Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

Hey everyone!

Ok so I've been away for a while... a long-ass while. 2009 was a pretty crazy year trying to come back after it seemed like every single artistic project I was being commissioned for lost all balls and went into lock-down for fear of the global economy collapsing into a brilliant, but deadly, black hole of poor.

But you know what?! 2010 has been great! My freelance projects have been the best kind, the ones you can't talk about (them's the highest payin's ones's). While that's great for me professionally and economically, my personal projects have been taking longer to complete since most of my days are locked up and when I DO find time to work on something, it can't be too long or momentum will run out before I get a chance to really get anywhere. That's where these "microshorts" are coming from...

I've been noticing that people are not so happy with how short they are. That's a fair criticism and it's really not my place to say if it is or isn't anyway... I create content and happily put it out there for people to consume and I welcome critiques and comments; I don't, however, want people to feel cheated when they click on a link with my artist title to it and only see a 10-20 second one-joke clip.

The original idea was that after I released "Three's Horrible: Part I" in 2008 in the Halloween Collection and I got some great comments, I was completely gone in 2009. 2010, for all the work I was getting, was starting to look the same way and I came up with the idea of WHILE I was working on a larger personal project I would do 2 things:

1 -- I would produce a Video Blog series to show people what I actually go through when I'm creating an animated short from start to finish... concept, dialog, sound fx and music, right through the final animation

2 -- I would produce so called "microshorts" which would be at a length I could reasonably start and finish in between freelance projects (this happened to be about 10-20 seconds long) that would give people a little joke, a little something to smile at, and at the end of which I would merge together into a longer short which I could release with my "real" animated short that I will have been working on in tandem (the one with the Video Blogs).

This, I thought, would put enough varied content out there while I was doing freelance projects I couldn't talk about and working one a personal project that wouldn't be done for months that people who cared would be happy to see what I was doing.

I'm now thinking that this plan might be backfiring if my name is starting to become synonymous with "microcontent." Maybe it would help if I could show my VLOGs on here but they're 10 minutes each and... well... videos. But check them out if your interested anyway: http://rubberonion.blogspot.com/search /label/VLOG

So here's where you come in: I would really like to hear what YOU think about what I'm doing. Are the microshorts too short to be enjoyable? Are they not worth producing at all? I'm always trying to grow as a creator and I think Newgrounds, for all the things I hear from other people about getting "bad criticism", is a great place to find out what people REALLY think about your work.

Thanks in advance, and no matter what my next content piece turns out to be from this learning experience... I hope I'll see you there!

--
Stephen

As my first news post on Newgrounds I'm not entirely sure what to write because if you're reading this you already know my history on this site... it just started.

I posted "Three's Horrible" as my first submission here for Halloween 08 and it's been doing pretty well so far so all that have supported it and me by proxy -- thank you! My love of the great early horror movie monsters, movies, and their lore... as well as all the myths and legends behind not just the creatures but also the people who played them gave me the idea to create "Three's Horrible".

A lot of thought went into it before I ever put pencil to paper and the over all plot for the next few episodes is already fleshed out. There was some hesitation as to whether or not it would strike a chord with enough people to justify continuing with the series but decided to put my faith in it and tack on the "part I" after "the end" for my first submission here. I'm happy to say that because of the great reception it's been given I can completely justify continuing the series. I look forward to showing you more with these characters and why I decided to start this series in the first place.

Happy Halloween!

-Steve