to watch out for to help improve next time and get better at their own craft from what my past experience could pass on. Each client / job was a give and take relationship. I’d gain new experience and a bit more money to live off and they’d gain a polished project and the knowledge of how I’d gone about it so they could apply similar strategies themselves in the future if they felt comfortable to do so.


Over the past few years I noticed too that if you’re offering something of value, people only really take you seriously if they’re paying for it, and a suitable rate too. The amount of people who’ve wasted my time with projects or treated me like crap when offering a “favour” has taught me that the hard way. The exchange of a suitable amount of money for the time you put into something is as much a means of living as it is a symbol of respect and professionalism. I always write up invoices and contracts and again having learnt the hard way, while I can be flexible, I’m committed to charging what I feel I’m worth. If I’m spending 2 hours on something, I’m not going to charge a fiver for it. Also, you don’t need to be the best to be able to offer a service and charge for it, you only need to be able to offer a quality service. I think that’s something many people don’t realise. If your clients leave happy then you’ve succeeded and you should keep doing what you do. If not, then it’s a learning experience. Adjust how you do things and try again.


That’s not to say I haven’t worked on passion projects with people for free or low pay, but that comes with an already established level of mutual respect, it’s not something you’d often have with new clients. Pick your jobs wisely. If you’re doing something for low or no pay, make sure it’s something you actually want to do and are willing to put the time in for with potentially no end results. Otherwise you can find yourself becoming bitter.


At the same time as offering my services as a mastering engineer I also offered audio post-production services for animation. The story of how I got there was similar in terms of past experience, and for me this was another passion thing I felt someone needed to do to help improve the community.


When I first started on Newgrounds, independent animation felt like it had a long way to grow, but fast forward 10 years and you had amazing graphics animations and voice acting, some of which could have been at Disney level! For some reason though, there was a very apparent neglect in the evolution of the soundscape of animations, particularly the quality of the mixing and audio post-production. Graphics, voice acting, sound effects, were great but the quality of the audio very much separated these projects from their professional counterparts in the cinemas or on TV. For musicians, it seemed like the quality of music production had increased with the access to affordable technology, but in animations the audio seemed stuck a decade or so in the past. There were so many beautiful animations which were let down by bad sound mixing. I didn’t really know if it was that people didn’t care or that they didn’t have the means to make things better. With such big projects too, often people seemed so focussed on the visuals, the character acting, etc... that the actual mixing of the sound was merely an afterthought, if a thought at all. It very much saddened me, and I felt like I had to do something proactive to help. It was one of the only areas in independent animation which I didn’t feel was growing as fast as it should.




Q: When Hikarian was here we talked about Tales of Zale. How did you two come to meet and what can you tell us about working with Hikarian?


A: Ah Hikarian! Such an incredibly talented animator, director, writer, and more, and one of my favourite people to work with! I had been following her work for quite some time here on Newgrounds and was captivated by her amazing animations back before we worked on Tales of Zale together. Just watching I could see so much potential in her animation vision, and on a whim, I contacted her to ask whether she wanted any help with audio post-production. Sure enough she let me have a shot at mixing a short scene from the (at the time) upcoming Tales of Zale Episode 1, and she must’ve liked the results because I’ve been mixing Tales of Zale ever since!


Hikarian is not only an incredibly hard working and gifted animator and writer, but she has this amazing attention to detail and command as a director that I’ve not seen quite so much in anyone I’ve worked with before. She knows exactly what she wants, what bits to ask help for, how to organise a team and when to ask for a second opinion, how to keep everyone motivated and happy. Super easy to work with, really friendly and bursting with drive and passion but this balanced laidback aura which makes it such a pleasure to work on her projects.


I have 2 moments that really stand out to me when we were working together. The first was when I was doing the final audio post-production for ToZ Episode 1 and she called me out on something she didn’t like: “There’s something a bit off about the reverb in this scene; I feel it’s a bit too bright for the room”? We had a chat and she pointed out that I’d mistook the wooden floor for concrete and not taken account of the hole in the ceiling where the sunlight was pouring in! A quick adjustment and things were sounding much more appropriate. THAT kind of detail is why I love working with Hikarian! The other time that stands out was when the audio team got mixed around a bit and I was working with an unfamiliar foley artist / sound designer. We’d had a meeting together with Hikarian to discuss the direction of the sound in this particular scene and I thought we’d got everything sorted but when it came to putting things together though, it appeared there’d been a miscommunication and I was having trouble with the audio I was given. I asked the new sound designer about it and things got a little heated quicker than I expected. I wasn’t sure what to do, but before I’d even had a chance to think, I got a message from Hikarian asking what’s up. I explained the situation and she quickly solved the issue very nonchalantly in a way that made everyone happy. It’s great to have that kind of director who can resolve those problems so quickly and painlessly.


I’ve been working with Hikarian for a few years now on Tales of Zale and having seen her growth, I can say with certainty that the direction she’s heading is one destined for greatness! I feel privileged to be part of that journey and wish her all the best in what she’s doing. She deserves all the success animation can give to her!


I’m very much looking forward to working on ToZ Episode 3 too! It’s going to be a blast!




Q: Cyberdevil joined us not too long ago. When he was here we talked about the collaborations you did with him. One thing we weren't sure about though was who contacted who first, even I couldn't find that when researching him and I couldn't find it researching you. Who made first contact?


A: Hehe! I read that interview with great delight! Cyberdevil will have to clarify this, but I’m pretty sure I made first contact. I remember hearing him on a track and thinking, holy moly this guy’s voice and lyrics are incredible! He really reminded me of Del The Funky Homosapian who featured in the early Gorillaz records! I messaged him as soon as I could about working together. Definitely one of the best decisions I’ve made on Newgrounds!




Q: When I asked Cyberdevil what it was like working with you, he had this to say...


Jabun's a humble dude. Very positive, forthcoming and easy to work with, not to mention incredibly talented with all that involves music. Hopefully these almost-yearly collabs are still far from over!


What can you tell us about working with Cyberdevil?


A: Hehe, very kind words, CD and indeed I’m looking forward to the next collab too! Working with Cyberdevil’s been great! He’s an incredible guy both musically and socially. I’d say I come from a rock/punk background with an interest in hip hop and rap, but we both have a huge shared interest in nu-metal , and working on the more hip hop fusion side of things with him has been a super fun challenge. He’s really opened my eyes and expanded my horizons to the world of hip hop music too with some great recommendations which have become big parts of my musical taste. Lots of thanks and praise to Cyberdevil for everything he’s done to enrich my life both when we’ve been working together or just chatting casually. I’ve no idea how many emails it’s been throughout the years!


The guy is of course super talented too. I love the way he handles his lyrics and it’s always a pleasure to see what he comes up with next! He even has this amazing habit of suddenly writing in rap verses during emails which is an incredible treat! Very chill and positive guy, super fun to chat to, and great to make music with. He’s an exceeder of expectations and a great friend I cherish.


Also if you’re reading this Cyberdevil, thanks so much for introducing me to cloudberries and cloudberry jam! It’s been a game changer!




PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 ]


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3

Posted by TheInterviewer - October 7th, 2020


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Interview No. 169

Interview By: @The-Great-One


Today's guest is quite possibly one of if not the hardest working musician here on Newgrounds. With his project Better Than The Book being a success here on Newgrounds and acclaim for his assistance towards other musicians here on the site. His skills are incredible as a composer, lyricist, singer, and guitarist. His story is long, but an amazing one and I wish for you to read it all the way to the end. I am most pleased to welcome, @Jabun.


[ PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 ]




Q: How did you find Newgrounds and why did you join?



A: Man... It was so long ago... I can remember browsing in my teen years to watch all the cool flash animations back in the day: Egoraptor’s “Awesome” series, Legendary Frog’s stuff, “The Matrix Has You”, “The Decline of Video Gaming”, “There’s Something About Halo”, and their sequels, Adam Phillips' Brackenwood series, the list goes on! I’ve always loved animation and it was amazing to me as a teen that people were making these incredible projects independently!


I don’t remember quite how I stumbled upon Newgrounds itself, though I imagine it was through my friends who were pretty savvy when it came to “the places to be” on the internet, and NG was definitely one of them! I joined to upload my own creations: the music I recorded with my band(s) or solo at the time, though many of the earliest projects were actually uploaded on my brother’s account. A lot of this was before the days of YouTube and SoundCloud, when people still had MySpace pages for their bands, and Newgrounds was THE place to upload and share your music. I guess it was a familiar place I enjoyed, as well as a necessity at the time.




Q: You and I have something in common. We both began our craft at the age of 6. That's when I started writing. You started with the piano and the cello. How did you start playing these instruments though? Who introduced you to them?


A: When I was very young there was a piano at this children’s club my brother and I went to, and when I got to primary school and heard the piano being played properly for the children to sing along to, I guess it really resonated with me. I remember at age 6 my brother and I asking my mum if we could learn and she went above and beyond to support that. We looked for teachers but none of them would take “2 young boys who would be too hard to teach” on for lessons, so she talked to the pianist at our school, and after some convincing, though she’d never taught anyone before, we became her first students. My dad was working overseas at the time and unbeknownst to me we didn’t have a lot of money (not that at age 6 I really knew the value of such things). After being “tested” to make sure we could concentrate on learning and had a musical ear, my mum, with only £200 in the bank, contacted a piano tuner to help her look for a piano for us to start learning on. After finding one and organising for it to be moved into our house and tuned, she only had about £20 left. I only found this out about a year or so ago! I have so much to be thankful for to her and my dad for supporting my bro and I back then!


My interest in cello came shortly after that when the person who would become my first teacher came to visit our primary school to show us what the cello was all about. Much like the piano, I was instantly captivated! At the time he was building his own cello too, and bought quite literally a treasure chest full of parts for his unfinished instrument to show the school. Yet again, it was a case of trying to convince my parents to let me learn and sure enough they supported me with that too. Again, I have so much thanks to them for all the support when I was so young and didn’t realise how money worked!




Q: We have had the chance to talk with other singers here on the site. MistyEntertainmentHaniaCayler, and Jazza. At what age did you start singing? What choirs did you sing in?


A: Ah man, I used to sing Hania tracks back in the day with the piano! “Softly I Sing” is an oldschool favourite! I don’t really remember when I started singing generally (I’d definitely have been singing at school or along to CDs & tapes as a child), but I really started to focus on it when I joined my first band when I was 14. I feel like that’s when I actually started to think about how I sing and focus on improving my voice and technique.


With regards to choirs I’ve sung in, it was just the one when I was in Sixth Form College: the East Sussex Academy of Music (ESAM) Lewes Choir. It was compulsory for music students to join the choir there, but I had a lot of fun. I sang bass. On the topic of large ensembles though, I actually played a lot more in orchestras as a cellist. The Mid Sussex Strings and Youth Orchestra (and Junior Strings when I first started), the Downlands School Orchestra (at my secondary school), the ESAM Orchestra, and Hatfield College Orchestra at university.




Q: You received a guitar for your 14th birthday. Who gave it to you? Did you play guitar before receiving one for your birthday?


A: That would have been my parents again, and I’m sure my mum did most of the research to find it. The guitar was actually a joint present for me and my twin brother, but he’s since got his own acoustic and so our originally shared one has sort of become mine, following me to University and beyond. It now sits on a stand within arm’s reach of my studio chair!


I didn’t really play guitar before being given that one, no, though my dad had a left-handed acoustic in the house for a little while during my early teen years which he was planning to learn on. My bro and I fiddled on that occasionally and awkwardly before receiving our more appropriate right-handed one. Funnily enough, although my dad got rid of that left-handed guitar years ago, he still wanted to play and was planning to start after retiring, so my bro got him his first electric guitar for his birthday last year! He’s been learning slowly but surely since!




Q: You constructed your own double neck guitar at the age of 15. Why would you want to build a guitar from scratch? What was the process that came into making it? Have you made other guitars in your time? What songs have been made with this guitar?


A: At the time I started thinking about building one (2004/5), double neck guitars were very difficult to come by and even the cheapest ones would be £500+ but limiting in terms of features. The only ones I could think of were the Epiphone (£500+ at the time) and Gibson (£2000+) SG double necks, both of which only had 20 frets per neck (same as a standard acoustic) as opposed to the 21/22/24 fret standard of most electric guitars, and had “tune-o-matic” style bridges which I am not a fan of... I really wanted to be able to express myself musically and was very much into my progressive rock and metal at the time. There was no point in shelling out £500+ for a double neck I wouldn’t be happy with, so I didn’t really see much of an option. If I wanted one, I had no choice but to build it myself, and I relished the challenge!


Almost everything guitar-wise I had up until that point had been second hand because that’s all I could afford. In fact I only bought my first brand new electric guitar in 2017 (my first brand new bass would be in 2010/11). My dad was an aerospace engineer and having stopped working overseas when I started up at secondary school, our family garage was now filled with countless tools. My great uncle and a few family friends did some woodwork too, so any tools we didn’t have we were usually able to borrow. The idea of building my own guitar was something definitely inspired by Brian May of Queen, who similarly built his own “Red Special” guitar in his teen years, as well as of course my first cello teacher who was playing his own hand built instrument for much of our lessons together. I think there’s something really special about crafting your own instrument, like building your own voice from scratch. Much like vocal chords, no-one else’s will be quite the same as yours, and it becomes a unique part of your identity, both sonically and visually on stage.


I started mocking up guitar designs in MS paint of all things, splicing together pictures of various guitars and drawing in the bits that didn’t exist (like the headstock shapes), and even made a tiny 4” model out of wood. Having not been around for much of my childhood, it was an amazing bonding experience for my dad and I to build this thing together in my teen years and I think he appreciated it as much as I did. I remember getting a book on how to build an electric guitar and buying and taping together a whole load of graph paper, then sitting on the wooden dining room floor designing this thing from scratch, marking measurements, drawing circuit diagrams for the electronics to get all the tones I could possibly want, then when that was done, making thick cardboard templates as a proof of concept. Once I was 100% sure where I wanted to go with it, we started researching where to get the wood, electronic parts, etc... I remember us driving to collect what would become the body wood and it being so big and heavy I could barely lift it! The $ to £ rate was pretty good at the time so we ordered most of the electronics and hardware from the US. I dread to think how expensive it would be to build another one today!


The whole thing took about a year to build, and it was finished a little before my 16th birthday. Long summer days and weekends routing, sawing, sanding, soldering, and drilling (including accidentally into my dad’s hand...), but it was an incredible journey! The whole thing cost just over £1000 by the end of it, a bit more than expected, and I had to work at the local Tesco every Saturday until summer 2007 as soon as I could get a job to pay my dad back for it (I still have the IOU spreadsheets!), but it was totally worth it! That guitar has seen me through some great gigs and recordings, even after snapping the whammy bar and having to replace one of the bridges, replacing a set of tuning heads, and worst of all having to steam the glue of one of the necks apart to replace a broken truss rod! It’s still going strong (touch wood) and currently lives right next to me in the studio even closer than my first acoustic!  


Sadly, I’ve not made any other guitars in my time, though I’ve built a handful of effects pedals, and modded plenty of instruments for other people as a side job as well as a couple of my own. It’s always great fun! Lots of stuff I have has been customised like that, buying what I can afford and then improving it to the best of my ability for my own needs. Effects pedals, synths, guitars, it’s nice to be able to make things really your own if you feel they need improvement.


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In terms of songs with my double neck “Satin-X” on them, I’ve been using it on recordings since my first band Crow’s Wing’s stuff, all the way to my most recent album as Better Than The Book “Hopes and Dreams”. It’s one of my workhorse studio guitars since it’s so versatile, though it’s pretty heavy so there’s been many long recording sessions that have given me a dead leg! The Satin-X double neck was heavily featured on Better Than The Book’s “Two Years On” and “Hopes and Dreams” albums, almost on every track. You can hear the 12-string side especially for the solos on “The Bigger Picture”, “(The Travelling To See Eva Song)”, “You’ve Got A Lot To Say” and “Hopes and Dreams”. Most recently, the Satin-X was featured on my new side project Jabun [Alternate Reality]’s debut track, a metalcore cover of Kesha’s Warrior. I think it was the sole guitar on that song apart from for the guitar solo.




Q: When and how did the band Crow's Wing form? What were your rolls in it?


A: Crow’s Wing would have formed shortly after getting that acoustic on my 14th birthday (spring 2004). My friends were getting into music too and a few of them had started learning instruments so we’d commandeer music practice rooms after school and jam. Originally 6 of us, myself and my brother Eamon on guitar, Sam on Bass, Andy on Drums, James on guitar and Kevin on keyboards, a few weeks of jamming sorted who was really interested in playing and shortly afterward it was just the 4 of us: myself, Eamon, Sam and Andy.


Back then Eamon and I didn’t have electric guitars of our own, heck we had just one acoustic to share between us! There were these 2 beat-up electro-acoustic guitars with maybe 2 or 3 strings each at school and so Eamon and I would bring packets of strings with us and string these things up every week whenever we had a practice session for MONTHS, taking them off at the end of each rehearsal! We started by playing covers of rock songs we liked, the first being Paranoid by Black Sabbath, then Crazy Nights by KISS and Don’t Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult, before moving onto more challenging things like Iron Maiden when we could actually play well enough. I brought my first electric guitar from eBay in September that year, £112 for a beat-up Yamaha Pacifica 112, a little Marshall 15 watt combo amp and a guitar stand, cable and tuner, and my mum drove me an hour away to a McDonalds car park in Chichester to pick it up (thanks again Ma)! By this point the 4 of us in Crow’s Wing were practicing around each other’s houses over the weekends and after school regularly, but it was still just the acoustic guitar shared between my brother and I. Eamon was playing most of the lead parts and solos, and I was mainly focussing on chords and lead vocals. When we came to our first practice with my new electric, I was so excited, but then realised Eamon would need to be heard more than me... Disappointed as I was, I sucked in my pride, picked up the acoustic, and he played my new instrument instead. It was a strange moment, but we sounded a whole lot better for it. Eamon picked up his own electric guitar from eBay shortly afterwards, and the fully functioning formation of the band was complete! I’m sure we decided on the name by putting papers in a hat and drawing one out at random. I remember putting in the name “Tinned Piranha”, but I’m happy with the name which got picked!


Crow’s Wing would continue until 2008 when we headed our separate ways for university, with a slow fadeout during our Sixth Form years as we were in different colleges. At the start, I was lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist, but by the time we stopped regularly jamming, I was sharing some lead guitar roles with my brother, playing keyboards (organ, piano and some synths) occasionally, as well as playing (Sam’s) bass whenever we jammed “Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz! I’d also somehow become our main sound engineer and producer when it came to recording our music, though the song writing was an “each person writes their own song and presents it to the band” kind of situation. My recordings with Crow’s Wing would be my first, and we ended up with 4 tracks by the end of it. It was an amazing early learning experience and my gateway to music production and recording.




Q: When and how did you become a member of Lupus Atrum? What can you tell us about the song Face the Omega?


A: So this is a bit of a strange one. In my first year of Sixth Form (2006/7) I spent most of my time in the music department hanging out with the other musicians. I think it was Thursday lunchtimes where I’d have my guitar in, and a couple of my friends were free, so we’d jam in the drum room. Ali was on drums, Alice was on bass, and I was on guitar. We’d jam anything, but usually something simple we could pass a solo around on, a blues, occasionally some simple reggae or ska or something like that (some foreshadowing there). We’d even swap instruments occasionally for the heck of it.


Anyway, a few months into this, Ali finds out there’s a battle of the bands on and says he needs a lead vocalist / guitarist for it, so I said “sure thing”. He’d gathered a few people for it: a music tech student called Nathan who was amazing at guitar and could do super high vocal harmonies effortlessly, Jack from my friendship group who was a bassist, then there was me on lead vocals and guitar, and Ali on drums. Everyone did harmony vocals in that band, and the genre was: power metal! Strangely, I kind of didn’t feel like a proper member of the band despite being part of its founding. For me I was just doing Ali a solid so we could compete in the competition, and it was really more him and Nathan’s project at the core. They chose the songs to cover and did the bulk of the writing (Ali’s lyrics mostly I think), and Nathan acted as recording engineer and producer when we did any recording. They were phenomenal musicians and it was great fun playing with them though there was definitely a different power balance compared to my days in Crow’s Wing. My whole stint with them was probably less than 2 months and I was really just there to compete in the competition. Highest judge votes in the finals, though I can’t remember whether we placed 2nd or 3rd overall. Unfortunately, the BOTB finals were the same day as my younger friends’ secondary school prom, so we didn’t have much of our fan base there for the finals either. I left after that little mission was accomplished and we’d finished our recordings. Funnily enough I did actually see Lupus Atrum in concert the summer afterwards, with a different Nick on guitar, and Sam (the bassist of Crow’s Wing) on lead vocals! They were great too!


Face The Omega was the only song we wrote and recorded while I was there which had lyrics. We had another called Point of Impact, but that was an instrumental. I’m sure Ali wrote the lyrics to this one, and apart from performance, I wasn’t involved with the technical aspects of the music production or the writing (unlike in Crow’s Wing). Nathan handled the engineering and production. We actually had 2 versions of this song and the vocal melody was slightly different when I performed the song live. There wasn’t much time between being given the words and learning the song and going on stage so it was very much performed as best I could at the time. Usually when I would record, I’d also take the time to properly write guitar solos, but for this track, it was a bit of a rush, and so they were all improvised. I think we recorded all my parts in an afternoon at Nathan’s parents’ house, and as such I’m not quite happy with my solos on this recording. I’m sure the ones I did live were better, but it’s a nostalgic snapshot of a very specific time in my life! You can see my double neck in that video too, as well as that later gig after I’d left where Sam’s on the mic! Good times!




Q: You are a musician that wears many hats when in music. From guitar player, to vocalist, and lyricist. What is your process for juggling all of these? What advice do you have to give to those who are looking to do it all?


A: I think the notion of doing it all is a bit of a misconception. It’s more of an illusion than anything, at least I feel that way when it comes to my own hats. In reality, I feel like my skill set is wide-spread but not really as deep as it could be compared to someone who specialised in one specific thing. It’s like life is an RPG and time becomes the experience points you can use to level up each of your abilities. Some people would put all their time into boosting their bass guitar playing stat for example so that they could play any genre under the sun, learn pieces super quickly and improvise comfortably on any scale. Comparatively, my bass playing is narrowly specialised. I live and breathe ska and punk bass styles, but put some soul or jazz in front of me I’d have no idea what to do! It’s similar for my guitar playing, and lyrics I find very challenging to write because I don’t put the time in regularly to nurture that skill, it’s more that I brute force my way through with it whenever I do need to write lyrics and it takes me ages! On the other hand, I’m consciously and constantly trying to develop my music production skills, really pushing and challenging myself as much as I can, and after years of almost daily practice, it comes quite naturally to me now, though of course there’s still much to learn and improve on.


Juggling lots of things might seem daunting too but for me I feel like it’s a strength. When you’re focussed on developing one thing for a long time it can go one of two ways: either you’ll keep getting better at it constantly, or you’ll start to stagnate and hit a roadblock where you’re not sure where to go and how to improve. That’s when juggling things has become really useful to me. If I feel like I’m stuck at how to progress more as a guitarist, I’ll switch over to focussing on bass, or vocals, or keys, and I’m on a roll again! It’s a big reason I have 2 main writing projects, Jabun and Better Than The Book. When one big album project is finished, I’m often exhausted and it takes a while for the writing ideas to flow again for that style, so I’ll just switch over to the other project and it’ll be a change of pace and scenery. I don’t think I could write BTTB albums back to back every year, but alternating projects (and even doing collaborative ones in between) keeps me energised for both!


It’s all about what you really want to do too, and there’s definitely an element of compromise to it all. There’s simply not enough time to max out all of your skill stats. For some people, being the best at one thing is the goal, and that could be true if for example you’re a musician in a function band where you need to know 200+ cover songs and be able to quickly learn more each week. For others the compromise of doing well with a small section of lots of things is worth it for their own purposes, and that’s what works well for me. In that case, it’s about switching off from the things you don’t need to work on to prioritise and maintain the areas you do.


Much like practicing anything too, the more you juggle things (correctly) the better you’ll get at doing it. Try to start small and add to it gradually. I had a great head start learning both piano and cello at a young age, but I’m positive anyone can pick it up with the right strategies; it’s just like learning multiple subjects at school. Start with jugging just 2 things which synergise. Perhaps vocals and guitar, or recording and mixing, or even writing lyrics and singing. When you’re comfortable with those, add something else, and so on. For me, learning guitar wasn’t so hard because I already had the finger strength and basic string instrument principles from cello, and from guitar, it was much easier to pick up learning the bass, etc... It’s about finding a natural strategy to practice those skills, and balancing the time to develop and maintain them as necessary.




Q: You went to Durham University and graduated with a Masters Degree in Physics and Mathematics. Why not pursue a music degree? Was this a fallback plan or something to cover bills while in pursuit of your music?


A: I always felt like a career in physics or the sciences was something expected of me from a young age, and I enjoyed studying those subjects so I thought that’d be the best thing for me to continue with at university. Of course there was the whole “physics graduates on average make blah blah money” propaganda that was fed to everyone by the schools and universities so I’m sure that had an influence too, but on the whole, it was something I was good at and wanted to know more about at the time, and I didn’t think I’d be able to study them to the level I wanted to as simply a part-time / casual interest.


 


For my A levels, I took maths, physics, chemistry and music (and a pre-professional music performance course), and by the time I had to choose what I wanted to study at university, I was content with the composition techniques and music history I’d learned and wasn’t really interested in formally studying music further. There was also an aspect of chasing grades to musical instrument learning too. You had to have a grade 8 in an instrument to be accepted into most university courses, following strict rules on what you had to / could learn, effectively to jump through hoops and tick boxes to meet standardised requirements. Once I’d decided that I didn’t want to study music further in a formal setting, that freed me up to learn whatever I actually wanted to on the piano and cello, rather than the limited set of pieces and techniques you needed to pass to get to university. It was liberating!


There was also the aspect of what I wanted to do in the future which at the time I wasn’t sure. Realistically, I didn’t see myself as going into a music career as a performer or academic, it just seemed too distant a goal for me, and I didn’t feel additional qualifications would help me either. That freed up my musical energy to focus on things I really wanted to learn for myself, like music production and exploring more experimental techniques and less “academic” genres. Music had been a huge part of my life for almost as long as I can remember, so I put all my free time into my own musical self-exploration outside the confines of academia. Physics and maths on the other hand was a blast to study! Very little essay writing and in a nut-shell it was all about solving (often very difficult) puzzles and problems rather than learning facts. It was more about seeing the world from a different angle and gaining / developing the skills to apply that to other areas of life rather than just the narrow scope of science. It was hard work but often fun!


 


When I finally graduated in 2012, I took that summer to apply the skills I’d learned to record my first original tracks as Jabun as well as Better Than The Book’s debut EP One Small Step, and it was a super fun adventure. Meanwhile I was starting to apply for physics / science related jobs not because I wanted to, but more just because it was expected of me, and I didn’t enjoy any of it. I was applying for all these things that felt alien to me just because of the salary and because it was what I was told I should do. I didn’t get any interviews, just in my mind the dissatisfaction of lots of time wasted chasing someone else’s dreams for me. On the other hand, I started actually making money from my own music, and by 2013 people weren’t just asking to work with me, but also giving me money to do so, for music and for audio work on animations. I figured why waste my time pursuing something that I don’t enjoy and that’s going nowhere when I’m finally having a blast doing something I love and being paid for it! Somehow, my casual hobby had become my source of income, and my plan A of physics (really other people’s plan for me) had become a tentative plan B. I figured I’d just drop the plan B! I was in a lucky position where I could put all my energy into nurturing my own music / audio production business, so I stopped everything else and just focussed on that, and I’m still doing it today! There didn’t seem like there was any point in having a plan B, it’d just take away from the plan A!


Now that’s not to say that the decision hasn’t made for a bumpy ride, but it’s a road that’s been true to myself and that’s been incredibly rewarding! Sure, I’m certain my bank account would be a lot happier if I’d have given up on music and kept looking for physics jobs, but even with all the headaches and occasional financial uncertainty, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing now, even 8 years later, and I’ll be continuing down this path for as long as I can!




[ PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 ]


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Posted by TheInterviewer - September 1st, 2020


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Interview No. 167

Interview By: @The-Great-One


Today's guest is an artist whose works show off the beauty and mystique of the female figure. From his works on pieces such as Green Lady, Pilot, and Two Lungs Breathe as One, for which he won an art contest for under the same name. I am most intrigued and pleased to welcome, @A-lieN.




Q: How did you find Newgrounds and why did you join?


A: My first exposure to Newgrounds was back around 2009-2010, one of my close friend that I went to karate class with, visited my house and noticed that I had my own computer. He started showing me all sorts of stuff he found on the internet, one of those things being a flash game on Newgrounds. I noticed he scrolled over a lot of other games in the process and wanted to try them after his visit. Newgrounds quickly became a place I would visit quite often after that since it seemed like it had tons of content to play. After a while though I started to get into other hobbies, school work became more demanding and I found other things to do in my free time like browse Youtube videos, make little tunes using ProTools that came with my digital piano and play video games that weren't just flash games. My visits to Newgrounds sadly became less and less frequent. My reintroduction to Newgrounds came in April of this year, I wanted a place to put my artwork, but also to get a little feedback. Newgrounds seemed like a good place since it doesn't compress your image and people could rate your artwork anonymously, giving me an idea of what people liked based on what I posted, the system isn't perfect but I tend to get more feedback on Newgrounds than other platforms.




Q: At what age did you become interested in drawing?


A: I think I have been drawing since from a very young age. At that age I was drawing and doodling because I found it fun and I was just playing around. I started to become serious about pursuing art around middle school. At first I wasn't too sure about fully committing to it, but finding all the resources online gave me the confidence that pursuing art as a career wasn't such a far fetched idea. I decided to go to an art highschool and planned to go to college for art, but there were some complications with getting into college since I was not a citizen of the U.S.. My family figured that trying to get appropriate papers to stay in the U.S. was not really feasible anymore. I disagreed, but I understood why they felt that way. And my formal art education ends at highschool, but I have kept studying and with the plethora of free resources online it was incredibly interesting and sometimes overwhelming! As much as I endorse learning art by yourself, nothing can replace a good teacher, they can really help you save a lot of time and energy by simply pointing you in the right direction.




Q: Looking through your works I am reminded of Edward Hopper. You both do incredible things with lighting and you both seem to have a fascination with women. How do you explain the concept of light in a piece? What is your fascination with women in your pieces?


A: Thank-you for saying that I have great lighting! As to how I explain lighting and the concept of light in a piece that is a topic I am very interested in and have read extensively about, so instead of writing your ear off for this one question I'll try to condense all that I've learned in the past years about lighting. There are basically two main resources that I use when it comes to understanding light and color. "Color and Light" by the incredible James Gurney; and the concept of "Physically Based Rendering" or "PBR". In summary the first resource is just a really good book on how to pick colors and I'll just tell you to read it, or at least skim through and take inspiration from all the great illustrations the book has in it. As for "PBR" it's more commonly associated with 3D renderers like Unity, Unreal and all the different game engines out there. "PBR" however isn't an algorithm or an amazing new piece of technology, it's more of a philosophy, a way of thinking about light in a more accurate and scientific approach. Simple principles like the conservation of energy and the fresnel effect can take your shading and lighting to the next level. A third resource i like to refer to is "Stylization with a Purpose" a Games Developer Conference presentation by Valve the developers that created the amazing and stylish game Team Fortress 2. The presentation emphasized the importance of "Readability", the idea that the shapes you use should immediately and boldly say what you want the audience to think about, the way they did this is by making absolutely sure that the shadow shapes of every character was clear and identifiable. This doesn't just apply to characters it also applies to general illustration and something I personally want to get better at.




Q: You don't seem to post on the forums much. How and when did you come across the Two Lungs Breathe As One Art Competition? What can you tell us about your entry Two Lungs Breathe as One? Will we see your works in future contests?


A: I mostly lurk the art forums looking for people who want help with their art, but I always feel like the advice I would give them would come off as unhelpful or hostile so I generally decide against it at the last minute. I came across the competition when I was lurking around and thought it might be a nice change of pace for me. I also wanted to see how I compared with other artists. When I tried to make the piece for the competition I was stumped by the prompt, the only thing I could think of was how symmetrical our lungs are sans our heart. I decided to make a piece that had a very symmetrical composition but with the two halves being different slightly and having the two figures doing the same action, hence the prompt. As for future art contests I will definitely try to make an entry, but I really want to put in a good effort into my entry and not make an entry just to make an entry, unless the time limit catches up to me!




Q: My favorite piece by you is entitled Senior Employee. You said you were practicing a new painting process. Could you elaborate for us?


A: The new painting process I was practicing was more of an exercise and an experiment. I think most artists have heard of Peter Han's advice to beginner artists to draw with a pen, a medium that doesn't allow you to erase your mistakes. This seems counterintuitive since all beginners do is make mistakes! But what it does do is make every mistake very painful, rather than something you can erase and do over and over again. I wanted to do something similar but with my brush strokes, so I set my brush to full opacity at all times and tried to make every brush stroke count. I found that the best way to go about it was by making new brush strokes on new layers and once you're satisfied you tweak its color by locking the transparency. It helped me think more critically about my brush strokes, but it was a very time consuming process. I would like to revisit that way of painting but I will have to get faster and better at painting overall.




Q: What I believe to be your best piece is entitled Painting Demonstration. This is where I found your lighting to be absolute perfect. I love that there are people painting a person painting. Where did the sketch for this piece begin. When did you come to look at it and say it's done?


A: It started out as a way for me to study hand poses. For me studying hands that aren't attached to an arm doesn't seem to be too helpful for me, in order for me to study hands I have to attach it to a whole figure so that I can properly assess it's proportion compared to the rest of the figure. I find studying hands this way to be more helpful. One of the hand poses that I find to be interesting and challenging is holding a pencil, this is where the sketch came from since I needed a figure to have an excuse to be making that hand pose in the first place. I found it weird that I was drawing a person drawing, so I just took that idea and took it farther.




Q: What is in your opinion, the definition of art?


A: In my opinion art is anything that can evoke a certain emotion or reaction from an audience. Of course the emotion or reaction has to be relatively strong. For example, a guy getting on the bus isn't really art, but a guy wearing full plate armor or cosplaying as Iron Man getting on the bus is art, it might not be your type of art, but it evokes a much stronger emotion or reaction from the people on that bus. I think it's easier to understand if I compare art to writing, writing is something that most people understand and do quite often. Asking what is art and what isn't is like asking what counts as writing and what doesn't. Shakespear, text messages, business ledgers, 4chan greentexts, excel spreadsheets, these are all written works. But random indecipherable texts like "fmA-_---nf Afd //*de=3+" isn't a written work because there is near to no meaning to be extracted from it, art is the same way. Of course as to what makes GOOD art, that's a more complicated question and probably not within the scope of this question.




Q: What can we expect from A-lieN in the future?


A: I am planning on continuing making illustrations and hopefully try to get some employment somewhere as an artist, If that does happen then I might upload less full illustrations. I also really want to teach art, but I want to first get to a level where I would consider my skill level to be worthy of teaching. At some point down the line I would like to make my own game, but that's a far fetched goal and I'm not going to be focused on that any time soon.




This was a small art contest on the forum that I was looking forward to contributing to as a prize. I was hoping that an unknown would come through it, and I was not disappointed. A-lieN is a skillful artist, whose lighting and modeling is quite the breathe of fresh air here on the site. If he decides to embark into animation at some point, I am most sure it will be phenomenal!




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Posted by TheInterviewer - August 15th, 2020


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Interview No. 166

Interview By: @The-Great-One


Today's guest is a momentous one and one to celebrate special. For his creation of the flash B. Which would lead to the creation of the first flash movie group on Newgrounds, The Clock Crew. A group of members who would start off by spamming the Portal for fun, who would go on to improve the craft of animation not only in themselves, but in others throughout the site. I am most humbled to welcome, The King of the Portal, @StrawberryClock.




Q: How did you find Newgrounds and why did you join?


A: I was a dumb kid with unrestricted internet access and stumbled upon it when I was 12 or 13 in the late 90's, before the automated portal even existed. To put things into perspective, I'm now 34 years old. It was unlike anything I've ever seen before and when the automated portal came about it got me excited. Only problem for me was my flash movies were terrible and got rightfully blammed. They were genuine attempts at first but down the line I decided to make flash movies bad on purpose to see how people would react to them. I wasn't expecting all of this as the result. Who would?




Q: RupeeClock recounts the tale of the Clock Crew's origins in The CC humble beginnings. In that movie we learn about the BLAMMED submission A. We also learn about B. How much about the origin movie is true? What can you tell us about B?


A: It's true, the idea was to submit the entire alphabet one flash movie at a time and see how people would react. I expected every single one to get blammed, but the surprising success of 'B' changed my plans.




Q: Although you and the Clock Crew are beloved on the site nowadays. Back then you and the Clock Crew were some of the most hated members of the site. With Anti Clock movies, other Newgrounds members hating you, and if I recall correctly the Clock Crew were also receiving death threats and doxxing threats as well. You're response to the situation was thusly...


Listen.... this has gone WAY to far.

Ive gotten alot of attention by posting shitty movies, is that against the rules? And people are trying to get me banned for THAT? You people are pathetic. Whoever wrote that is right (I DIDNT WRITE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Ban them, they have no lives. All day they spend on Newgrounds.com looking at flash movies and e mail the fulps everytime i submit a movie... people here are SAD. Thats why i picked this site to be an asshole on. Ive gotten alot of attention! I know some 15 year older is gonna reply saying that i suck, but you know what? I dont give a shit? Why? Cause i know im right. This site has more teens than adults. If they are adults they need to grow up. Cause if your making a movie to make fun of someone, you need to get a life. Go outside and play tag or something away from the computer, it will do you alot of good. As for th clock crew, i didnt make it. Some guy signed up as a bunch of accounts (Possibly GrandmasterJ due to his comments about my movie osmosis hones) Just want attention! Now if you dont agree with me, get a life. If you do, good for you having enough brain cells to figure out that i just shit... nothing more.


Looking back, how serious was this situation? Would you have done anything differently about it?


A: First off, I'd like to say reading that post made me cringe. I don't even remember exactly why I made it, what exactly I'm trying to convey or if it was even serious or not. If it was serious, it was an overreaction (which I used to do), if not, then I fooled my future self so well done teenage me! I think it was my confusion regarding how big this 'joke' became, when all I wanted to do was spam movies and read people's reactions to it. Not even I understand exactly why this all happened and I never will, but it did and I'm thankful for it. If I remember correctly, it wasn't until years later when people started getting involved with my personal life, like calling my house. I was confused why people were carrying out this joke years later and the lengths they would go to try to have a conversation with me. That turned me off of the Clock Crew for a while, but later I realized that it was unfair to the rest of the clocks, most of are really great people. Now I make sure to submit something every single Clockday and keep in touch with the clocks every once in a while.




Q: What can you tell us about The Clock Crew as a whole at the time of its inception? When do you think The Clock Crew started to gain praise and recognition?


A: Late 2001 was when the Clock Crew was formed by members like Orange Clock, but the reception was negative until years later when it had its place solidified in Newgrounds culture. It's when people saw the group for more than just people who submit bad flashses. The Clock Crew later was regularly collaborative and was a great way for new and experimental artists to gain support for their animation projects. It inspired people to make things not to make other people happy, but to make themselves happy. I still believe making yourself happy first-most with your animation project is the most important part, even if you believe most people won't understand it. After all, you're never going to please everybody, no matter how good you make something.




Q: Tom celebrated Clock Day on August 15, 2003. In 2005 is when Newgrounds started to record each Clock Day in its own section. It is almost 20 years old now. How did you feel about the Clock Crew getting its own day? Did you ever think a simple B would have grown into something so large?


A: I think it's great the Clock Crew has its own day to celebrate and that the tradition is still going on. I never thought 'B' would get as big as it did. As I said earlier, it originated from me just submitting low quality flash movies and seeing how people reacted to them. I spent more time uploading the swf to Newgrounds than I did making the flash. I figured I would get bored with the Strawberry Clock shtick one day, that would be the end of it and as the years went on Strawberry Clock would be forgotten. But here I am in 2020 in my mid 30s with a bunch of other stuff going on, making a new toon for Clockday, and many other Clocks are doing the same. Why? A better question is, why not?




Q: A lot of members of the Clock Crew would improve their animation and flash skills over time. It got to the point if you were a Clock then you were in good hands and would have access to a lot of resources and assistance. Would you agree that a group on Newgrounds has the capabilities of improving others works and the community overall? Where is the danger in the works becoming skewed?


A: Absolutely, The Clock Crew and other Newgrounds groups are full of welcoming animators who all want to help others improve their skills and collaborate. It can be really confusing going into animation for the first time and it's easy to fall into common mistakes, that's what happened to me when I first made movies. But getting guidance from those who are eager to help and collaborate can help you get a great start and have a lot of fun too.




Q: We have had other flash groups appear after the Clock Crew. The Lock Legion, The Star Syndicate, The Kitty Krew, and The Soup Squad are just a few that come to mind. You have been around on the site a long time. What your thoughts on these other groups?


A: I think they're all great! There's none off the top of my head that I dislike. Each group had something unique to offer, so even if you felt you weren't a good fit for the Clock Crew, there were others you could join with the sole purpose of making flash and having fun. Many groups like The Kitty Krew, The Barney Bunch, etc. all had clear established identities and offered something different. Some people from the Clock Crew, Lock Legion and others became professional artists, animators or ended up making it big by other means. If the groups can help some people get started with what later became their careers, then I think it's all worth it.




Q: Your first Daily Feature is one I find quite hilarious and that is SBC Kills Pokemon (A.P.I). Where did the idea for this come from?


A: It reflects the culture change in Newgrounds. Back when "Pokemania" was around in the late 90's and early 00's, there were tons of anti-Pokemon related content on Newgrounds because the hype annoyed a lot of people. Fast-forward about 15 years later and Pokémon's reception is generally positive on Newgrounds and everywhere else. I could've done more with the idea, but I think the concept of an average Newgrounds user 15 years ago behaving the same way in the current year was funny enough. I used to pretend to hate Pokémon because it was "cool", but I actually like it for the most part. I even made a Pokémon ROM Hack, but that's a much different story.


There's a lot about the Newgrounds community, as well as the internet in general, that's changed within the last 20 years and reflecting on the differences is very interesting to me and I've been doing so in my recent movies as well. For example, 'Clocktube' was meant to reflect how differently a popular guy behaves and how hard some people try to keep up with the times in order to stay relevant. Strawberry Clock was somewhat of a trendsetter, but to keep his relevancy he became a trend-chaser with things like way-too-far pranks and over-hyped fraudulent cryptocurrency and ditches almost everything that made him popular in the first place.


But no matter how many years pass, Newgrounds retains the same vision of the Newgrounds I grew up with, but for a brand-new generation of animators and there's no doubt in my mind many of them will make it big with their evolving talents.




Q: What can you tell us about your work on NG's 20th Anniversary Collab?


A: It was fun working with Whirlguy and I wasn't a stranger to collabs. He gave out a list of years to everybody who wanted to participate, and I chose 2001, the year 'B' premiered and Clock Crew came to be. But I didn't want to make it 100% about Strawberry Clock since this was supposed to celebrate all of Newgrounds history. I did a lot of research on the year to find other things that also premiered and even discovered some gems that I've never seen before.




Q: Can we have a sneak peek of what you're working on for Clock Day 2020?


A: For the last few years I've really been experimenting with animation. They're not the most fantastic or creative pieces of work, but I've been a big animation fan my whole life and very interested in the animation process. Both TV and web animation from the 90's and early 00's helped shape the kind of humor I'd use in Strawberry Clock's movies. I still often get inspired by the great flashes right here on Newgrounds and elsewhere. I'm obviously not an animator, but it's fun putting these together. Each year helps me learn new techniques and better understand just how much work it takes to make something, even if my process is vastly simpler and shorter than a toon you'd see on TV or almost anybody else. I'll never get to the skill level of so many talented people here on Newgrounds and beyond, but that's ok.


Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic keeping me indoors far more this year, expect a slightly higher quality flash for Clockday. It continues a year after my last movie 'Clockmiration' where the popularity-starved Strawberry Clock tries to cope with the COVID-19 quarantine as he can no longer socialize in person. It quickly takes a turn when some hairy visitors show up at his house with a vendetta. It's a silly (with just a small dash of seriousness) story that I think turned out ok, and like it said earlier, yourself is the most important person you should try to please when making something. It also has a big twist at the end that I hope really intrigues people.




Q: What can we expect from StrawberryClock in the future?


A: As far as Strawberry Clock content goes, I'll continue the traditions as long as I'm around while also trying new stuff with it. While the Clock's aren't as big as they once were, they're still making flash movies and work well together. After all, Tom Fulp (an inspiration to me) has stuck to his guns with Newgrounds even though the internet has vastly changed over the last two decades. I've already helped drag Strawberry Clock and the Clock Crew out for almost two decades anyway and it's still a lot of fun, so I'll continue to make at least one new Strawberry Clock movie every year for the foreseeable future.


As far as misc content goes, my software development career keeps me pretty busy. I'm also leading a large scale game project that I want to pick up the pace with soon and a few smaller projects that haven't been announced yet. I'd love to discuss these more in detail when there's more to discuss.




It is amazing how the smallest thing from a teenager on this site can blow up into something not only hilarious, but fun and engaging to an entire site. I think in the end B became something better for the community overall. StrawberryClock at the helm for a while, others took the mantle and built friendships and built a creative group that others would go onto make on Newgrounds. Thank you to StrawberryClock. Without him. We wouldn't have this day or this much fun! Happy Clock Day!




The Interviewer is a part of Dohn's Desk Productions

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Posted by TheInterviewer - August 9th, 2020


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Interview No. 165

Interview By: @The-Great-One


Today's guest was one of my first all the way back in 2009. During his first visit we talked about the series that he started and how it birthed a day of it is own, with the Madness Series. It is time to revisit and learn more than we should have since then. I am most pleased and honored to welcome back, @Krinkels.




Q: Last we spoke was eleven years ago. You have been quite busy since then and there were a lot of things I neglected to ask you back then. I hope you don't mind we'll be retreading a little ground.


A: I'll do my best to remember things, I'm getting old and new information keeps pushing old information out of my head.




Q: At what age did you become interested in animation?


A: I can't even be too precicely certain, especially because we're all fascinated with cartoons as a kid. I remember abusing the slow-motion feature on the VCR many times so I could see how animated things moved on more than one occasion. The interest in animated work came and went as I got older until flash came along, or more accurately; Newgrounds. It was such an eye opener to see just some guy (Tom) banging out home brew cartoons with a PC and posting it online. It helped that they were super amusing and in line with my sense of humor, too. So while I was always fascinated with animation I never really get it in my head to embroil myself in the methods until I saw Newgrounds, so like, what, 19 years old?




Q: Where did the inspiration for the Madness series come from? How did you come about this design for the bodies and heads?


A: The design for the grunts was in my sketchbooks all through highschool. They were little sack looking featureless men I could just scribble into anything and were great for doodling because they were so featureless. A lot of the handless sort of looks (i.e. Rayman) are ofc a direct artistic inspiration, showing me that I don't have to draw arms to have hands out there doin stuff, so I ran with that. The cross on their face was derived from the basic drawing principal of using a cross to orient a sketch/drawing of a human head.




Q: When I wrapped up the last interview, the ninth installment of Madness Combat, Madness Aggregation was already out. Looking back on the Madness Series as a whole, how have you felt about it blowing up in popularity?


A: I'm still stunned people enjoy the series, considering how slowly I churn them out, and how the fandom itself has far and long surpassed me in quality (and quantity!), but I'm absolutely grateful for the opportunity to throw something out there that people enjoy and that I enjoy doing. Part of me wonders what would have come of the series if I had a stronger business acumen but that road of thought has me thinking there's be madness funko pops and that seems kinda gross.




Q: Madness Day will be celebrating its 13th Anniversary this year. It is a day that I always look forward to. With creators such as Littleluckylink who was here to talk about his Madness Day trilogy. Madness Anitpathy was the inspiration for him. MOC-Productions was also here to talk about his Madness Day contribution as well. How many of the Madness Day movies have you seen? What do you think about Madness Day overall?


A: I try to watch every single one of them! It's easier these days as the popularity has waned but the creators are no less driven. The last couple years I've been twitch streaming on Madness Day to watch the entries with anyone who cares to accompany me on the journey through the portal. These long time Madness animators like LLL are definitely a part of why I have to evaluate my own process to make sure I ain't slacking! As for my thoughts on Madness day like, a lot of people will come at me and say something to the effect of 'hey matt you got your own day on newgrounds!' and I feel like I have to correct a lot of people so it'll be good to kinda run the words here; it ain't Krinkels day, it's Madness day because it's a show of what newgrounds can do when they circle up on content they're into. Like Pico day, robot day, ect al, it's about the artists who are enthusiastic about the portal and what it brings, the days are great for compartmentalizing and celebrating.




Q: One thing I absolutely love about the Madness Series is that with each new installment there are new weapons introduced or older weapons used in creative ways. You find a way to break up the monotony of the fight scene with each new addition to the series. How do you do it?


A: I HAVE TO DO THIS!!! haha, I know I do a lot of samey stuff, in fact the biggest fair criticism is that i'm maybe too consistent with things and let them get stale! Any instances of freshness you feel within the newer entries comes from me kicking in keyframes and stopping and thinking 'wait i've done this before' and rolling back to approach it again. It lends to a longer gestation period in my cartoons but I hope it's worth it! I get worried that more plot heavy stuff like the Dedmos series (which, frankly, had the same kinda whispy plot as the rest of the series just sorta more... rocky?) will miss the mark, and for many it did, but it got me thinking of stuff I wouldn't have introduced otherwise.




Q: In the last interview I asked you the story behind Hank. The reason I ask because back then and even to this day, Hank is my favorite Newgrounds character. I kind of relate to Hank in a way. Just having the damn determination to just not give up and keep fighting. He's quite inspirational. How did you come up with the idea to flesh out this one character?


A: Hank is literally an amalgamation of 90s and early 00s edgelord protagonists, my love letter to an era of ridiculous anti-heros. There really isn't too much to say about him other than he's a force of nature wrapped in bandages, an agent of the higher powers to enact change in the Godmachine Nevada. Of course his determination is mysterious!




Q: You have many episodes that expand Madness Series. For those looking to start a series in animation, what advice can you give to them about world building and fleshing out the characters and story in-between the lines.


A: Oh man I may be the worst person to ask! My method is to just hammer out animations with the person and start figuring stuff out as the process starts getting slick, instead of planning things before hand. Maybe I have an aversion to plans because they invariably change/fail and I can't handle that so a more lazzaie-faire approach lets it feel more organic? Even if it winds up being a little indicative of a lack of deep creativity. Working with swain and doing actual writing for Project Nexus has been insightful, on the other hand, so in all fairness my knowledge of how to 'properly' world build is pretty new, and I still favor a 'lets figure it out together' design for the animations, using a few bullet points I want to hit and then just animating around them.




Q: When and how did you meet The-Swain? What stories can you tell us about working together?


A: I met Swain first at a Comic Con back in 2009? 2010? I can't remember the year precicely but we hit it off pretty quick talking about venture brothers and animations/vidyagames. Embarassingly enough I wasn't aware of Blockhead when I first met him and it wasn't until the next comic con when I was able to talk to him about the work HE'D done as well. From there we'd communicate on AIM and over time we got it in our heads to collaborate. Working with swain has been a boon to my own sense of professionalism and drive. We stopped being goofballs with ideas and became forgemasters with plans, though admittedly it took me some time to get in step with the processes but I'm grateful he had the patience needed for me to get a handle on game development and Blender/3d and even art in general. When we met my art wasn't what i'd call even adequate.



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Q: What can you tell us about The Gibbing Tree and Madness: Project Nexus 2?


A: Not a lot to say, Gibbing Tree is two desks in a room where Project Nexus is being made. We've dropped the 2, and are referring to the Flash as 'classic', moving forward, so as not to shut out new people who feel like they need to play an ancient game to be caught up to speed.




Q: An Experiment does ask quite the interesting question. At first it made me go "huh... that's interesting" to "WTF" real quick. How did you come to this conclusion when answering the question and will we see this being utilized in a future Madness Combat?


A: Grunt S3lf energy erodes into dissonance when abused in such ways. Dissonance being the 'atomos' of s3lf, and a large byproduct of... well, things doing what they do in Nevada. The story of Project Nexus is surrounded by it in a more destructive capacity, the cartoons cover the more bizzare aspects of it.




Q: Alright, are you saving the next Madness Combat for this upcoming Madness Day?


A: PART ONE OF MADNESS 9.5 WILL BE READY FOR MADNESS DAY, MY DUDE!




Q: What is in your opinion, the definitions of art and animation?


A: oh god, what a question. Right now my working definition is that art is little more than basic interpretation/expression. Even if it just an expression on 'I really dig on this thing, so I drew a picture of it'. It all starts with looking at stuff, seeing the stuff, and thinking about it. We all got different filters so ten people living the same life will draw different things at the end of the day and that's the beauty part of it. It's an insight into what a person thinks, if even just a little bit, and even if it's confusing and might be unsolvable from our view. But deterministically speaking data goes in, data comes out.




Q: What can we expect from Krinkels in the future?


A: A couple more animations, at least. MC12 might be it for me then I'll relegate myself to shorter and shorter animations. I'm in a position where I can animate a bit right now and will absolutely make the most of what little time I can to make good on the implicit promise to those who patronize me.




One thing The Interviewer has always been known for since its early days are interviews with big names. Although I have no personal vendetta against my older interviews I wished I was better back then. You could say this along with others has been me trying to correct this matter. Krinkels' Madness Series has not only helped fuel Newgrounds, it has made possible, the chance for many new artists, animators, musicians, and programmers come to the front with a style that they can make their stamp with. Without Krinkels and Madness Day we may not have as many talented creators on the site that we do and we wouldn't have so many wonderful stories. Madness Day is a day I look forward to every year, and I am always anticipating the newest Madness entry from Krinkels. He has given so much to this site, and we can all only hope to see more.




The Interviewer is a part of Dohn's Desk Productions

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Posted by TheInterviewer - August 5th, 2020


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Interview No. 164

Interview By: @The-Great-One


To categorize today's guest, would be a huge disservice to not only his talents, but his character. You have heard his voice through multiple projects on Newgrounds. He is also a writer, a musician, and animator. He is also the most helpful and generous person on the site. I am most honored to welcome @ForNoReason.




Q: How did you find Newgrounds and why did you join?


A: I was hanging out at a friend's house after school. Probably around 2001... He was showing me some really stupid and insanse videos in between matches of Command and Conquer. More than certain that the first Flash video I watched ever ever was Balthor's Tales from Hell. I was hooked after that. I started checking out Newgrounds almost weekly after that. I didn't actually joing until 2003, however. I joined cause I wanted to start leveling up and writing reviews, but I soon fell down a rabbit hole that is the Newgrounds community and began trolling on the forums, submitting shitty flash content and voice acting. I didnt have a solid reason to join Newgrounds, but Tom, the staff and all the insane people in the BBS made me stay.




Q: When and how did you enter the Air Force? What is your rank and status? Why did you enlist?


A: I joined the Air Force in June of 2003. I just graduated high school and I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. My dad had served 20 + years in the Air Force so I thought it would be something to do. I am currently still in the Reserves and I hold the rank of Master Sergeant (E7). I have three years til I retire and I am just about ready for that. I've been to a lot of places and seen a lot of things... Its been a pleasure but I'm just about done.




Q: You made animations for Newgrounds while you were deployed in Iraq. What can you tell us about your deployment and what made you want to create during it?


A: The deployment was "fun". Got to see and experience all kinds of things. I didn't see combat or anything but our base was attacked daily so that was fun. I always loved Newgrounds and creating stuff for Newgrounds. I just enjoyed being part of the community and trying to build my presence. I felt the best way to get myself out there as a voice actor was to create things. Maybe they wouldn't be very good, but at least people would hear my voice and maybe like it for their project. 


The thing that doesn't get shared much about deployments is how bored you can get. I worked 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. That sounds busy, but everything I did was within a mile of everything. So I worked, went to the gym, ate food... and it still left me with a lot of extra time. SO... I had a tiny little laptop that had FLash 8 on it. I had my mic with me and the rest is history. Helped give me something to do during those cold lonely nights when the mortars and rockets were flying.




Q: You and I are both writers. At what age did you become interested in writing? Who is your favorite author and why? What is your favorite book and why?


A: I started writing in high school. I like creating stories and expanding on my ideas. My main issue is I have horrific penmanship, so my written word was never that great and my computer was slow as hell when I was younger. I read a lot of comic books when I was younger, so I got a lot of inspiration from that. I also really like George Orwell and J.R.R Tolkein. My favorite book is the Hobbit cause I'm a basic bitch like that. It's just a good story. Its exciting and easy to read and just fun. So much imagination can come from it!




Q: You also voice act here on Newgrounds, featured in multiple collaborations. How did you become interested in voice acting?


A: I suck at animating... I couldn't program... I like listening to my own voice.... and I wanted to be a big famous Newgrounds star. So I thought voice acting was the way to go. I just remember listening to some of the great voice actors from Newgrounds like Egoraptor, Tomamoto, and others and just being so excited by that idea.




Q: A Voice Acting Demo? is a humorous demo. One in which when scottmale24 was here we talked about in one of my favorite movies on Newgrounds Six Minutes of Nothing. Here is your review of it...


I never reviewed this?
How could I not? This is the greatest thing I have ever seen! The style of it was just amazing. I never thought I could ever stand listening to my own voice for that long, but your animation made it enjoyable and hilarious, more than I ever could have imagined. What you added to my VA demo was amazing and I cannot thank you enough.


What can you tell us about the demo? How did you find out about this movie? How do you feel looking back on this now?


A: I made that demo in sort of a response to TomaMoto's demo from the time. His was brilliant! It was beautifully produced, well acted and just a classic to this day. I had no skills and no talent so I was trying to be silly ironic counter culture to his. I think scottmale24 messaged me on Newgrounds telling me after he posted it. I watched it like a hundred times. Seeing my work animated like that brought tears to my eyes. I still love it. Im still so humbled by it. Two creators who have helped me the most are probably scottmale24 and Carbonwater. I know there are more, and ill probably have someone angry at me, but those guys are the best.




Q: What can you tell us about the Atlanta Meet-Up in 2009? What made you want to attend the meet-up? What stories do you have for us?


A: I actually organized the Atlanta Meet Ups. I wanted to meet other nerds from Newgrounds and it seemed like the cool thing to do at the time. I was not a very good planner. I tried... but I think they could have been better if they were better thought out. We had some great folks show up like Luis and Jonas who I still stalk to this day. All I can say is that they both are fantastic at Karaoke!




Q: What can you tell us about The Newgrounds Charity Project?


A: I wanted to help give back to the world in general. Once Tom mentioned that Newgrounds was helping some charities like Childsplay I thought it was a great opportunity for the community to build upon that. With the Ad Rev system being introduced it was a perfect opportunity. I created some Newgrounds accounts for some charities that were close to my heart and started running with it. I remember that the Breast Cancer Research fund sent Tom a letter of appreciation because of one donation Newgrounds made because of this project. It was exciting. The accounts are still open, but I haven't had the time to really promote it like I did many years back.




Q: When did you become a moderator for Movies, Games, and API? What does your job entail? How do you feel about The Elite Guard Barracks?


A: Its been a few years now. I pretty much became a mod as soon as those positions were created. It started cause I volunteered as an icon mod and then weaseled my way into any position I could. The EGB are a valuable resource to Newgrounds because of their dedication and helpful nature. I have had a lot of help from its members identifying illegal content.




Q: What is your current work in the Voice Actor Collaboration?


A: Unfortunately I had to step back for a moment because I put to much on my plate at once. The idea and execution so far has been brilliant, and I want to contribute more, but with the cast of talent it already has I don't think they are loosing anything from me not being a part of it right now.




Q: You once stated that your dream job would be working for Newgrounds. Is that still the dream job?


A: No, it is not. Would I love to do it? Yes, absolutely, but that mainly is because of who I'd be working with and for. Having gotten to meet Tom and the staff I know it would be a lot of good times and fun/hard work. However, I currently work my dream job. I am an detection K9 handler and I get to work with dogs all day. So I really can't complain.




Q: What can we expect from ForNoReason in the future?


A: I am really trying to get back into the voice over work. Just popping in here and there with whatever I can get. I have a youtube channel if anyone wants to subscribe to that, but just keep an eye out for some more collaborations and voice work. Thanks for the time to interview me!




ForNoReason has been on my list for years now. A man of many talents, a man of much kindness, and a man of much laughter to share with all. He is the Steve Martin of Newgrounds. Using his craft to revolutionize the works on Newgrounds and receiving less spotlight for his efforts. We should all be grateful for his contributions and selfless dedication to Newgrounds and abroad. If ForNoReason's name is on a project, I can assure you two things. One, despite his username he is certainly there for a reason. Two, whatever it is, it's gonna be good.




The Interviewer is a part of Dohn's Desk Productions

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Posted by TheInterviewer - July 22nd, 2020


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Interview No. 163

Interview By: @The-Great-One


Today's guest is quite... naughty. Their creations of the male anatomy range from the kinky, passionate, nerdy, beautiful, and sometimes, even all three. Ranging from Warhammer 40k to Final Fantasy to the far back time of the Roman Empire. I am pleased to welcome a most humble garden dweller, @semicabbage.




Q: In your first piece uploaded to the Art Portal entitled wamuu you stated it was a re-upload from a previous account. Was that previous account on Newgrounds or elsewhere? If it was elsewhere, then how did you find Newgrounds and why did you join?


A: When I decided to start a nsfw presence, I went with the name "semisexycabbage", so the image was uploaded to that account. Buuut.. I realized that for other platforms (mostly twitter) might censor the name, so I simplified it down to semicabbage. I basically deleted that account for this one. That's right, this cabbage used to be sexy.


I didn't really need to find newgrounds, I kind of always knew it was there from the earlier days of the internet.. hahah I hope that's not showing my age too much~




Q: At what age did you become interested in art?


A: Oh boy, I've been destroying family books for as long as I can remember. My mom used to show me illegible recipe books I "decorate" as a kid hahaha.




Q: When did you become interested in NSFW art?


A: WELL that's a two part question. Interested in general, my good sir, it's been a while. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Interested in drawing on the other hand, it's actually started last year, when I realized my anatomy is terrible and needed practice. And then one thing led to another, now I have a nsfw account.




Q: When and how did you discover Warhammer 40k and Final Fantasy? What about them appeals to you in your art?


A: I joined a Deathwatch tabletop game which is set in the 40k world. There I learned about the oh-ever-so-kinky- dark eldars. I mean it's hard NOT to draw kinky things when it comes to those guys. Space marines are also just absolute MEALS.


As for Final Fantasy, I only really played FFXIV, which I picked up after Activision Blizzard happened. (Yes for all ya'll in the mmo circle, I'm a wow refugee, please take me home). FFXIV has quite a few handsome NPCs, plus the storyline is excellent, it generates many, many materials. ;D




Q: In the past we spoke to TheShadling, who is known for his NSFW art involving straight and futanari. We also spoke with SenpaiLove about his NSFW art involving straight. You are one of the few here on the site who is drawing nude males and homosexual males. What makes you want to draw NSFW art? Why focus on males?


A: At the end of the day, people who make nsfw art either didn't find what they're looking for, or wants something in a specific way. I started this because I was having a hard time finding what I like (also so I can ship fictional dudes together :D). I focused mostly on niche-ish yaoi stuff cause that's what I enjoy. I started the account mostly for myself and whoever passing by that shares my interests.




Q: In the past we have had artists talk about their art threads on Newgrounds. They all have the common denominator of showing works in progress and getting feedback before moving the final product to the Art Portal. What can you tell us about your art thread NSFW males - art journal?


A: Well, it's pretty much the same as the other artists, I post partial WIP in my journal until the final is done. I also babble about the piece a bit every week. I originally made it for feedback and discussion but, it's eh, it's kinda quite in there. Aw well, talk as if you have an audience, right?




Q: How would you say your anatomy has improved? Is there a difference in drawing the male and female anatomies?


A: I sure hope so! It's what prompted me to start this account afterall~ The biggest difference is that, in a stereotypical male, the person is drawn with more square shapes (square jawline, square shoulders, etc.) While females have softer features. But that's traditional methods, nowadays the biggest difference is where you have your lumps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯




Q: In your piece Elf you state that it was for a friend who can't stop (and won't stop) boning elves. Who is this friend? What is the story behind this piece?


A: Hahaha I won't live to see the next sunrise if I gave you a name. BUT, I will say, it's for a long time friend who has been going after all of the elven NPCs in my tabletop game. For years. That kind of dedication deserves something, don't ya agree?




Q: You have stated that you don't draw Furry art with the exclusion of minotaur. Maze features a minotaur. Why this exclusion? Where is the line drawn between what is Furry art and what is Fantasy? What is the difference?


A: Ok, so I have some friends in the furry community, it's kind of a niche you either go into, or stay out of. And since it's not one of my interests, I decided to drop that bit of expectations from my artworks. Minotaurs are.. ehh have kind of a "myth" of its own on the nsfw side of the internet. I find that added trait to be very interesting, and decided to do a piece with one. For me minotaurs kind of falls into the monster category rather than furry, but there is a resemblance, so I added it as an exception just in case. I'm not sure there is a line between furry and fantasy in the general sense, but as far as my list goes. Fantasy means elves, fairies, knights and dragons, rather than fluffy humanoids.




Q: Auction house is a fine piece. You have shown disappointment in your friends for not knowing what is going on. Add me to the list. What is going on?


A: Oh geeez if I knew you were going to poke into so many pieces I would have named them better ahaha.. *ahem* It's supposed to be some kind of sci-fi auction with a vendor displaying the goods for two potential buyers, by manipulating the mask. On the slab you can vaguely read "New arrivals, human, male".




Q: My favorite piece by you has to be Trophy. What inspired you to visit the time of the Romans with this piece? Will we see you revisit Rome again with your work?


A: I absolutely love the Roman aesthetic. And the coliseum, while immoral, is a pretty metal place. I wanted to show that the one raising the glass is a man of power, and what better way than a prime seat at the good ol' murder pits? I'm not sure I will say yes to Rome as a location, but I will definitely be burrowing from their designs!




Q: If someone were to ask me to show them your best work to summarize you, I would definitely say it is Alphy-nooo. It shows male on male, it's kinky, it's funny with the Kama Sutra, and it's fantasy. Using this piece as an example, what is the process that comes from your mind to the sketch and then to the final product?


A: Alphinaud (his full name) is a NPC in FFXIV, who is 18-19 as of the current game timeline. He always acts like a smartass who knows better, and sometimes ends up in messy situations because of it. He also has a knack for summoning, and is always finding new ways to improve his summons. I figure it's a pretty fitting setting for him to end up in. This is one of the first pieces I decided to try a painted colour style on lineart. I liked it so much I'm still practicing it to this day!




Q: Seeing your artwork over time I noticed that the feet are hidden. Whenever I did see feet it appears that this is where you have made the most improvement. I also love the way you draw hands. What advice do you have to give to those struggling to draw certain parts of the body?


A: KEEP DRAWING IT! Draw to references, ideally picture references. Keep drawing until your friends think you have a foot fetish. That advice applies to anything you're trying to improve really. When I first started drawing hands my friend thought I was painting a bag of snake escapees.




Q: How would you describe your style?


A: HMM a terrible amalgamation of comic book and manga? Or maybe comic books, in a parallel world, where artists have infinite time to paint all the panels.




Q: What is in your opinion, the definition of art?


A: Please sir, I'm but a humble cabbage, I have no idea how to even begin defining art. My closest guess is that it's the thing your hands make when you're happy.




Q: Will we see animation from you one day? Whatever your answer is, why?


A: I.. would like to, but first I need to find the sanity I lost during art school. IRL I had a chance of going into animation, but I kinda backed out of it, because the idea of drawing the exact same thing with the tiniest variation over and over again drove me nuts.




Q: The more I learn about NSFW artists I find it interesting that their skills in drawing humans and creatures tend to grow faster than others. Would it be wise to suggest other artists give this a try to improve or is it a niche style?


A: I think artists should go through life drawing classes, it's definitely one of the fundamentals! On your own or with school. You don't have to go full nsfw, you can just draw nude models. It only turns into nsfw when you have no self control and you agonize the fact that you've spent too many hours on one piece then get deflated when you lack the courage post it online where your parents and teachers follow you so then you secretly start a nsfw account to hide it all and then it becomes a balancing act-


..ehh sorry, where were we?




Q: What can we expect from semicabbage in the future?


A: More dudes! Doing really gay things! If that gets your pants wiggling, come by and say hi~ :D 

I'm hoping to do topic polls eventually, but for that I need a few more gardeners <3




Some of you reading may have seen an increase in NSFW artists being interviewed. Reason being is I wanted to focus on anatomy. There are tons of art classes that do nude modelling. It is a respectable form of artwork. Why can't we expand on that? semicabbage I came across while interviewing SenpaiLove and going through more NSFW art than you could possibly imagine. semicabbage's style is one I find incredible. I love the detail on the anatomy of the human male (or even elf). The lighting, shadow, and at times humor, are all top notch. This is no ordinary cabbage, it seems to have a lot of passion, and is giving me the eyes.




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Posted by TheInterviewer - July 15th, 2020


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Interview No. 162

Interview By: @The-Great-One


Today's guest is one of new fame here on Newgrounds, yet he has been here for quite some time. He most known on here for his series Sublo & Tangy Mustard. He has other series including Fester FIsh, and he has done work on the Netflix Original Series, BoJack Horseman. I am most pleased and privileged to welcome, @Aaron-Long.




Q: How did you find Newgrounds and why did you join?


A: I must've found Newgrounds around 1999 or so. A friend showed it to me at school and we would sneak onto it to play Flash games. Then we'd go home and watch parodies and tell each other about the best ones. Our early favourites included Sesamea Street and Scooby Doo Tension Tent. I really miss that early era of the internet when there were a bunch of small independent sites that had their own flavour, and you were just as likely to stumble onto weird art made by independent creators as you were a slick expensive product. Before it had been figured out how to algorithmically manipulate people's attention. Now it seems like most people mostly just browse a few major sites but I'm so happy that Newgrounds is still around and active.




Q: What can you tell us about Hot Rod and Stinker?


A: Hah I'm surprised you know about that! Hot Rod and Stinker was one of my earliest cartoon ideas, from when I was a kid. It was basically just a sibling duo based on my sister and me. I wrote a full season of scripts, drew a bunch of comics and storyboards and even wrote a short novel or two. Their parents, teachers and friends were based on ours, the stories were all just stuff I did as a kid... The funniest thing in retrospect is that as an 8-year-old, I thought by the time you were 11 you were pretty much an adult and so I had an "older cousin" 11-year-old character whose main personality trait was that he was always drunk. Later on I tried aging them up and writing high school stories with them but those were awful.




Q: Your influences include Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones. Three mavericks in their own respect at Warner Bros. How did each one influence you? Who is your favorite Looney Tunes character?


A: Hmm well with Bob Clampett, I guess it's more the animation in his shorts that I love rather than his direction or storytelling, which is often pretty sloppy. A lot of animators did their best, wildest work under him. But more than anybody else I feel like he leaned on the comedy crutch of pop culture references which mean his shorts don't hold up as well. Tex Avery is just the all-time master of staging a gag. His posing, timing, composition and everything are unparalleled. Chuck Jones, in his prime (about 1945-1955) is probably the best of the Looney Tunes directors at personality, although a lot of that is due to Mike Maltese's writing. Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin were also pretty great. I guess the downside with Friz and Chuck is that they stuck at it for so long you can see a long slow decline in their stuff, but at their peaks they were both amazing.


It's really hard to pick a favourite Looney Tunes character but here's a few-- Bugs, Elmer Fudd, Cecil Turtle, Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre.




Q: At one point you considered your drawing abilities terrible. Looking back on them what did you consider bad about them? What brought you to Max the Mutt College of Animation, Art & Design?


A: I mean I wasn't TERRIBLE, I was better than most kids my age at drawing, but I kind of rested on my laurels and didn't really improve between age 8 and 16. I just thought "ok I'm pretty good at drawing for now, I don't have to work at getting better." And then once I started making my own cartoons and thinking about applying to colleges I realized how much work I had to do. My drawings just didn't have any solid construction, my line quality was weak, I was stuck in lazy bad habits. I started getting better when I did a high school co-op internship at Chuck Gammage Animation. Chuck was great to me and gave me a lot of advice, and made me come to life drawing classes with him on Sundays. He also introduced me to the work of Jim Tyer, who's still one of my favourite animators. As for Max the Mutt, I was impressed by the art they had on display and figured it would be great if they could teach me to draw like that. Another big reason I went to MTM is simply that I didn't get into Sheridan haha! But it ended up being good that I wasn't at Sheridan living in residence because right after I started college, my dad had a bad head injury and I needed to be around a lot. If I had been out in Oakville at Sheridan I would've had to drop out and move back home, but Max the Mutt was only a 20-minute walk from our house at the time so I was able to keep going to classes.




Q: Counterpoint - The Story of the Baroque Orchestra was made for your music class and you got a perfect score on. Where did you get the idea for this? This has the potential for a fun educational series, any chance of expanding it in the future?


A: At that point I was starting to use Flash and I was delighted that I could finally make animated shorts like I'd wanted to for years. So I kept talking my teachers into letting me do projects as animated shorts. That was a music history project for my teacher Roy Greaves, who I also got to voice a character in my early cartoon Space Goose (which I used an episode of as another high school project!)




Q: What can you tell us about Fester Fish?


A: I made up Fester Fish shortly after starting at Max the Mutt, after watching a bunch of 1930s rubber hose cartoons. Space Goose had been very talky and I found it tedious to animate the scripts I had written, so I decided my next thing would be storyboard-driven. Fester Fish is basically a love letter to 30s and 40s animation. I completed one short each year while I was in college, although the school never had anything to do with the production and probably discouraged the extra-curricular work taking time away from my studies... It got me featured on Cartoon Brew a few times, and a bit of attention in the industry although I didn't realize it till later. People kept telling me to pitch Fester and I thought there wasn't much of a premise to pitch. But maybe I will someday, it's definitely a series I want to revisit!




Q: We now come to the series that has become a household name on Newgrounds and that is Sublo & Tangy Mustard. I work as a deli at a sub shop so this show does hit me on a personal level and I love it! Where did the idea come from? Will there be a Season 3?


A: After I moved to LA I didn't make a personal short for a couple of years but I was brainstorming ideas for them. I had plans to do more Fester Fish but I also wanted to do something that wasn't a pastiche of existing stuff, something more inspired by my own life in Toronto with my friends in my early twenties. I put a lot of my own personal experiences into it and the mascot suit idea was just sort of a gimmick so that the two protagonists were visually interesting and that it wasn't just a totally self-indulgent autobio project. Season 1 was written as six episodes but ended up just being the first 4, which we recorded in 2015. Then season 2/episodes 5-15 were written and recorded in 2017, and I'm only just finished that batch now! Yes I do want to make a season 3 and I have a bunch of episode ideas, but I'm not sure when it will happen yet. I think I need to take a break from it again (as I did after season 1) and recharge while I focus on my day job.




Q: There are two episodes I want to talk about more. The first one is Sublo & Tangy Mustard #13 - Convention. From beginning to end I love this episode, it has everything I like in a cartoon and more. There was a collaboration to help fill the other mascots, which I thought was a brilliant idea! Also I can tell you from experience that you hit the nail on the head when it comes to these conventions (although with a little hyperbole). How did you come up with this? Why did you decide to go with a train instead of a plane with plane jokes?


A: Yeah "Convention" is definitely based on a lot of real experiences at conventions. The gross crowds, the lame shows, confusing schedules, annoying youtubers filming stuff, VIP areas etc... it just seemed like there was a lot of material to mine, and I thought a performance evaluation would be a good topic for an episode that would stress out the characters. As for why the train, I just really like trains! I was excited to do a train scene and feature Toronto's Union Station.




Q: The season 2 finale hits home closer than it probably should've for me. Sublo & Tangy Mustard #15 - Picnic. How friends and co-workers lose their friendships and connections. How Katy doesn't want to be making sandwiches for the rest of her life. It was quite the serious moment and that ending was just perfect. How did this episode come to fruition? Why a picnic for the setting? Will we get to know these other characters more down the line?


A: Right from the beginning of the series I wanted to have the characters' relationships evolve over time. So in the first couple of episodes, Sublo and Tangy Mustard aren't really friends yet, they're just getting to know each other. And for the first few episodes Katy is kind of keeping them at arm's length, figuring they won't be around long. Eventually they go through enough experiences together they start to bond, despite the pranks and teasing, until by the end of episode 15 she actually considers them her friends and is hugging them, having vulnerable conversations with them, etc. She sees that deep down they're pretty decent, even though they're immature and a little obnoxious. I love in the Scott Pilgrim books how the friend group starts to dissolve about halfway through the series. I remember reading that and being shocked at how relatable it felt. So I wanted to hint at that happening in Sublo and Tangy Mustard too, with Sublo taking for granted that things will stay the same while Tangy Mustard and Katy only see this as a stepping stone to the next chapter of their lives. I related to both perspectives because I never want to stop hanging out with the same group of people, whether it's high school, college or a job... But it can also feel stifling to stay in the same place doing the same thing indefinitely. Particularly at the time I was writing season 2, I was debating whether to stay in what felt like a comfortable rut or take a chance and try to find more satisfaction in life.




Q: Your writing process for Sublo & Tangy Mustard I absolutely love. It is similar to what I do for my own writing, except using E-Mail for brainstorming is just genius. Do you use this process for your other works? When did you come up with this writing process? What changes have you had to make to it over time?


A: I don't think of it as a particular technique I came up with, it's just the easiest thing to do when you have a phone in your pocket! I wind up making a ton of notes and once I have enough notes on the same theme I start to piece them together into a story. Sometimes the notes are an actual story, but mostly they're just little snippets of dialogue, a visual idea, a scene or even a bit of music. Then I just piece together the plot in a way that uses the ideas effectively and hopefully fits a 3-act structure. It tends to be kind of like filling in the blanks, like "ok I need to get this character from X to Y so what plot can make that happen?"




Q: Despite Sublo & Tangy Mustard, my absolute favorite by you is DMX Meets David Bowie. This was hilarious! Why these two together? How difficult was it to get the dialogue together and then create cohesive conversations?


A: Thanks, DMX Meets David Bowie was probably the most purely fun time I've had making a short. I'd like to do more quick and dirty stuff like that. I'm obsessed with both DMX and David Bowie, and I had been doing audio mashups of DMX rapping over other songs-- some ABBA, Bo Diddley, Perfume, Yuji Ohno, Bowie and others. I started splicing DMX lines to make new sentences for the Perfume "Polyrhythm" one and it made me laugh so hard I started thinking about putting a little story together. DMX Meets David Bowie started as just a radioplay, sort of inspired by the bit in Winnie-the-Pooh where Tigger first shows up in the middle of the night. But when I played it to people they didn't find it as funny as I did-- and found some of the dialogue hard to understand. I figured adding visuals would help them see what I found so funny in my head. I really didn't want to spend a lot of time on it, and it seemed like it could be worthwhile even if it was a little rough and messy, so once I put together the characters' photo libraries I think I ended up animating the whole thing in about a week. Not doing lip sync really saves time!




Q: When and how did you become part of SHADOWMACHINE? What can you tell us about your work on BoJack Horseman? As a storyboard artist, animator, and director? What can you tell us about working on the series finale?


A: Hah I could write a book about working on Bojack, it was 6 years of my life! I got hired at ShadowMachine in 2013 based on some freelance animation I'd done for Scout Raskin, who was a producer at the studio. She had hired me to animate an independent short called Bakerman and the Bunnymen which she'd written, because of seeing my Fester Fish shorts which were in a similar style. Bakerman was like my part-time job in my last year of college. It finished right around when I graduated, so she invited me to come work on a sketch comedy series called Triptank. I moved to LA for what was initially just a few months, but then before the season finished I met my girlfriend Elizabeth and got hired on season 1 of Bojack, and it seemed like I may as well stick around in LA a little longer! Bojack was supervised by Mike Hollingsworth, who was also my director on Triptank, and still a great friend of mine. Working with Mike is always fun, and a big reason I stayed on Bojack for so long. After season 1 I was offered the choice of boarding on Bojack season 2 or directing on Triptank season 2, and I picked directing-- but I don't regret it because Triptank was SO much fun and very free, while season 2 of Bojack was a really tough production. I dodged a bullet there! And it ended up being good because it gave me some experience as a director, which eventually led to me directing on Bojack once a spot opened up in season 4. The team on Bojack was so great, I love all of them! I miss sitting in that room with the other directors, just constantly joking and laughing. A lot of it seeped into the show in small ways. There are a bunch of in-jokes that you probably wouldn't notice unless you worked on it!


Working on the series finale was hard because it was a bit like the "Free Churro" monologue episode-- it's a bunch of long, still conversations and it was a challenge to make that visually interesting! We also had a very short amount of time to do that episode but it ended up coming together alright. It's not my favourite episode I directed (that would probably be "Time's Arrow," "The Showstopper" or "Xerox of a Xerox") but it was definitely an honour to do the final episode and help figure out how we say goodbye to all these characters.




Q: What is in your opinion, the definition of animation?


A: Oh jeez I dunno, 'still images projected in sequence to create the illusion of motion' or something. But if you're asking what KIND of stuff I like-- I love acting that takes advantage of the medium to move characters in impossible ways that show their inner feelings. I also like really dynamic action. I like seeing complicated shapes being turned in perspective and knowing that it's all hand-made. I like seeing funny drawings move in funny ways. I like cutout, stop-motion, cel animation, stuff that's tactile. I'm not big on rigged animation or 3D. I prefer when stuff feels organic and handmade, when you can feel the life that people have put into it, and little imperfections that come through that process, rather than things being technically perfect. So I'm happy to keep a little aesthetically pleasing sloppiness in my animation.




Q: At what age did you become interested in music?


A: My parents were both musicians, so it was always kind of inevitable! I had a toy drum kit with my initials on it when I was about 3, and I used to take my mom's guitar and strum it upside down to mirror Raffi on TV. My mom made me start taking piano lessons pretty early, and for years I didn't really enjoy it, but I'm so glad I did it now because it gave me a solid basis for everything else. The lessons were all just simple classical songs but as I got older and more interested in the Beatles, I started teaching myself songs I actually liked which made a big difference. I have 'perfect pitch' which is this weird flukey thing where you can instantly tell what musical notes you're hearing, so it's not hard for me to learn songs. I played drums in band classes at school, jammed with friends and taught myself guitar and a tiny bit of banjo. It all helps with animation too because so much of animation is about timing, rhythm and spacing.




Q: Take a Break is a song that sounds like it was made with a bunch of samples, without using any samples. How the hell did you achieve that?


A: There have been a few moments when I've loved a song and then felt tricked when it turned out the part I liked best was just a sample. Stuff like "Shangri-La" by Denki Groove or some of Nujabes' stuff. I really like the sound collage effect that Pogo and others use in their music. I wanted to try capturing that 'sample' feeling but with original sounds so I treated them with different EQ and filters, and sometimes messed with the tuning a bit so that they'd sound a bit like warped vinyl.




Q: We are all guilty of procrastination. You were procrastinating on animation and made Stay Focused. What project were you procrastinating on? Why turn to making music for your procrastination? Should other artists switch gears to something else when procrastinating?


A: Hmm it was probably Sublo and Tangy Mustard! Sometimes you just get an idea in your head and have to record at least a demo before you lose it, and then sometimes that demo ends up getting so worked out that it becomes the final recording! And yeah definitely if you're stuck on something creatively, a good solution is to take a mental break from it and distract yourself with some other activity.




Q: What is in your opinion, the definition of music?


A: Definitions are hard! I guess any audio can be considered music. I think at this point more complex definitions are irrelevant! But in terms of my favourite music, I like a lot of 60s pop, UK post-punk, a lot of cheesy disco and funk and early electronic stuff. Some of my favourites include Beatles, Kinks, Bowie, YMO, Orange Juice, Talking Heads, Stereolab, De Lux, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Joe Hisaishi, Yuji Ohno, Daniel Grau, Raymond Scott, I should stop but I like a lot of music.




Q: I tend to ask creators what advice to those looking to get into the medium. You have answered that question before...


Always work on your personal stuff; it's what makes you stand out from the crowd


Do you still stand by this message? If no, then why? If yes, what would you expand on this piece of advice?


A: Yeah that's still my big advice-- don't wait for permission or funding to start making stuff, just do it on your own! I think it's good advice for people just starting out because making your own animation/art/comic is just a good way to get hired in general, and specifically on the kind of job you actually want because people will be able to tell what your strengths and interests are. And it's a good way to get recognition beyond just being an anonymous part of a show's crew.




Q: What can we expect from Aaron-Long in the future?


A: Pretty sure there will be more Sublo and Tangy Mustard coming up, and hopefully another Fester Fish short or two! Something new would be nice too-- I have ideas but I just don't have time to work on more than one personal project at once!




Aaron Long is Newgrounds modern day Adam Phillips. An animator whose works are regaled on Newgrounds, but has done a lot of professional work outside Newgrounds. It is a testament to the site that whether you move onto bigger or smaller things outside this site, it is a wonderful foundation to start on. A building block to expand beyond this site. If you are willing to put in the hard work and effort into your craft. Aaron Long is a wonderful example of this.




The Interviewer is a part of Dohn's Desk Productions

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Posted by TheInterviewer - July 8th, 2020


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Interview No. 161

Interview By: @The-Great-One


Today's guest is known throughout Newgrounds for his horror and humor. From Scratches, to his Still Spineless Series, to The Problem With Bill. His creations have horrified and brightened many a Newgrounds member with fear and sheer laughter. I am most pleased and terrified to welcome, @AntonM.




Q: How did you find Newgrounds and why did you join?


A: I remember one of the first times I ever visited the site was for the ‘Is That OK’ Dragonball Z video back when I was in early highschool, it’s still one of my all time favourites and I can’t remember if it was just a random google search result or if a friend linked it to me on msn. I only started to visit the site more regularly when I found Egoraptor and Yotam Perel’s cartoons on youtube, some of their cartoons were Newgrounds exclusive or they would reference the site a lot and it made me want to check it out. I would watch stuff here and there, mostly rewatch a lot of Yotam’s and Ego’s stuff. I remember Oney, Zach and Ukinojoe were putting out videos that a friend and I would quote endlessly. I got really inspired by what people were making and after a couple years I started to get the itch to make stuff too. I made an account and posted my first cartoon and a couple drawings in June 2013.




Q: At what age did you become interested in art?


A: I would always draw a bunch as a kid because I loved cartoons, I remember drawing a lot of Dragonball Z and Spiderman. I would draw comics in spare exercise books from school and try to do flip book style animation in them. One of my first original characters was a combination of this fox from a children’s book crossed with a Samurai Jack-esk robot and he’d just slice a bunch of monsters in half with a katana. I always loved any kind of art project at school too. There were a lot of inspirational shows that I watched on TV as a kid, not just the copious amount of funny and violent cartoons, but the show Art Attack really made me love making stuff even more.


I stopped drawing almost completely in highschool and my interests were changing to music and playing in a band, but after I found that a bunch of people are just making cartoons by themselves, Yotam’s videos in particular, it really inspired me to try it out. After posting my first cartoon, the second one got frontpaged and it really shocked me. It was really surprising to me that that happened and it gave me a huge confidence boost in making cartoons. I went to university and didn’t really draw too much for that first year, I made an album instead, but I was slowly realising that animation is what I loved to do the most and slowly started to pursue that more than my other hobbies. I think it was right at the start of 2016 where I was really looking into trying to improve in animation specifically, I never really kept a sketchbook prior but as soon as I got one I just filled it up quickly with a bunch of gesture drawings.




Q: Your craft tends to focus on the element of horror. What age did you become interested in horror? Where did it start, how did it grow over time?


A: As a kid the only horror I really remember actively wanting to watch was Courage The Cowardly Dog, it’s one of my favourite shows. I was way too scared to want to watch scary stuff or play any horror games though. A lot of the horror I saw as a kid were just weird tangents in otherwise non-horror stuff, the big one was the pink elephants in Dumbo, but there were many others, especially in games, the PS1 Rugrats had a nightmare upside down world with clowns and strange colours, and there was this PS1 demo disc with a dinosaur just walking towards the camera in a black void. I think that may have influenced what I like in horror a bit, normality that becomes strange and weird. As more horror shows started showing on TV, like Goosebumps and Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, I started to like it a lot more, in those kids shows there's a fun aspect of telling scary stories and stuff.


It was only when I was around 15/16 where I started really getting into horror, I was just discovering Kubrick’s films and I watched The Shining, it opened up the door of horror movies for me. I would look up more of that specific kind of atmosphere and that led me to Jacob's Ladder, which really cemented my love of the genre and from there, after researching a bit about this film, I found out that it was a major influence for the Silent Hill games. After playing the first four games in a row I was just blown away, I needed to make stuff like this.


When I went to university I remember friends telling me about David Lynch and weird Japanese horror films like Hausu and Noroi. Right now I’m getting more into manga and just re-watching/ playing old favourites for the most part. I don’t watch too much modern horror but Ari Aster’s two horrors have been amazing and the Suspiria remake was great too, I really didn’t think I would like it because I’m a huge fan of the original but it goes in its own direction and does so much with a loose connection to the original.




Q: Your works set out to sometimes make people laugh or scared. Either way you are building tension with a release at the end. How do you build your suspense and when do you realize what the final outcome should be?


A: Usually I want to express a certain thought or an emotion. Ideas on how to do it come to me in the form of a scene or a doodle of a character might make me project a story onto them. Shots just start to follow and connect to themselves if I like and think about the idea a lot. I try to build on each scene in a way that would hopefully add mystery to carry you all the way to the end of the cartoon. The final outcome always tends to change while making the video though, sometimes parts are added or taken away at the last minute. I feel that it’s more like writing a song, the video kind of tells you where it wants to go in a way, it has its own momentum. It all depends on the idea or feeling that I want to express too, the tone. I’ve seen so many horror movies and played so many games that I just like to play around with the silliness of horror suspense, for a joke or for something a little more sombre. I leave a lot to intuition and what feels right/ what would be fun or interesting to animate.




Q: One of your first movies on Newgrounds is entitled Ripped Off. It received a Daily Feature, however the page states that you removed it. Why was this?


A: There are a bunch of cartoons that I’ve deleted because they are just way too embarrassing haha. That may have been my fourth or fifth video and maybe if I muster up enough courage I’ll reupload them all one day and have a lil giggle. A lot of artists delete their early stuff and to be honest I’m a little disappointed that I can’t see their origins but at the same time…. I hope you never see those early vids of mine lol.




Q: When it comes to tension, you built it up in people with a twist that was surprising with Scratches. What can you tell us about this project and how you came to the ending?


A: Scratches was inspired by hearing that exact sound in my room A LOT back then. I had no idea what it was and I could never pinpoint where exactly it was coming from. At first I thought it was a mouse running about beneath the floorboards, scratching everything up but I never heard any squeaks... It turned out to be a bird pecking at the side of the house. 


The bird pecks would trigger the image of what the ‘real culprit’ in the video was and I feel like it’s a fun cliché of horror to have THAT kind of thing beneath the floorboards. I still like that last shot….




Q: I want to talk about the following movies. Still Spineless: CrowsStill Spineless: ArmsStill Spineless: The Tomb, and RIP IT OUT. What was the initial idea behind the Still Spineless Series? Will we see this story continue?


A: Still Spineless is a massive soup of everything I love. There is so much Silent Hill, Forbidden Siren and Bloodborne in it with a ton of movie, book and TV influences too. It was the story of how a small village tried to deal with a monster that appeared out of the woods one day. It would steal away citizens from the streets, leaving a bloody trail leading into the dark forest at the edge of town. It would show how the village broke down and how the people there were trying to survive.


I had so much fun making the first episode, the feeling of building this world and the characters in a mysterious and vague way was so gratifying and exciting! Doing the sound design might have been the part I had the most fun doing. It was one of the reasons I really wanted to make the series too, I dreamed of doing sound design and the score for horror stuff so I just made a show to do it. 


Arms, the second episode, was 10 minutes long (8 minutes of actual animation), I still can’t believe I did that. I remember it being quite gruelling but it was a really important bit in the story and I had to make it as strong as I possibly could. This was the first time I worked with voice actors too which was super fun! Dorrie voiced a cartoon called A Really Cool Girl and I really loved her performance in it and I’d been a huge fan of Piper’s work in The Finger Eater and Red Minus’ stuff too. 


For the third episode the style had a massive change, it’s pretty close to how I wanted the whole show to look from the beginning. The video was supposed to be structured like the previous 2 episodes, with a flashback at the beginning and the present time after but with the new, more detailed style and other stuff going on in life, I just couldn’t pull it off, so I just chopped it to the flashback and would try the second half next year. For this one I worked with Piper again but also another one of my favourite artists on Newgrounds, Deathink. I’d been a massive fan of his from when I first started visiting the site and after watching one of his streams, I knew he had the perfect voice for Vincent! 


The more and more I think about making another episode, the more I think that Rip It Out might be its finale. Making that cartoon in particular was really difficult. It changed sooo much as I was making it and became a little stressful to try and mould it into something I was happy with. After finishing it I had to take like 6 months or so off from working on another project to just do anything else, I can’t remember if I was even drawing much in that time. The project became devoid of fun while making it and I think it was because of the pressure I put on myself of making a ‘big’ cartoon every year for Halloween. Originally it was going to be fully shaded and after spending a month shading one shot I vowed to NEVER have shading in a cartoon ever again haha. I do think it’s my best-looking cartoon though, I love the inky black lines and the overall atmosphere. I think this and episode 1 are my favourites.


Rip It Out encapsulates a lot about what I wanted the series to be and is why it drops the SS title, it feels a little disconnected because it's almost a self-contained story, which is where I wanted to go with what I make in general. Even the third episode, The Tomb, was going for a self-contained feel. If I ever were to return I think the feel would just be way too different, to keep it in line with the other episodes I would really have to have a couple people help me out to get that specific anime-esk aesthetic and to get it out in a reasonable time. That or just make shorter episodes in a similar style that I have now which could happen one day.




Q: Still Spineless is a great example for writers and animators to take note of in terms of world building and character development. Especially so for horror. How did you know when the creature should be on screen and for how long? How the characters should respond to the creature? How much is show don't tell and how much should be kept vague?


A: This was all from trying to attain the same atmosphere of my favourite stuff. Alien is a big one of just don’t show the monster at all, I remember the Silent Hill games would always obscure the first reveal of the monster. I wanted to keep everything as vague as possible because I love David Lynch’s style of filmmaking. I’m just a fan of not revealing anything to be honest. Everything is scarier when you have less information about the thing.




Q: One of your best works in terms of animation alone is Infected. The way everything just naturally moves and the message it delivers. I must know the inspiration behind it.


A: That music video was born from the desire of self improvement and trying to figure out how to get better, where negative aspects of yourself come from and the fantasy of being all healed one day or at least better equipped to navigate through the world. I really liked using that imagery of that dark smoky room, the confusion and the hazy aimlessness that self improvement and a critical introspection brings feels exactly like this to me. There is a lot of Eraserhead in this cartoon, it’s one of my favourite films. I really like the idea of removing a ‘disease’ from your body in a violent way, it’s in Rip It Out too, I wish things were that easy lol.




Q: Nightmare Installed is a creative idea from beginning to end. What can you tell us about working on this project and will we see it expanded in the future? Perhaps as a game?


A: That was for the bad dream jam and it was made pretty late into it, I had to rush it because I just couldn’t come up with a good enough idea. I was also putting all my focus on making Rip It Out too. A few of those ideas came from dreams I’ve had and just general funny anxieties of mine. I would love to make a game about it, that’s a great idea, it would probably play a lot like LSD: Dream Emulator and Yume Nikki. I just downloaded pico-8 the other day and I’m pretty excited to try out some small basic game development….




Q: My absolute favorite by you has to be The Last Campfire Tale. It was scary, creepy, and hilarious. Where did the idea for Old Man Lindy come from? Why did you decide to do a campfire tale?


A: This was born from The Beatles method of writing a song where you start with a title and go from there. It was a method that Mega64 would use, I first heard of it when they were talking about how they make their videos. This was in a batch of titles with Green Potato as well and the idea for Campfire was pretty much fully formed back then in 2017. It immediately conjured up ‘Are You Afraid Of The Dark?’ vibes and this video was a little bit of a parody of that show, down to the characters looking like the actors and the dust they throw on the fire at the beginning. 


I have no clue where Lindy came from haha, he might have come from a funny doodle I made once, I’m not sure, all I know was this cartoon just fell out of the sky and into my head, it was a rare one where very little was changed while making it. I actually had to start the video from scratch because I was using a more detailed style that was just taking too long and I was starting to get bummed out with it. With this cartoon I really learnt that the more simplified the characters look the more fun it is to move them around. The style is heavily inspired by Creepshow, a really fun horror movie from 1982. I wanted to push the animation for this one, I think I was just finding Masaaki Yuasa’s films around then and got instantly inspired by his loose, dynamic, lively animation.




Q: As a writer I always try to figure out where the story is going to go before the ending. A lot of your movies have had me guessing where it was going to go. The one that really got me though was The Problem With Bill. At first I thought that Bill was going to be an alien. Then it turns out everybody is an alien. I was not expecting Bill's response to this revelation nor the ending which I laughed so hard at. You said you had fun making it, especially with the sound design. Could you elaborate more into the process?


A: Bill came from a lot of different places, I don’t work at an office but two of my friends do and initially I was going to make a cartoon about a specific thing one of my friends was going through at his place, it was about a guy who stunk 24/7. But I decided to merge the environment of an office with the thoughts I was having at the time with my job, mixed with my friend’s office woes too. And plus you gotta make an office cartoon as an animator, it's up there with Dragonball Z parody.


With the sound design I remember it being really fun because I was working fast and tried to be as dumb as possible, it became apart of how to make the cartoon funnier. In a previous cartoon The Song from a Dream, I had a lot of fun making the sounds for that too, but with Bill it was for comedy instead of straight horror. A lot of it was just “what if I add these heavy, serious drums?” or “what if his voice just gets demonic here?” Just playing around and experimenting, but in particular, abstracting, I don’t remember doing that all too much in vids before Dream Song.




Q: We now come to a tragic and yet beautiful story that I believe everybody can relate to on some level. It is the grim tale of A Crack In My Skin. A lot of people are going to have different interpretations on this story. What could you tell us about the story?


A: It's funny, I think this video did so well because of ol’ covid, but this was a cartoon that I started to make way before any of the quarantines started. I guess a lot more people were forced to experience that kind of feeling lately. While making it with all the quarantines coming into effect I really wondered if it was a good idea to make the video or not. I didn’t know if a darker cartoon would be appropriate and I think most people did walk away from it with a negative reading too… I wonder what people would think of it outside of covid. I don’t really want to share my intentions with what the cartoon means or what the ending is because it will kill the interpretation of the person reading this. I’ve seen a bunch of weird and personal readings for it and would love to see more! 


This one had a few inspirations, there are four posters in Cera’s room and if you can recognise them you’ll find out a little bit more of who she is. Stylistically, there is a lot of Japanese horror in this, all four posters are Japanese media too. Manga was a big influence too, my two favourite mangakas are Junji Ito and Hideshi Hino, I also love the Fuan No Tane series. I re-watched/ played a bunch of Japanese horror films and games at the time to best express the style and mood I wanted to go for, The Grudge movies, the Forbidden Siren games. I wanted that specific dark, gloomy, melancholy of Kiyoshi Kurosawa movies and a lot of the spacious shot composition was inspired by Cure and Pulse, I love those shots, it’s such a simple, effective way of showing how isolated a person feels.


This cartoon is very personal and I really love the sound design in this one, there are a lot of little details that I wanted to nail. I think I spent the most time with sound effects in this one than for any of my other shorts, usually I can get it all done in a day but for this one it took four or five. It might have been the least fun to actually sound design though lol, just a lot of fine tuning.




Q: What is in your opinion, the definition of animation?


A: Animation is the movement from one image to another. It’s my favourite art form, it is so limitless in what you can do to express an idea with. There are so many styles and all of them have their own rabbit hole of intricacies and specific qualities only that technique can achieve, each feeling different not only with how the images/ clay/ models move but in how you can create it, the process of it. I don’t think that there are any universal rules for how an animation should be but each animator has their own goals and crucial aspects of the medium. For me the only rule I try to keep is to make the process as fun as possible. Animating can be gruelling and so slow sometimes, especially if you’re pretty impatient like me, so if you can find a method to make the whole process enjoyable and efficient, you won’t feel overwhelmed and your next project won’t be as daunting.




Q: What is in your opinion, the definition of horror as a medium?


A: Horror is like a set of symbols/icons or a kind of theme. It uses darker and maybe grotesque imagery to achieve so many different reactions from you, not just fear. Some of my favourite directors have used the genre of horror as a ‘mask’. You use the tropes, the mood, the face of horror to express an idea in a much more effective way than you could in any other genre or visual style. I know Andrzej Zulawski and Kiyoshi Kurosawa have both talked about this mask, sometimes a specific idea can only be portrayed with darker colours. To me these images are also really fun to explore, there is some kind of exciting aspect to watching and making horror stuff. I also just enjoy delving into darker subjects, probably because I’m just a moody guy anyway.




Q: What can we expect from AntonM in the future?


A: Right now I’m working on a cartoon and I’m around halfway through the animation, it’ll be out one of these days. In the far future I don’t know, I hope I can make as much stuff as I possibly can, forever! That’s my biggest dream, just that I can keep going, maybe get a little faster too… I would also love to make a couple small games, I just need to crack it open and learn how.




AntonM I have absolutely no problem of giving the title of Newgrounds Master of Horror. He knows his timing, pacing, and execution down to the letter. When I first saw A Crack In My Skin on the front page I instantly knew there was something special here. As I was going through his works, he made me laugh, he made me frightened, he made me paranoid. After researching for this interview I was not able to sleep because every sound in the house made me jumpy, I have Scratches to thank for that. So naturally I watch something light hearted to calm my nerves. I've seen every episode of The Berenstain Bears now. All I can say about Anton is that there is a lot to learn from him. I can't wait to see what he brings us next.




The Interviewer is a part of Dohn's Desk Productions

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