Hi!
This is the post mortem recap for ratbasterdz i previously spoke of. I've been dragging my feet about it, but given that it's the new year and I just turned 25 (and am realizing as I write this that this project began when I was 23 and the original idea is from when I was 21 x_x), it felt like a good time to send off this thing that’s been such a massive part of my life for the past god knows how long.
PREPRODUCTION
I originally had the idea for these characters back in my senior year of college, late 2019, for a “Series development” class assignment. The night before this class I had gone to a hardcore show at some dive bar, and the frontman for the opening band was literally Rodney. He was this super short meaty dude stomping around screaming LET’S HEAR IT FOR DIRTY FUCKIN JERSEY STEP THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKIN PUSSIES to a room of like, three people including me. After the band I had actually came there to see played later in the night, I heard him clowning on them for being “myspace bullshit”, despite the other band’s act being way more put together and creative. As soon as I had to start the assignment, the character of Rodney came out pretty much fully formed based on this brief set of observations. The general dynamic of the trio came that easily as well, though the other two were both a lot less developed in comparison– Jay was more of a scumbag, Wade was more chill and less nerdy.
Originally it was set in Alaska, as I thought the more hyperbolic the isolation was the funnier it’d be.
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That iteration of the characters and world feels very foreign now, despite at it’s core being pretty similar. Everything was more situation based than character driven (band has to book a show, band has to shill demo tapes, etc). Now that the characters are more developed, I find what can come naturally from putting these drastically contrasting personalities together far more interesting than any of that. Something I wanted to hit early on was that these guys all really have no reason to be friends or hang out, are generally pretty incompatible, but are forced together by the fact that they are the only other people in their vicinity that share this mutual niche interest. A lot of this was based on living in the middle of nowhere for most of my younger life. I wanted to capture that specific sort of frustration that comes with wanting to make stuff with other creative people but being sort of screwed geographically, which I felt like a lot of people could probably relate to.
The original iteration of the “UNDERGROUND” script was written for this class early 2020, intended as more of a one off short for an assignment where we had to write a bunch of hypothetical “episodes”. Story beats were for the most part pretty similar, but a lot more underdeveloped, less exposition-ary introducing of the characters and stuff. Cut and dry- Rodney harasses a record producer over the phone, the gang blows up the web with insane lies about him, all the lies turning out to be true and the gang gets enslaved by illuminati mole people.
I was really stoked on the world and characters and then for some reason I just dropped it for a long time. I don’t remember why, i just remember getting sick of it, which is ironic because now I never shut the fuck up about it.
Cut to the beginning of 2021. I got my first studio gig, and while i was thankful for the opportunity, it quickly became soulcrushing. It was hardly even animation, just mindlessly clicking and dragging rigs around and timing every motion exactly the same regardless of context. I’d be clicking keyframes for 10-11 hours, and by the end of the day wanted to be anywhere else other than my desk.
One night after work I watched the CKY movies on a whim and it just hit me, like– fuck man, whatever happened to this? Just making videos because you want to and because it’s fun. Making something that you and your friends would want to watch because you aren’t seeing anyone else making it. Nobody seems to just make FUN things anymore. This is what it’s all about. Like, that was the whole reason I got into animation– I didn’t give a fuck about some job, I wanted to make cartoons! That night for the first time in a long time I felt totally creatively revitalized and decided I was going to make something again. This is the ethos that inspired every aspect of the project, and why it was so important it went on Newgrounds first, which I’ll get into later.
I decided I wanted to revamp my old metalcore rat band idea. This was March 2021 I think. @Pjorg and I got together and started grinding out the story, trying to make something that could function as either a standalone short or as a jumping off point for more if I wanted to. I wanted to do a 3-5 minute short that I was gonna make on my nights and weekends while at the studio. Obviously it ended up being way longer than that, but I didn’t realize just how long until I’d started boarding it. I went with the previously mentioned premise of them harassing the record exec because out of the ideas I’d come up with, it felt the most funny and fleshed out. It was tricky trying to fit everything into one cartoon- I wanted to have this main storyline, but also wanted to have the other secondary characters of Deacon Duck and Mr. Castaneda introduced and established, as they were some of my favorite parts of the stuff I’d come up with for the class back in college.
My biggest fear was doing that thing so many “episode one”-s do where instead of telling a compelling story, they just introduce you to 100 characters that you don’t care anything about and then the episode’s over. We wanted to prioritize everything feeling natural, learning about the characters as the story itself progressed through their actions, character acting and dialogue. The whole purpose of the first scene with them performing in the parking lot was to throw you into that right off the bat, showing the personalities of the characters based on what they were playing and how they played it. Mr Castaneda became a PC Repairman instead of a businessman to help tie everything together, giving the gang a reason to have access to hundreds of computers. This also made his design funnier and more indicative of his character– that he’s dressing up in a full suit and tie for a job that doesn’t require it, and one that he runs himself. Deacon had always run the convenience store so it was easier to fit him in. From the idea’s inception he was a character the trio looked up to because he let them use the parking lot as a venue, and because he was the only “adult” that they didn’t think was a stiff. So he naturally became the arbiter of them launching their flamewar. Once I started working on the real cartoon I decided to ditch the Alaskan thing as I decided I could give a way more authentic appraisal of the southeast, as I’ve lived there for most of my life and at it’s core that’s what the theme came from. I thought it’d be cool too because you rarely see the south represented in media other than by LA writers who’ve never even been there regurgitating the same tired stereotypes. The location of Bluxton county itself and it’s residents is something I want to explore a lot more going forward.
I know Pat was thinking a lot about the Richard Linklater movie Slacker during the writing phase– for some reason or another I kept coming back to Richard Linklater movies throughout the production, always unintentionally, which I think had a pretty big influence on things as well. In addition to the early Bam Margera projects, the Tenacious D show and movie were a big influence early on as well.
I started redesigning and reworking the characters around this time too. Wade had always been a stiff, technical musician to contrast with Rodney’s abrasive and impulsive nature (and lack of ability), but I decided to base him more off more of a sword n sorcery, power/prog metal fan to increase the gap between the two of them, as Rodney is more of a hardcore punk guy which is about as far as you can get from that in the realm of heavy music. Jay’s look became more directly influenced by old metalcore bands instead of being a generic long hair crustache guy, and in general became more appealing I think. Less of a scumbag, more of a happy burnout. Deacon became shorter and more unhinged looking. Mr Castaneda had the most radical overhaul as I probably redesigned him like three or four times, he kept falling into the uncanny valley of looking too human. Wyatt Wiesel also took quite a while because I was having to design him totally from scratch as he didn't even exist as a proper character before this.
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Summer of 2021 I hit a dry spell with work, which gave me some time to prioritize boarding the cartoon, usually 9-12 hours every day. By the time I timed it out I realized it was probably like seven minutes. When I did a dry read doing the voices over the animatic I realized it was gonna be more like ten. I really wondered at this point if this was something I wanted to see through till the end or if I wanted to just finish the boards and call it a day. But, everything was flowing so naturally, I decided to stick with it.
I got offered another studio gig on this crappy news show around the time I finished up the first big draft of the boards. I reluctantly accepted thinking “if this goes great I’ll stick out doing industry stuff, if I hate it I’m gonna find something else.” It went comically bad, unbelievably insane levels of bad, which I took as divine intervention that I needed to get the fuck out.
The entire duration I was there (Aug-Nov 2021), there was next to no progress made on the cartoon. Working on one of the worst shows to ever air had really killed my spirit, and a dozen production issues seemed to hit all at once which totally stunted all the momentum. Once again I was wondering if I should just drop it. But, losing my job in November became the second kick in the ass I needed to make this thing. I’d grown pretty sour towards the industry during my short stint in it, and I wanted to fuel that into something constructive, and once again, get back to what making cartoons is about. Something fun and with some real passion behind it.
Around this time my friend from college introduced me to his friends Tyler, Jake and Kyle– the dudes who did the music, and the voices of Rodney and Wyatt Wiesel. He sent me a grindcore track they'd put out and I was blown away. I really think of this as the turning point for the project, despite nothing really changing too much it feels like a totally different iteration before they jumped on board. I sent them the music I’d been using as insp for the cartoon so far to see if they’d be able to do the score– Poison the Well, Norma Jean, The Bled, early BmtH, etc. Tyler was immediately like, I love this shit, and it legit felt like a match made in heaven. They were all so stoked on the idea and to be a part of things, the enthusiasm from these three guys at this low point in the production really revitalized it and rekindled the drive to get it done.
PRODUCTION
The day after Christmas 2021 I started on the layouts. Over the next two weeks I knocked out most all of them. I went around my hometown and all the surrounding areas and took pictures of different locations, architecture, etc for inspiration. If I were to have one big regret it’d be that I didn’t play up the location enough, but there’s always next time.
Sackhead was the first real crash course I’d had in BG layouts, and while I learned a lot, I remember I did them super flat. This time I took a lot of influence from Jim Smith’s work, and tried to make sure that while everything still had a lot of attention paid to shape language, that it also felt very full and solid. I was going through a phase during my thesis as well where I was hyper-aware of line economy, and in contrast on ratbasterdz I sort of leaned into adding unnecessary details (as long as they were in a controlled, appealing way) to assist in creating the grit and dirtiness of the world I was trying to build. @Paperisfood and @iejomaflo 's contributions to the final BG look can't be understated either. I think the pipeline we worked out found a nice harmony of grungy and painterly. Katya inked every single one by herself and Josh painted every single one (sans one montage BG) by himself. An absolutely insane amount of work for two people to tackle alone.
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In terms of visual style the biggest thing I was thinking of was 60’s underground comix, which was one of the inspirations for the original idea back in college too. This ended up being sort of ironic– back then it was more about the style, but coming back to the idea years later, it also paralleled the ethos of that movement as well.
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Then there was also the usual stuff I try to channel like Bakshi, Spumco, Antonucci and Zim. I wanted to sort of create a hybrid between the expressive cartoon acting and gags of stuff like that with a more subdued, almost slice-of-life approach. Sackhead was 90% screaming and running, so I wanted to do something a little more quiet this time around. Where you could really get lost in the world and feel like you were there with the characters, with an occasional loud crescendo.
For the montage I finally got to utilize my love for old sci fi anime into something. Evangelion is my favorite piece of media ever and yet I feel like it never really shows through in my work, aside from maybe palettes or occasional composition. It was fun getting to lean into that look– I was thinking a lot about Eva, Lain, Ghost in the Shell, and the illustrations of Tatsayuki Tanaka and Otomo for that entire segment.
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The whole car ride shot was a direct homage to the Evangelion elevator scene too, or at least the philosophy of it. I wanted to capture the feeling of being caught in the backseat while your friend argues with his parents in the front, and force you to sit there uncomfortably and wait it out.
The montage (as well as the opening “performance” in the parking lot) was also heavily inspired by old metalcore and adjacent music videos. While boarding those I kept a playlist running at all times for inspiration, and tried to match the way in which they were cut and composed. There's a lot I want to do in the future to capture this more authentically.
Most of the good shit in the montage sequence was boarded by @Emrox though. I remember him acting like they were just scribbles and not that great but it really cranked the whole thing up to 11 and i think it would’ve been substantially weaker without his input. The montage also took a lot of visual influence from the early MDE sketches, which were a big inspiration in high school that I hadn't really watched much since.
Other than that I thought a lot about old-school NG flashes, and those kind of stayed my north star. Visually I was thinking specifically about Anusboy and some of the other Nekrotherium flashes, and whenever I’d need a burst of inspiration i’d go back to Knox’s Korner, Retarded Animal Babies, Brackenwood, old Spazkid stuff, and the other flash stuff that made me try animating to begin with like Homestar. The raw creative energy in that stuff is infectious. A lot of it is pretty rough around the edges (sans brackenwood, that would still be incredible if it came out today), but it has such an overwhelming amount of soul in it. The fact that all this stuff was just art for it’s own sake inspires me so much to this day. As much as I learned about animation and fundamentals in college, I learned just as much about how to make a cartoon from beginning to end on Newgrounds. I really wanted to get back to why I made shit to begin with and embrace all my influences.
Animation started sometime in January 2022 and went through October 2022. This was mostly nose to the grindstone time. I started working random service jobs to get by, some better than others. I’d go to work, come home and work on the cartoon for a minimum of 7 hours (usually more), then pass out and do it all over again. I found that I had much more creative vitality at the end of the day, even if the work was more taxing, than I ever did at an animation studio. For the first couple months I was constantly doubting if I had made the right decision, but I don’t think the cartoon would’ve gotten done if I had continued the path I was on. I don’t know how sustainable this is long term though so don’t take this as a full endorsement of my approach to things.
With each cartoon I make I try to make it almost in response to what I didn’t like about my last project– with Sardinez I felt like much of the character of the individual drawings and the movement of my roughs were lost in trying to achieve super clean inks. So on Sackhead, I tried working with a rougher line and tried to keep everything moving all the time. However I think the drawings in Sackhead are generally not as strong, and are flattened out by the lineart style a little bit because of this. In trying to make sure things weren’t too stiff and on-model, I lost the model entirely and in that some of the appeal of my initial design of the character.
With Ratbasterdz I wanted to find a compromise– I wanted the animation to be generally more limited, with more emphasis on strong keyposes, solid drawings and expressions. Instead of using what I felt in Sackhead was sort of a stock digital “rough” line with a repeating texture, I tried to make sure each drawing felt entirely organic and capture the unpredictable rough quality of drawing with a pen in a sketchbook. Sometimes I’d go through and throw some more sketchiness to the drawings just cus it looked cool.
A lot of the lineart style was inspired by album covers from the genre/era, which I hoped would tie it all together as well. Specifically was thinking of AFI’s Art of Drowning/All Hallow’s Eve, Disembodied’s 1999 EP, the early Converge covers, Limp Bizkit’s 3 Dollar Bill Y’all, In Love and Death, and more recently some of the art Foreign Hands does for their stuff.
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I’d rough each scene super messy, then go through with an eraser and chisel out a final drawing from the mess. This was also an economic choice, as it saved quite literally months of time on cleanup. With everything I tried to keep the core ethos of raw creative energy, embracing roughness and imperfections as they showed that human beings made this. Nearly everything coming out of the industry now is so clean and sterile it feels like it could’ve been created by an algorithm, I wanted this to stand as a contrast to that in every capacity.
When it came to working with other animators on the project, I wanted to use this philosophy as well. Something I love a lot about stuff like Looney Tunes, Golden Age Disney, Ren and Stimpy, Gainax stuff etc– is that you can pick out which animator did which shot. I’ve always thought that was so cool, being able to notice an individual artist’s quirks when drawing a character or their specific acting choices. Generally I’d draw a character layout or keyframe to go off of, and then let the animator do whatever they see fit. Character models were mostly a suggestion. As long as the drawing looked enough like the character and was a good/funny/interesting drawing I was all for it. I’m very very lucky that so many talented people were willing to contribute to this project, and seeing everyone’s contributions culminate in the final thing was really awesome to see. I wanted to highlight everyone’s individual strengths as an animator. That’s one of my favorite things about making a cartoon, whether directing my own or contributing to someone else’s– seeing all these different peoples abilities come together, like individual instruments in an orchestra. Whenever I’d start to get fatigued, seeing someone else’s contribution would re-motivate me again.
PREMIERE
The production ended in the Ratbasterdz Premiere event. It was something I’d been spitballing since the cartoon started official production. I’d been going to hardcore shows pretty routinely and was constantly wondering if you could translate that energy to something like animation. I like the freedom the internet offers as a means of distribution, though it feels like a lot of the human element of things gets lost in that. I think it’s natural when you make something to want to share it with others, and even if it’s in a small space being able to see people’s reactions in real time is something really special. Film fests can be cool, but there’s a lot of structure and bureaucracy that goes into those which I think makes it a much more rigid experience. There’s something about live music that feels much more engaging and human, everyone’s there to jam and have fun. Plus this cartoon didn’t really feel like it was for a “film fest” crowd anyhow. The idea of combining a hardcore show with the cartoon premiere felt like the perfect way to debut the cartoon and tie the two cultures I love together. A friend from a local punk band helped me out a lot with figuring out how to go about booking a venue, finding bands, printing your own shirts, etc. This all proved to be way harder than I thought it’d be because I was trying to book it all a month before the actual event was supposed to take place. On top of my other two jobs and finishing the cartoon, I now had this other thing I was managing that took up a large chunk of my day everyday, and this one had a very pressing deadline. It was so totally worth it though.
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I felt like a hybrid cartoon screening/hardcore show was a pretty weird idea to pitch to bands + the venues, but I was shocked by how enthusiastic everyone was about it. All the bands came out and jammed just because they thought the idea sounded fun. They were all so fucking cool about everything. None of them knew me or my work going in, they just wanted to play a fun show. Pretty much all of them traveled from hours away to play it too, it really meant the world to me. The venue hosted and helped us set everything up just because it sounded like a cool idea. It really felt like the idea of creating shit for fun and making art for it’s own sake came full circle in the way of this event.
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I hate to say “you had to be there” but that’s kinda what it feels like trying to recount it. All the bands ripped, had a way bigger turnout than expected, lots of people getting in the pit, and the cartoon had a really great reception in spite of some tech issues on the venue’s side. In theory I had considered having issues with the projector to have been a worst case nightmare scenario, but when it actually happened, I was shocked with how cool everyone was about it. Everyone there huddled around the smaller TVs to watch the cartoon, a lot of which being people that were just there for the bands and had no reason to care. It really floored me. The whole thing was unreal.
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We had a lot of other NG folks come out too which was rad. A million thanks to @nihaho, @mikecarf, @brewster, @amazinlarry, @moonslothart, @ghost-bat, @pjorg, @Spinalpalm, @thejanitor9k, and @yourfriendjosh for making the trek to come hang and celebrate the toon dropping. Made me nostalgic for things like pico day and magfest back in the day. It really conjured up what it felt like to go to one of those for the first time again.
I also fucked up my leg in the pit and have been in a wheelchair ever since! (true)
In general I hope more hybrid events like this start popping up, I know for sure I’m doing them for upcoming ratbasterdz stuff. Live music and cartoons go together better than you'd expect! The pipe dream would be to take future ratbasterdz stuff on a mock “tour” to a couple different spots on the east coast, each with it’s own set of local bands, but I’d have to be in a way different position in life in the future to ever make that happen.
Once again I just want to highlight how none of this would be possible without all the people on the crew that generously lent their time to making it happen. I feel really lucky to know so many talented people that are also so willing to collaborate just for the sake of making something cool. I really think it speaks volumes to what’s possible now from an indie standpoint. I don’t wanna soapbox, but now more than ever we have the resources to make high quality productions from our own homes. It's twice as accessible as it was even ten years ago, and twenty years ago it would've been next to impossible. What I’ve learned from this project is you have to just start taking steps even if you’re unsure of where you’re headed. Art and risks have to go hand in hand. If you take away anything from Ratbasterdz, it's make a cartoon!
As for the future– this weekend we’re gonna start writing more Ratbasterdz stuff. No promises on when it’ll come out but i’ve got a billion ideas for where to take it and am very stoked to make more. If you made it this far thanks for reading, and thanks for caring about the project at all. It really meant a lot to me that people gave a shit about this thing.
Bye bye!
