My friend wanted me to make some stickers of this shadow drawing i did last month so i got a small batch of em made.

You can buy one here! https://ratbasterdz.bigcartel.com/product/edgehog-sticker

Ratbasterdz episode 3 just passed the 80% point recently too! Life's been very busy but I'm happy with how much progress we've made in spite of that. Should have it out early year, and will begin booking the premiere show very soon!

MERRY CHRISTMAS, HAPPY HOLIDAYS, ETC ETC ETC <3

Just dropped the footage from the Ratbasterdz: Jay's Day premiere show over on my youtube page! All shot and edited by Wesley Jacobs, whos both Rodney's VA and the most talented live action video guy I know. If you don't know what this is-- for each episode of the cartoon we put together a hybrid cartoon screening/live show featuring local hardcore and metalcore bands. Always a blast and already stoked for the next one.

If you haven't seen the toon yet, you can do that right here on NG!

vvvvvv Show some love to the bands at these places! vvvvvvv

FEAR ILLUSION:

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CHAINED:

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VIOLENT LIFE VIOLENT DEATH:

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and if you wanna support more Ratbasterdz, my patreon page is here and you can grab merch here!

Episode 3's comin along slowly but surely! Everything we've got done for that one is coming out killer and I've been constantly stoked working on it, can't wait to share. Hoping to have it out by the end of the year (knock on wood!)

PEACE

HI! This blogpost goes into the production of Jay’s Day from the start till the end in excruciating detail– Of course if you haven’t seen Jay’s Day this will make no sense, so check out the toon if you haven’t already! 

and if you haven’t read the first one of these I wrote for Episode 1, you can do that here!

POST-UNDERGROUND 

After Underground released I was at sort of an impasse on what I wanted to do next. Spending two years on another 11 minute episode just didn’t seem viable or fulfilling– I had way too many ideas for these characters and this world, and a lot of things I wanted to say and develop further. The idea of doing significantly shorter episodes didn’t really appeal to me either, on the basis that working around a predetermined runtime immediately feels restrictive-- you’re not able to fully explore things as they naturally develop.

When you look at the landscape of independent animation you don’t really see many guys that are putting out cartoons somewhat often, all longform original work, and also not utilizing rigs in some capacity. The only dude at the time I was conscious of doing so was @aaron-long, so I reached out to him for advice. He introduced the idea of “chainsmoking” your projects– having a little bit of the next one started before you finish the first one. This helps keep a more consistent momentum and mitigate the slump you get after finishing a long piece of work. This was pretty formative in the way I handle ratbasterdz currently. (If you read this, thanks Aaron!) 

I think prior to this I was forcing myself to think within a structure, like it had to be another 10 minutes and tell an equally ambitious story because that’s what we established with the first one. Knowing from the get-go that you’re working on something larger than a standalone piece, you can develop the story bit by bit across multiple episodes, build ideas concurrently, or focus on weird specific ideas that you wouldn't think of when trying to write a standard episode. In explaining it to me Aaron compared it to songs on an album which has really stuck with me. An album has room for experimental songs, heavy songs, upbeat songs, etc…and they all culminate in something bigger than the sum of it’s parts. I felt like this also was the best utilization of our format as an internet cartoon. The beauty of doing it all yourself even down to the distribution is that you don’t HAVE to subscribe to any structure for how you do things. 

I had also decided that I wanted to make the move back to Flash after moving away from it 7-8 years ago. Partially for ethical reasons, partially for practical reasons. 

Flash was and is THE program for DIY animation. To what degree this matters I dont know, but as I looked back on my own history with animation I couldn’t help but feel bad for abandoning flash! While it's not without flaws, I taught myself to animate with it as a kid, and the majority of the web animation that has stayed with me was created using it. I’m very much endeared to it, it carries a lot of history and inadvertently embodies a spirit of creation you don’t really see anymore. 

Marty's video Artifacts really pushed me back into being a Flash guy too, if you haven’t checked that out yet please do. Major thanks to both him and @mikecarf for continually taking time to help me get reacquainted with Flash and teaching me so many new things about it. At first I was fretting about losing the lineart style– but I look back at Underground now, and for being a cartoon that intends to be rough looking, it’s still pretty clean. I feel like this crusty flash brush really gives the drawings the dirty, chaotic feeling I’ve wanted. It’s difficult to train yourself to draw in, largely because to get the brush texture, the wacom pen firmness has to be turned all the way up. It’s kind of like drawing with a leaky pen or something, it takes a different approach. 

I knew if I was going to get all these episodes done I was going to have to limit my animation a bit more. This felt like the perfect episode to experiment with because Jay is such a slow, stiff character to begin with. Underground was supposed to be my attempt at limiting my animation– which is very funny looking back on because there’s so many goddamn cushion frames. I look at how much time I spent doing near exact traces of the keyposes, and while it looks nice, I feel like as an independent there’s a lot better ways I could utilize my time. Which is the sort of lens I try and look through now– realistically examining the position of an independent animator and gearing how you create around the limitations. That can mean different things for different creators. For example, I logistically don’t think cleanup is a worthwhile use of time if it can be avoided– it adds another eight months onto production redoing work with “nicer” lines, a superficial thing that isn’t indicative of a better drawing at all. But maybe your style is super graphic and clean– for you, that might mean gearing your work around the overall design so that the material is still visually engaging with less drawings overall.

Point being, there’s literally nothing stopping you from making a cartoon however the fuck you want as long as you hold your work to a certain standard. Animation style can change drastically from shot to shot– put a couple shots on eights and another on twos, draw the characters differently every time, embrace weird idiosyncrasies of your process. If anything it all adds more personality, which is what we need more of in animation. Within the landscape of independent work I’ve seen this sort of shift towards chasing what appears as “TV Quality” animation or some sort of studio-level consistency, which is totally missing the point. “Indie” is supposed to exist as an alternative, giving people something authentic where mainstream entertainment fails to. Instead we’re seeing it turned into what is essentially its own mock industry. Trying to achieve the same look/mirror the practices and behaviors of that system should not be desirable or the end goal. Even within alternative schools of thought there’s these sorts of structures people seem to adhere to either out of habit or fear or conservatism. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, but I feel like on this project I really started to think outside of habit and structure, and I’m looking forward to pushing further on the next episodes. 

I tried to seek out what unique and creative limited animation offerings there were out there for inspiration. Marty and @shufflehound put me onto a bunch of good stuff (Edit: @speedo also suggested a ton!), one of which being the animation of Tissa David. Specifically I was thinking about her work on the Electric Company, having a certain set number of drawings and reusing them in unusual patterns. A lot of her animation is all “important” poses pushed in really interesting ways with no inbetweens or cushions– I still want to take a crack at animating more extreme stuff with that philosophy, or some of the stuff Trigger does– but this episode tonally didn’t feel like the right fit. I took a lot of inspiration from the general philosophy anime implements too– where it’s really only the important shots, or when there’s a specific movement or timing in mind, that are given the works. I tried to sandwich more static shots between more animated ones, and even when things do get relatively static, to try to inject a little something here and there to keep things visually interesting. I studied what moved and when in work that inspired me, and how things were layered. @speedo also gave me a rundown on how he times and spaces his animation. He’s got some of the most appealing limited animation out there in my opinion and works crazy fast. Through his advice I started to get more comfortable with incorporating longer frame counts, and really thinking if each motion needed 15 drawings to convey an simple action, or if 2 strong keys with a couple support frames could achieve the same effect. 

Through watching the Bridge Kids process over the years, I recognized there’s certain places where incorporating symbols would speed up my process exponentially. I fretted a lot on if incorporating even the faintest approximation of rigged animation was somehow in compromise to the look/ethics. What I realized is that it only has that effect if you let it– you can use relevant bits sparingly as a way to speed up the true tedium, in turn giving you more time to direct focus to the truly creative and interesting parts of the process.

With certain shots where I could tell we could get a lot of mileage out of a little, I’d create mouth/eye packs tailored for that specific key drawing of the shot, still breaking them and doing unique iterations when a sound/motion called for it. In the past I’d draw the entirety of the lip sync straight ahead, only rarely reusing mouth drawings towards the end of a shot– which frankly feels like a colossal goddamn waste of time in retrospect-- I’d redraw the same near-identical “E” shape mouth 30 times over, and then do that again for every single mouth shape. I can’t think of how many hours this has probably saved me for what is essentially the same effect. I’m still very neurotic about things looking organic and don’t like to use these more than when necessary, and don't reuse these assets between shots. I like each shot having it’s own unique drawing that’s more reminiscent of whatever I originally drew in the storyboard than any sort of standardized character model. 

There were moments where I began to doubt myself along the way, whether or not limiting my animation or incorporating mouth packs was somehow in compromise to what Ratbasterdz stands for to me. An analogy Marty shared with me that really changed my perspective on it all, I will now share with you in hopes it helps someone out there:

As an artist you need to fail in different directions. Imagine getting good at something is like shooting arrows at a target: 

If you’re a perfectionist, you’re likely to miss in the same way every time– detailing things to a fault, excessive rigidity, leaving projects unfinished. This is like shooting your arrow too far to the left. 

If you’re more about production speed, you’re also likely to miss in the same way every time– rushing things, lacking care/attention to detail, subpar results. This is like shooting your arrow too far to the right. 

You have to analyze what type of artist you are, and adjust your aim accordingly. Meaning that you’re being fast and sloppy as often as you’re being slow and methodical. Even if you're still off the mark, you’re closer to hitting the target than you would’ve been, had you kept shooting your arrow in the same direction. Each adjustment nudges you a bit closer to the bullseye.

Thinking about the cartoon from this perspective made me realize, hey, even if this doesn’t come together the way I want, I’d just need to adjust my arrow left again next time. 

JAY’S DAY

Early on when I pitched "chainsmoking" to @pjorg, he mentioned “What does Jay do all day” as an example of how much freedom we had approaching the project with this mentality. Ironically, Jay’s Day was the last of the episodes wrote. The Jay-centric episode originally was “Jay Gets Sober”. There were some funny moments in that one but it felt too much like a cartoon trope, a waste of potential. We cannibalized the good parts of that and put it into what is probably my favorite Ratbasterdz thing we’ve written– which won’t be featured in this current batch, but regardless of where the project goes once these episodes are done, I’ve promised myself I will see through to completion. Without either of these the batch felt a little empty. Jay’s Day sort of came about out of that– the “what does jay do all day” idea stuck around in the back of my brain and it just felt natural. It exemplified what we wanted to do with these episodes: taking it in wildly different directions with the core focus of authentically fleshing out the world and characters. It was a simple premise with a lot of potential to build both Jay and Bluxton county, and it felt like the perfect follow up to Underground in that it establishes immediately what our intent going forward is.

In tone and pacing I wanted it to be incredibly slow, to the point of it being excruciating at times, to mirror Jay as a character. One of my biggest regrets on Underground is cutting out a giant chunk of silence in the car ride scene that was there to emphasize how fucking awkward it was. Whenever I showed people the boards it wasn’t landing, so I cut it down– but in retrospect, that’s kind of the point! I should’ve been more okay with making people sit with being uncomfortable. On this one I decided to let each pregnant pause and drawn out sentence last as long as it needed to, and even up until the final render I was adding seconds onto certain pauses. This was the root cause of one of my biggest concerns during the production of this episode– that it was too slow, too much of a departure from the first episode, etc….which suddenly felt insanely stupid once I saw it play in front of an audience at the premiere, in that moment I realized it’s honestly more gag-driven than Episode 1 was. Something I have continually noticed about each project I do is that the elements I am the most unsure of in the trenches of making it end up being the strongest parts in the end.

The intent of this episode more than any of the others was to flesh out Bluxton County as a location. I feel like the location is central to everything about Ratbasterdz and that's something I didn't fully highlight in Underground. I spent a lot of time on google maps and driving around taking reference pics to try and solidify what is authentically the south. The characters were also very specifically referenced in that way. I went through family’s facebook friends of friends and found people that fit certain visual archetypes I had in mind, then tried to find what were the most distinguishing characteristics that I saw amongst all these people, and did a bunch of passes caricaturing them into my animal designs. 

Also want to shout out @slippypunk, who did the majority of the BG layouts on this episode! He injects so much personality and life into the RB world and has such a keen attention to detail. He really brought the whole look of the show up a notch. He did all his layouts on paper and scanned them in, which I thought was a super sick idea! @iejomaflo even had him to scan in a sheet of the paper he was using to work as an overlay, preserving some of the grit and texture in the final paintings.

MONTAGE

The purpose of the montage in this episode was a direct extension of this idea. The first iteration of this segment was radically different– it featured a slower paced song with Jay slowly walking from background to background, eventually tripping, falling, and rolling through several more locations. I think I went on autopilot when I did this, and after sitting with it I found that I’d mentally tune out every time that segment came on, which to me is always a sign you need to redo some shit. Jay’s actions weren’t really funny or interesting enough on their own and the locations were all sort of breezed through with not enough focus placed on them. 

The final draft of the montage began as a series of brainstorm sessions with Marty. He came up with the idea to have it instead focus entirely on backgrounds with little to no character animation, other than the occasional denizen of Bluxton County to help characterize it more. We'd only see Jay at the beginning and at the end, almost like we're seeing it through his eyes. It'd be way slower and let you live in the world with them for a minute. I really took to this as I felt like that's something Hideaki Anno does in his work a lot that I've always resonated with. I spent a lot of time studying the way he composes the "empty" and more candid shots in his work when I started re-boarding it– even in the live-action footage I tried to lean into that.

At some point I said something like "I wish I could just do that Bakshi thing where he animated characters over live action footage", and it clicked, I could totally just do that. I had the benefit of living like a half hour away from where a real life "Bluxton County" could be, it suddenly felt very silly that i'd never thought to utilize that. Throughout all the early stages of this cartoon Marty and I had been geeking out on weird and experimental media, which was also a big push in the direction of wanting to do something more out-there. I remember being concerned about whether or not it'd be too disorienting-- this was one of those big moments where I started to think about fully utilizing that we are free of any pre-established format for how a cartoon has to operate. In that, fuck it, maybe it will be weird and disorienting, lets give it a try and see what happens. It also helped from the perspective of thinking within your limitations, as it turned what would have been 1:15 of animation/BGs into a couple days of shooting, editing, and misc. character animation that functions as something far more unique and memorable. When we started putting that sequence together I realized it sort of has a narrative function as well– in that it visually communicates what being high feels like in a more authentic way than a typical WOAHHH DUDE IM TRIPPING, instead things feeling a little more “real” or intense than they usually do. 

Last summer @TheJanitor9k and I got together and spent a day driving around where I grew up + surrounding areas filming from morning till night. This was a fucking blast and a highlight of this whole thing. In the past decade-ish, especially since the pandemic, the area is rapidly getting paved over by the day. In a lot of places it’s totally unrecognizable. This especially bothers me because it’s not like you can just create more land out of thin air. Once all this wilderness and greenery is gone it’s gone forever. That’s always been a big personal part of what Ratbasterdz is, trying to capture a specific moment in time, how I remember these places being as they will inevitably be sanitized apartment complexes and townhomes too in time. Now it does that quite literally in a way i didn’t anticipate– as long as the cartoons exist there’s little bits of my hometown as I remember it forever embedded into them. I’m glad we shot that footage when we did because in the time since a lot more has gotten torn down.

I wanted the way it was shot to also be reflective of the era, so we put fisheyes on our cameras to imitate the look of CKY & other skate videos. It only occurred to me after I had already cut the footage to music that we should’ve gotten an old school camcorder and shot it directly onto DV tapes & crunched it into early youtube res. In retrospect I would’ve shot it in 4:3 too!

Thankfully @Deadlycomics came in clutch and was able to transfer the signal from digital to analog. One thing he told me that I thought was really cool was that on his converter, there’s a PAL/NTSC switch that created a glitch effect when swapped, so during the screen recording he’d intentionally flip it to create glitch frames here and there. He’s a fucking genius and if you’re not already familiar with his work do yourself a favor and check it out! 

LIFE INFLUENCE 

The first/last shot of the episode and the cyclical nature of it was very much inspired by my time with a torn ACL/Meniscus, which were the primary months we spent writing all the RB episodes. I couldn’t walk or stand up without my leg collapsing in on itself, which made pretty much every daily task a huge pain in the ass. Getting up to go to the bathroom or get something from the kitchen was either stupidly painful at worst and incredibly frustrating and inconvenient at best. At the time of my injury I was working at a pizza place, and my buddy still worked there, so hed bring leftover pizzas all the time to help me out. So this time in my life is characterized in my memory by waking in and out of a haze on the couch surrounded by half-empty pizza boxes. I ripped this directly for the cartoon because I thought it was a funny visual in spite of it being one of the darkest times in my life. Which, if you want to get philosophical about it, speaks to not only what Ratbasterdz has been to me from it’s inception, but what the art that has most impacted my life has been– taking the negatives of life and transmuting them into something positive.

From the moment we came up with the idea I wanted it to start with Jay waking up to an extremely 2007 song w/ clean vox. I felt like this immediately sets the tone for this episode aesthetically. This was also a reference to this music video by an old school NC metalcore band which is super reflective of the era. NC has an incredibly rich history with metalcore which I had no idea about until I became more active in the scene here a couple years ago-- frankly I feel pretty stupid! So the intro was my homage to that. A couple of the dudes who were in that band also play in VLVD now, who ended up playing the premiere show for this episode— really fuckin cool and surreal how things unintentionally came full circle.

I originally wanted Jay to bike to Burger Barn, some beatup bike with flames on it that hes had since he was 10. Quickly realized it’d make the whole thing a drag to animate, and the idea of walking was much funnier. It leans into the whole feel of the episode being insanely slow with very little payoff, and emphasizes the total isolation these characters live in. It’s also just something you see a lot in rural areas– often I’ll drive by a dude walking on the side of the road, with stretches of nothing in either direction, and think how long he must have been walking for. Or where he’s going and why. It was fun to actually explore what a guy like that might be doing. A lot of high school memories are just walking the side of roads for an hour to go to a convenience store with my friends so that was definitely an influence as well. When you’re actually walking those stretches it certainly feels like the slow-motion Jay lives in. 

The drive thru scene came to mind because dudes in bands are always talking about a specific fast food chain around here, I think on the basis that when you get out of a show that’s the only thing open next to Waffle House. The drive thru guy was very much based on the dudes at the taco bell I used to hit after work sometimes. They’d keep the “We’re sorry, this location is closed” robot voice playing on the intercom, but if you sit there for a second they’d go “...whenever youre ready”. When you'd pull up to the window it erupted in a cloud of weed smell. I remembered the dude had studded earrings which felt like a very specific southern guy archetype I tried to channel.

PUPPETS

The puppet scene was another relatively “last minute” change– when boarded I didn’t really think of it as being anything special, but the more I sat with it, it felt like a missed opportunity not to have them represented in some drastically different visual style. I considered getting different guest animators to take on that part in 100% their style, but dropping close to a minute of animation on a single person felt like too much. I was also considering getting someone to 3D model the characters in a claymation style and just have their mouths flap, which is in turn what gave me the idea of getting puppets made. This also felt like a much wiser investment because not only is that a minute of screentime that didn’t need excessive animation, but we also have the puppets forever and can do more things with them in the future. It also helped to keep things visually engaging in what is otherwise the least visually interesting part of the episode. I remembered @deedledraws had done puppet stuff in college so I brought her on board, and goes without saying her work came out phenomenal. I feel like the puppets are one of the most interesting parts of this episode, but are something I honestly had next to no involvement in– so I’ve asked her to do a write up on what her process was like creating those:

Making these puppets was both a joy and a challenge! The challenge being bringing these animated 2D characters into the real world faithfully. I started with some concept art sketches to adapt the designs into puppets. The concept art noted fabrics, the general size of the puppets, and different features such as Rodney’s sculpted eyes. After getting the go ahead I created unique patterns out of newspaper for each puppet. Using these patterns I cut upholstery foam for the puppet base, and used hot glue to attach each piece together. The heads and bodies are separate for these guys for ease of movement. From here I covered the heads in their respective fabric, and glued in their eyes (painted and sealed ping pong balls for Wade and Jay.) I fitted on their eyelids and hand stitched them into place. After getting their eyelids the puppets personality really started to shine through. After the fabric for the heads were fitted on I made all fabric arms/ clothes to fit over the foam bodies. Clothes were stitched on, and from here they just needed some small details. Teeth, piercings, and tongues were all made from fleece and stitched onto the heads. That about wraps the process of making them up! I loved making these guys, I love seeing them come to life on screen! 

On my end it just involved doing the actual puppeteering/filming. For that we just propped up a greenscreen I had from an old job and used some lamps to simulate three point lighting. I cut the audio that the puppets had to lip sync to and would play it on my phone and follow along. We had to do this a couple times over for various different reasons, it was a big learning curve but really fun. After that it was just comping it together in after effects, fixing the colors and masking them into the thought bubble! 

PREMIERE SHOW



Putting together the premiere this time around is a great example of “failing in different directions”-- although I’d still consider it a total success! For the premiere of Underground, I was trying to put it together three weeks before the actual event. Which was fucking crazy and stressful as shit. Venues were booked out, it was too short notice for most bands, and there was practically no time for promo. It’s a miracle that show was as awesome as it was and we got the amazing bands we did to play it. 

This time, I naively assumed none of these things would be stressors if I was booking it further in advance, LOL. What I thought would eliminate the stress spread it out over four months instead of two weeks.

I started hitting up venues the day after Thanksgiving for what was going to be a show in April. Finally lock one in mid December. Couldn’t get a final lineup together till March. 

I originally had intended for each premiere show to fit a different vibe reflective of the different musical niches represented in each episode (this one being more 2000s emo-y), so it was like a specific extension of the cartoon in a way. I had curated a huge list of bands I was gonna reach out to and was confident that with three-four months of time on my hands I could book a perfectly curated lineup to that sound. 

What I learned very immediately is it’s all about who is available, down to play, enthusiastic about the idea and can respond. I also learned that there's always going to be a million things you could never anticipate. So while the idea of each show catering to a specific niche sound was a cool idea, in the future I’m going to continue to prioritize bands I love that really fuck with the concept. At the end of the day it’s an unconventional event that’s going to draw a mixed crowd either way, might as well lean into that. 

I was stressed out of my mind for months juggling putting this show together, finishing episode 2, starting episode 3 + the rest of life. By the time of the event I had decided I was going to have to ask a friend to book the remainder of the RB shows, as I needed someone who wasn’t as personally invested in their outcome. But then the show actually happened and I decided fuck all that, it was so worth it. It’s so fulfilling seeing it come together. It really mirrors animation in that way.

It was dope seeing the cartoon projected and hearing it on a good sound system this time. Everyone had a blast and all the worries I had during the booking process were of no consequence. Bands all kicked ass as they always do. Seeing them all fuck with the cartoon so much too really meant a lot— hardcore has been such a positive influence in my own life and im very happy that RB resonates.

In my Underground writeup I mentioned that the first screening conjured the same feelings for me of what going to Magfest/Pico Day for the first time felt like back in the day. Through hearing friends talk about the event, I realized that this was now beginning to function as its own iteration of that, a reason to meet up with your artist friends and something to look forward to throughout the year. I never in a million years would have guessed i’d be organizing something like this myself. I also mentioned distributing your work online really removes the human element of things, something I really cherish about these premieres is the reintroduction of that. Seeing the shows develop into something that brings people together and represents more than just an outlet for my work has been both unexpected and very fulfilling. Weird the directions life takes you. I was at about 20% battery the whole time through being spread so thin— and while that’s my only regret, i kind of dont care, in that seeing everyone else having such a great time overshadows any personal experience i could have and to me signifies a good event.

The NG folks in attendance this time around were @moonslop @spinalpalm @mikecarf @nihaho @pjorg @brewster @croody @yourfriendjosh @sveekins @thejanitor9k @ghost-bat @paperisfood @bill @hannahdaigle @arniegutz @weezerbloodorgy @deedledraws @drsteen @hacho7 @cchilab @alexmigo @mikelzng @jaster @claykidng @squirm0 -- a million thanks again for coming out for this! People traveling out specifically for the cartoon is something I never would have imagined, i am still very humbled. I hope these continue to draw out more NG folks in the future! Once I get more booking experience under my belt I’d like to do a larger scale version of the show/screening extending beyond just RB, still cookin on that idea.

In closing-- something I’ve thought a lot about over the past year is that growing up, I never really had any aspirations of doing “my own tv show” or anything, all I have really ever wanted to do is put out cool cartoons i really care about with my friends. NG has always been a huge part of that. Making Ratbasterdz, let alone having NG sponsor it, would’ve made 12 year old me’s head explode. I feel very grateful that I get to live that dream every day, and that there is anybody out there at all who cares about it. It means a lot. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Episode 3 is in the works! 

Thank you for all the love on Jay's Day! I've been insanely flattered by the reception, I really did not expect people to fuck with it as much as they have. Just wanted to say some thank yous and share all the supplemental material for this episode--

First of all, THANK YOU to Newgrounds. it was fucking crazy waking up to see it on the banner spot the other day, this was the first time something I’ve made ended up there. Newgrounds was kind enough to sponsor the production of this batch of Ratbasterdz episodes we’re working on, which to put it bluntly is literal childhood dream shit. This site has been a part of my life for a very long time, so many formative memories and lifelong friendships are a direct result of NG. I never would’ve started animating and certainly wouldn’t have started pursuing it seriously were it not for this site. To say I’m honored that Newgrounds saw enough value in Ratbasterdz to put the NG name on it is an understatement, hope we’ll do you guys proud with these.

We premiered the cartoon on April 6th to a packed house which was super fucking cool. Once again, thank you to everyone who came out to that. I was really floored by the response. I plan on doing a longform postmortem blogpost thing like I wrote out for the last episode where I’ll share some more pics from the event and go more in depth on the whole process. The whole show was filmed as well, and we’ll have another edit coming within the next month or two. 

The online store is restocked with all the leftovers from the premiere show– we’ve still got a handful of Jay shirts, and a good amount of logo tees, stickers, and prints. With each shirt I’ll throw in a few stickers or a print.

The soundtrack EP dropped on bandcamp and spotify the other night too! Alongside this, Tyler and I also put together a playlist of inspirations for the episode like we did for the last one– songs that inspired the soundtrack/placeholders from the animatic, songs referenced on jay’s ipod, and bands that played the premiere. Each episode’s got a different vibe in terms of sound and I hope to put some people onto music they wouldn’t normally seek out. This one’s a lot more mall-screamo/emo influenced with some heavier stuff here and there. 

(cool art in the above image is by Michael Shantz!)

If you’d like to support the cartoon we launched a patreon page back in february too! I’ve been posting a bunch of sneak peeks and updates on there as well as doing monthly drawing request streams for patrons. I rarely draw for non-ratbasterdz stuff lately so that’s been a lot of fun. 

We’ve got a little over a minute of animation done on episode 3, which out of all of them is my personal favorite. The work the team's been doing for that one is looking crazy good. Hoping to keep up the momentum and have that one out at the end of this year/early next year. Another live show to accompany that one as well. 

As mentioned above I’ll do another postmortem writeup for this episode eventually– @sugarpolyp was suggesting I record them which I’ve been seriously considering. As much as I like longform writing, most of the time I’m working and need things to listen to, and am always craving stuff that gets into the weeds of creative work– thought it would be nice to fill that gap for others potentially. Lmk if that's something people would be into!

Thats it for now, peace!

WHADDUP NEWGROUNDS

The next Ratbasterdz cartoon, "JAYWALKING" will be premiering April 6th 2024 in Charlotte NC alongside this fuckin insane lineup. Some of my favorite bands outta NC all on the same bill, stoked outta my mind on this one.

If ya missed how the last one went, the deal is we have a bunch of bands come out and jam and then screen the cartoon later on in the night on a projector. We'll be screening UNDERGROUND alongside the new episode too.

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvv More details in attached flyer vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv

Shoutout to the legend @sugarpolyp for the fuckin insane flyer art. Please go check out his page, his stuff fucking rules.

I wanted to have this announced a little earlier to better accommodate anyone that might've been interested in travelling for it, but ran into about a million things I wouldn't have expected along the way in the booking process. Hopefully next time. Once again if anyone from NG does actually travel out for this hit me up and I'll give ya some stickers or somethin.

PEACE!

HI NEWGROUNDS!!!!

I feel like I said most of the big important update stuff on my last news post on here, but wanted to come on here and share that the Ratbasterdz Patreon just launched! Ideally this will help us get cartoons out faster without having to make any compromises on quality. I’ll be sharing frequent updates, behind the scenes stuff, WIPs and more on there, plus early access to merch, work streams and etc. If you'd like to help out with gettin these toons made it'd be very sincerely appreciated.

https://www.patreon.com/jonsherin

As far as production goes we're nearing the end of episode 2, which'll be dropping sometime in April. Been cooking Episode 3 in the background and progress has been slow but steady, I'll be moving my priority over to that pretty soon. I wanna try and get that one out by the end of the year god willing.

Been booking the premiere show for episode 2 as well and will have an announcement on that soon! Booking shows is hard as fuck but I'm so stoked on the lineup so far, it's gonna be a banger.

Thank u! Next time you hear from me there will be a finished cartoon (hopefully!!!)

For the one year anniversary of the Ratbasterdz Premiere I cut together all the footage I had from the event into this recap video. I get into it more in the video description on youtube, but this was something I wasn’t sure I’d ever release– I really dig how it came out though and I hope you do too! 

You can check it out HERE!

(NG is ratbasterdz home but wasn’t sure what the deal is with uploading live action on here anymore– is this vid a thing we can put on Newgrounds nowadays? Lmk and I’ll upload it here too if so!) 

I plan on doing one of these events for each upcoming ratbasterdz episode. This was so much fucking fun and I’m really hyped on what the future ones will be like. Gonna start booking the next one very soon. (I’ll announce it more than two weeks in advance this time too lol)

Realized too that I never properly announced on here that I’m making more, either! There’s four new cartoons in development. Instead of doing one more massive 11 minute episode, we’re breaking it up a little bit.

Each one is very different from the one that comes before it. This has given me a lot of room to experiment, focus on different characters/ideas that I’ve wanted to explore, and make a variety of different “types” of cartoons.

The way I’m looking at them is like songs on an album. Different in tone/focus/style, all working separately under one sort of “sound” to comprise a larger picture. That's all I feel like I can give away right now without spoiling anything.

As of the time of writing this, there’s only about 1 minute left of storyboarding on what would be “Episode 4”. Every other episode is completely boarded and voiced. Layout’s completely done and Animation/BG Painting has started on episode 2, shooting for a Spring release. 

I feel like if you know what Ratbasterdz is or use NG in general you already know what Bridge Kids is too, but if you dont, go check it out! I voice the character Moe– they’re a fucking blast to record and I love seeing how the full toons turn out every time. Very grateful to be a part of it. 

Also, if you fuck with the music from Ratbasterdz check out Tyler’s solo project Black Teeth. He did all the RB music minus some screams and lyrics. Dude’s a powerhouse, im blown the fuck away that he does this all himself. 

The full album should be out towards the end of the month I think, but the single’s up right now: 

https://www.instagram.com/black_teeth_screamo/

https://open.spotify.com/track/0OzO3BUfpSgiySRI5vdktW?si=404f37cb0e70496b

That's it for now, peace!

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 often 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. 

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. 

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. 

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!

WHAT'S UP NEWGROUNDS

First of all, I really can't say enough how much all the love for the cartoon has meant to me, especially here on Newgrounds. It was really important to me that it went up on here before anywhere else. The response has been overwhelming, I'm very happy people are digging it and very humbled in general. I still can't really wrap my head around the fact that this project that has consumed the past year and change of my life is finally done and out there. I'm gonna try and write a proper postmortem blogpost going over the production of the cartoon + the premiere + what's next eventually, but I injured my leg pretty bad so hasn't been top of my priority list yet. Nonetheless that'll be on here soon for those that are interested.

Just wanted to post a couple updates:

I just put up a Bigcartel page for the merch we've got leftover from the cartoon screening. There's not too much left, but in the event that we sell out of shirts, we'll print em to order for you. There's shirts, stickers, prints, and some sketches I did that I threw on there also.

We went live with the Soundtrack EP a week or so ago, and if you haven't checked that out yet, you can listen to it on Bandcamp and Spotify. All the music was written and performed by my friend Tyler, who is a fuckin insane talent and without whom IDK where the project would even be. It was awesome getting to work with someone who fucks with 00's metalcore as much as I do, and I think you can really feel the love for that sound he has in these tracks. Kyle, who voiced Wyatt Wiesel, wrote the lyrics and did some of the vocals too.

Something I didn't post anywhere else is the "Inspirations" Playlist that Tyler and I collabed on, attached to the Spotify account for the EP. It's comprised of tracks Tyler was thinking of when writing the soundtrack, placeholder tracks from the animatic, music videos/live footage I referenced when boarding/animating, music that inspired the original idea, and the bands that played at the premiere.

A core tenant of the project for me was bridging the gap of two of my biggest passions, and as much as I wanted this to be something that people that were already into this kind of music would dig, I wanted it to serve as an introduction into core music for people that might not have had any interest prior. There's a pretty big variety of stuff in there from different eras and styles, and a couple tracks from tangential genres too. If anyone checks it out, let me know if something you heard sticks out to you!

That's it for now I think. Thanks again 4 everything. <3

Probably should've posted this on here earlier, but HEY better late than never--

If you're in the southeastern US consider coming out to the premiere of my new cartoon RATBASTERDZ this weekend! We've got a bunch of hardcore bands coming out to jam and will be screening the cartoon for the first time in full. It'll go up on Newgrounds in the weeks following the event.

Here's the trailer for the cartoon in case you missed it:

+ All event details in attached flyer!

If anyone from NG actually comes out because of this post find me at the show and I'll hook you up with a shirt or some posters or something.

PEACE!