Interview No. 179

Interview By: @The-Great-One

Patreon Post Date: Mar 9, 2022

Today's guest is a highly praised creator here on Newgrounds. His animation style moves seamlessly between his movies and games. From hit such as 'Save the Sock', 'DUCKS!', and 'Brain-Toasting Dungeon', all of which have won him the Daily Feature. To works as Win & Corn - 'Draw a Card' and 'Dogs of the Planet', which have won him the Triple Crown, the Daily Feature, Review Crew Pick, and Weekly 1st Place awards. With 'Dogs of the Planet' winning multiple accolades outside of Newgrounds. 'Brain-Toasting Dungeon' would win the 1st Annual Flash Forward Jam for Best Movie with Interactive Elements. I am pleased to welcome @Butzbo.

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

A: My first approach to NG that I recall was from a friend from school showing me the classic video game sprite animation Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom, it was so much fun to watch so I continued looking for more sprite animations and over time I kept finding them hosted on Newgrounds.

As a spanish speaking kid, my english was super limited at the moment, but thankfully there was a good amount of animations without dialog, and over time I slowly began finding my way around the site and portals.

I also kept finding more of the other unique animations (highlights like the YuYu and Salad Fingers), and probably after a few months of watching and playing Flash (by 2006) I finally began goofing around with Flash 5 and a tiny Genius tablet, and decided to make a little animated project to see what could happen, so around that time I finally made an account.

Q: When and how did you get interested in art and animation?

A: Not the most surprising answer, but as a fan of cartoons as a kid I spent a lot of time just drawing and trying to make my own characters, inspired by shows I liked (Rocko's Modern Life, Dexter's Lab, Spongebob just to name a few).

I was intrigued to try animating with more classic attempts such as flipbooks and making stop motion with toys. During school I never considered it as a possible 'career' at all, it was much more of a curiosity, but once I discovered the accessibility of Flash I got more seriously intrigued to focus on animation.

Since a big starting influence were sprite animations, I actually made a few attempts with videogame sprites, but quickly grew bored and decided to try my own weird characters to see what could come out. After managing to finish my first flash cartoon (Solar Burn) I was eager to keep using this new found power.

Q: What brought you to Design School?

A: When I was finishing 'Enseñanza Media' (the Chilean equivalent of high school) I wasn't 100% sure of what to study, I actually liked maths and physics and considered something closer to that, some kind of computer engineering or even aiming at something like astronomy.

However, after learning a bit of drawing and digital editing softwares (extremely basic stuff, but good enough for the time) I got more inclined to study something in that line.

By that time I was already interested in animation, but that was a pretty new option to study in Chile so I wasn't as convinced with the alternatives available at that moment. So finally, design school seemed like a decent balance between creativity and technology with (hopefully?) enough occupational fields.

Q: What can you tell us about Loopdeloop?

A: Loopdeloop is a community event in the form of bi-monthly challenges where participants make a loop based on a theme, then those loops go to their site and are screened at a few locations.

Q: What can you tell us about your works on Pencilmation?

A: Around 2015 I was ready with Design School, and had just started doing freelance work, that's when I was contacted by Ross Bollinger, the creator of the series, who had seen my animations on NG, to begin collaborating on a new batch of episodes for his channel.

It was among my first commissioned cartoon animation works, and an entertaining one at that considering the simplicity of characters and the graphic gag-based humor, since these shorts were simple in elements, there was an important design vision to them to make the most out of these simpler assets and keep a clean composition, which also made it a good challenge, they've done quite well on Youtube so it's surprising to see how much reach those cartoons have gotten.

I animated around 6 episodes around that time, and later on I continued working on color palette design for many more of them.

Q: How have sponges inspired your works?

A: While that's more of a goofy profile line, when I try to describe my work I usually think of my characters as squishy and spongy creatures in the way they move and have usually large eyeballs, so I guess that kind of counts, haha

Q: Your first movie here on Newgrounds is entitled Solar Burn. What can you tell us about this first movie? How do you feel looking back on it?

A: Ooof! That was the first time I decided to upload an animation to the internet, I remember just learning how Symbols worked on flash and being excited to make characters walk and run through the screen with the basic 'Motion Tweens'! it took me about a week and I was really proud at the moment, especially as it wasn't blammed! (It may have entered the portal with around a 2.50 score, phew). Now, looking back it is a bit of a mess, I had no idea about how to animate a run cycle at all and I recorded some audio which may be kind of painful to hear, haha.

But anyway, with details like the pictures of food and the explosions in between, it does feel like a 'very mid 00's' flash cartoon to me, so looking back there may be a little bit of charm in that sense.

Q: What can you tell us about the Chilemonos Animation Festival and the Mantequillo animated shorts?

A: The Chilemonos Animation festival is the biggest animation festival in Chile, and also a big one South America, one of my favourite events which I rarely miss. They bring international guests of all kinds, and get a great selection of shorts every year.

It also has a latin american specific category where I've participated with shorts a couple of times and is always a great event to meet creative folks.

In 2016 the festival had their first version of a Cartoon Network Latinoamérica pitching contest. where artists from the continent could pitch a show idea in front of content executives. My pitch was this small series called Mantequillo, a kid made of butter who had to face the daily challenges of being slippery and easily melt down (based on a small round of webcomics I had made with the character), it was the winner of that year contest and we later went into a phase of production for a couple of small shorts (the length of interstitials (15 seconds) shown on commercial breaks), there wasn't much more development after those mini episodes, but even to this day I'm surprised by the fact that a short cartoon of mine aired on Cartoon Network.

Q: You have participated in the Newgrounds Annual Tournament of Animation in both 2013 and 2014. What drew you to these competitions? What was it like competing with the other animators on Newgrounds?

A: Similar to events like Loopdeloop, when I have the time I try to join these creative contests to keep practicing and have an excuse to explore different ideas. During both years I was still in design school, so it was challenging to make a small short film in around 3 weeks for each round, but I was eager enough to participate even during more demanding exam seasons.

The competition was a lot of fun, they had a theme for all animators, and in each round, after uploading my take on it, it was also a great reward to finally watch how the other animators gave their own spin to the theme.

In the 2014 event I made it to the finals against Stejkrobot where we had to make something inspired/in the style of the other animator based on what we had seen on our previous submissions, it was kind of an epic animation showdown. My short was Chicken castle, an action short with robots which was easily the most complex short I had animated at the time (maybe even anime-like in some aspects, but that's stretching a bit). I ended up pretty close with 2nd place. It's quite fun to go back and rewatch those shorts. Those 2 tournament events were pretty unique experiences, and for me it was like taking a bit of a crash course to keep up the animation practice, I highly recommend these types of events, such as the more recent NG Animation Jams.

Q: What can you tell us about animating in Mario Paint?

A: That was a fun curiosity, shout outs to the Gaming Historian for making a documentary on it focusing quite a bit on the creative aspects of the SNES software.

Once in a while I would find some medium that looks fun and weird -but also approachable- and just give it a go. In my case I sadly don't have the original Snes setup so I found a way to make it on my PC by animating on my tablet. I made this tiny animation with 'fish' characters.

It was a fun experience to try animating something with more basic technology, for example there's no 'onion skin' so you would have to animate by copying the previous frame and editing it. It takes a while but the retro interface is fun to interact with so it had its charm.

Also you could use the music from the Mario Paint composer so you could do a bunch more stuff with it.

I don't think I would recommend it for something more complex due to its limitations and setup required, unless the 'retro charm' of animating on a SNES is enough to intrigue you.

Q: You won the first annual Flash Forward Jam in 2021 for Brain-Toasting Dungeon. You have stated in the description...

"So for the Flash Jam I wanted to make something technically simple but taking advantage of features I miss from the 'golden age' of Flash animations, I really liked the simple interactivity of buttons getting you to different segments of animations, so I focused as much as possible on this simple 'mechanic' to make a little adventure. Enjoy!"

The process behind this is a lot of history in working with Flash. How would you describe the golden age of Flash?

A: To me this was the era of early to late 00s, I would describe it as an era of sprouting creativity, when all of the sudden making animated cartoons became more approachable, with absolute freedom on what you wanted to make, from parody content, to completely new and refreshing original animations which wouldn't have a chance in other spaces

at the time. One thing specific to my Flash Jam submission was the interaction with buttons which in flash can be freely customized as you'd like, even including details such as scene selection, easter eggs or mini-games within animations, it's a unique feature which is pretty much gone in the more contemporary and standard landscape to watch video/animation online.

Q: One of your most ambitious projects which would win you the Daily Feature, Weekly 1st Place, and Review Crew Pick on Newgrounds hitting the Triple Crown, as well as multiple awards and recognition outside of Newgrounds would be entitled 'Dogs of the Planet'. A project that you worked on for half a year. When AlmightyHans was here we talked about The Ballad of CrippleKane. A year long project that consumed his life. How did working on 'Dogs of the Planet' affect you? Where did the project begin and when did you know it was done?

A: Dogs of the Planet began as a little innocent Loopdeloop submission for DOGS, I had asked my musician pal Moralo Gonzalez to make an acoustic song for that loop describing each of those dogs. Months later I kept on thinking on how this animation could evolve into something larger, kind of a musical-short or video-clip, and decided to give it a go!

Narrowing it down, it probably took around 3 months pre-production (everything from choosing and designing these dogs, making an structure for it and working with Moralo on the first rough version of the song) and then 3 months of continuous non-stop animation, those last months were much more heavily dedicated to the project, I was animating around 4 hours per day after I was done with my regular job, and even more during the weekends, so I would agree with the life-consuming bit, but on a shorter scale in this case. As much of my free time as possible went straight to continuing with the short.

I think every involved personal project that takes more than 2 or 3 months to complete comes with an extra challenge of endurance, over time you question if you're making progress, if it will be worth the effort and even if you should be doing something else with your limited time! Not the most exciting part, but I've found ways to get through defining some clear reasons and motivations to finish it, which helps a lot to get over those dry moments, also working with Moralo was fun and helpful to always share and discuss the progress and gags.

In terms of calling it done, I gave myself the deadline of hopefully being able to screen it at the Chilemonos Animation Festival, thankfully I managed to make it and send it over just in time - and pretty glad I did! it had a pretty good response at the premiere-. I could have taken more time on details, but the deadline helped me to prioritize finishing it.

Dogs of the Planet was also my first 'serious' shot at going through a bit of a festival circuit, and for a first time, it was quite decent. It got 10+ selections in animation events, and a couple of awards! One of the most notable being "Ojo de Pescado", a Chilean festival focused on shorts for children, where it had an awesome response.

Q: Your art style is not only unique, but it's a style that you transition seamlessly to both movies and games. What differences do you approach in animating movie scenes versus gameplay?

A: One example is what happens with anticipation, one of the defined 12 principles of animation, with the idea that a character should show some build-up to each relevant action they take in order to make it stronger and more believable, for example if I animate a character jumping, it would normally go in a squat position before rising up. But if I'm working on a platformer game, when a protagonist jumps, the player commonly expects it to be jumping as soon as they press the button, so in that case, this anticipation is either reduced to a minimum, or completely skipped.

An opposite example in this case could be an enemy character, for example on an action game, while animating an enemy or boss, the way it moves should give some information to the player on how (and when) to react, so if a boss is about to throw a punch, it should be clear and telegraphed enough so that the player has a chance to move away. Meanwhile in a short film it would be all planned so there's only one defined outcome to that moment and the timing for these movements would instead be in service of a more engaging visual display.

Q: One thing I've noticed when interviewing so long is that those who go to school and come to Newgrounds learn from both. What are the differences in education from schooling and Newgrounds?

A: On my case, while I don't do much 'standard' design work, I did get a lot of takeaways from Design School, being there in person I practiced presenting projects and explaining design decisions, and also technical things like color and composition, and there's also the recurring highlight that you hopefully meet people with similar interests, in my case with my previously mentioned pal Moralo González who has made a lot of music for my animations.

But also in general the concrete learning is that you get what the school's program is focusing on. One unique thing about my school is that there was a good variety of classes you could choose from, for example I could have gotten more into industrial or textile design but that was faaar from my interests so I went more towards graphic design and even motion graphics when it was an option.

In comparison, in Newgrounds you normally participate voluntarily on what you personally want to try out, so the main different would be that the Newgrounds experience teaches you to be more proactive and try to solve problems even if they are out of your area, either by reaching out to collaborate, or just motivating yourself to explore and try out something different. In my case, most of what I've learned about sound editing -which may be quite basic, but decent enough for my animations- has been by making stuff for Newgrounds.

On that note I really like the concept of Newgrounds as an open school of some kind, where you participate in projects and learn stuff while sharing it with the community.

Q: BoMToons has collaborated with multiple members here and has expressed interest in collaborating on a point and click adventure game with you. Perhaps turn your latest work 'Klecc and the Marble of Time' into a game?

A: That's right we've yet to make a collaboration! should be fun for a jam or something of the like, I think one should always have a little extra time reserved for collabs.

The little loop of 'Klecc and the Marble of Time' took quite a while with the experimentation with a recorded moving background, but at the same time it makes me think of how much fun it would be to make a whole Point and click game with that aesthetic, I'll have to think about it!

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

A: A few things, hopefully, the semi-recent experience of making an animated short from beginning to end (Dogs of the Planet) and attempting the 'festival circuit' for a while was a pretty satisfying one, even with the required effort and discipline.

So I have the plan of continuously working on shorts when I get the chance, I do have a few possibilities around which I hope to develop over time.

On the other hand, making art for games is also one area I'm pretty interested in. I'm currently working making artwork and animation for the indie game Bounce Castle, a mix of a strategy/skill game I'm working on with Robot Monkey Brain, hopefully we'll get to publish more updates soon, that's one area I'd definitely like to keep working on.

I first found out about Butzbo through his game 'DUCKS!' while doing The Tank Tribune. It was a Daily Feature win. After I looked through his other works, I chose him as a Featured Artist for The Tank Tribune. After that I put him on my list of potential interviewees. I offered an interview with The Interviewer as a prize for the Flash Forward Jam and he won! I got a chance to see all of the incredible works he has done. It is amazing that he was introduced to the site the same as I was. Through Randy Solem and "Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom". I am glad he was. His knowledge and art are greatly appreciated here on Newgrounds.

The Tank Tribune is a part of Dohn's Desk Productions

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