Hey there, you lowdown duded-up egg sucking guttertrash. How's it going?

Another week and I still haven't completed the second Sketchy Friends clip, but I have started to compile a bunch of my walk sequences into a something I will submit to the portal, so soon there will be two new things. Both just might be ready this time next week but don't hold your breath. It always takes longer than I expect to clean things up and get them ready to show. I'm back at work now too so that may or may not throw a spanner in the works...

So, since I don't have anything of my own to show you I thought I'd show you a couple of clips that I wish I'd made. These are both very near the style and mood I've been going for in my work.

Return as an animal by Bruno Dicolla

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Dance of the neon knight by Paul Rayment

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The Sandwich Twins made by Tim Ruffle using Flipnote Studio on the DSI

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Now as always here's a new walk sequence, getting the swinging arms to delay and sync up right took ages. The whole loop took about 6 hours in total... six hours I'll never get back... unless I... no... that'd never work.

Hello Newgrounds, I trust you've all had good christmas' and newyears times, I know I did. It was actually nice to not feel the need to draw all the time for a couple of weeks. I've been renovating the house and now finally have a lounge room and a fence which isn't falling down, and one more week of freedom before I'm back to work. It's hot as hell here in Melbourne at the moment, 40 something degrees celcius, which must be about a million farenheit.

Anyways, who give a hairy left testicle about that, let's watch some mother flipping cartoons

Okay we'll start with a good one, Plastic Man looks like a fantastic show and the Jack Cole comics are incredible

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and to follow that up more recently a pilot was made for a new version through warner brothers, I can't believe they didn't take it on, it's GREAT! "feel the long arm of the law you no good goon!"

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And now for the crap, here's Street Frogs. The hippingest hoppingest frogs around!

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The Poddington Peas, I really like the look of this one!

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Rocket Robin Hood the late sixties were not the most creative time for childrens cartoons...

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You never know I might just finish the second sketchy friends dance clip by the end of this week, but I'm not sure if I have the guts.

M-Shack has a new collaborative morphing collaboration starting up, click here to check out the forum. I've made a part for it, click here to see it.

Oh, and here's a new walk sequence I've just finished of a zombie pickle

Seriously, if I had to honestly admit to my artistic influences over the years, cereal boxes and candy packaging would be at the top of the list. I still buy food based on the silliness of the cartoon on the front, and get hit for it when I get home with an empty wallet and bags full of processed sugary shit.

So, I had a free moment (well, lets face it, I was procrastinating) and I thought I'd have a look at old cartoon ads for some inspiration, and I struck GOLD!! For people who make really short animations like me and have really short attention spans, a good cartoon ad is a dream come true! Here are the best of them;

This one's the oldest and beautifully animated back before television when there was more money available.

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Snagglepus was the best in America at selling cereal, in the world even!

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Applejacks, just make sure no bullies get their hands on them or we're all screwed!

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Quangaroos!! Why didn't we have these in Australia?!

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Booberry flavour, looks like some sort of science experiment

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In the early eighties factories were laying people off, but I didn't know it was this bad

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And finally, a glimpse at the future of cereal

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In other news I'm making a collaborative illustration with Nathaniel Milburn, still working on Sketchy Friends 2, and I'm working my way through my sketchbook scans and redrawing them in flash. Some of them are screaming to be animated such as this walking lizard.

How's everyone going out there? Me? I'm feeling pretty good, I guess. You know that feeling of relief when you get a pain in the arse job out of the way and it all goes smoothly, well that's where I'm at.

Yesterday I discovered that the photocopier at work also doubles as a scanner, so I scanned my way through my latest two sketchbooks and uploaded the pages to my website, so if you want to have a look head on over to neilsanders.com.au and have a browse. The drawings are mostly of Sketchy Friends style character ideas to entertain myself when stuck on trains, in meetings and places like that. Unlike most teachers who say you should always draw with a purpose, I've always just let the pen do what it likes and find I get more fun out of it and more interesting images as a result.

And in other news I did an interview about my approach to animation for a local Melbourne TV show that'll be on some time in the new year on channel 31. The show is aimed at 12-15 year old market, and is designed to help show the diverse possibilities of animation beyond anime and pixar and how various professionals work.

To keep myself sane while compiling the sketchbooks onto my site I've been watching japanese commercials, and here are some of my favourites.

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and now to hypnotise you for the next ten minutes with these running ball type fellows

well, I'm slowly working my way through a new Sketchy Friends Dance style clip, while working on renovating a room in my house. Between these activities and work I'm busy busy busy, but perhaps not too busy to make a little clip for peoples birthdays.

If you tell me when you're birthday is I'll be more likely to make you something, much more likely than when I don't know about it at all... so tell me. MrScriblam and Fawx's are soon (khawnerl is running a collab for them) and Emanhattan is getting older too I think, or something.

So, I thought I'd show you some stuff by Malcolm Sutherland, in case you hadn't seen anything by him before. He's does great work, freaky good animation and lots of variety in his skills.

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Woah, look out now!! It's a hungry froggy type guy!

THANKS TO YOU GUYS I HAVE HAD A BIRTHDAY!! I am now 30, a quality vintage!
Some of the best people on this site (and one arsehole) made stuff for me to help celebrate!

Stalagmite sang me an acapella song which starts out spooky then gets a funky grind on!

MasterAardvark put together a supergenius piece of death cake action :D

Hulalaoo made Insane Boogley, a classic Hulalaoo violent epic in which I take on the newgrounds office which is currently on the front page!

mrnihil made me a clip with a freaky mouse which is so damned stylish I nearly gave up animation and joined the army.

MrAbnormal made me an innuendo filled visual feast of a gift with some sensual film times

eammy drew this, though he'll probably deny it if you ask him

Rutger made this bipolar freakout which hurts your mind after a short while

farfenwaffle made another moodswing inspired animated loop. I'm beginning to think that everyone around here thinks that I'm insane :3

I forgot to mention that iamweird made this bit of super large filesize madness :)

Luis (the arsehole) morphed me into a piece of shit! :D

So, obviously all of you have seen adventure time, yes?

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Pendleton Ward is the creator and I found this other video by him which is pure gold. Adventure Time is coming out as a series early next year. There is a production blog for the show that I've been watching and it's looking fantastic with the same energy and imagination as the original.

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here's another thing he made, one that's closer to the kind of thing I love making

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okay, so here's your loop...

It's my BIRTHDAY on friday! Make me a fuggin MOOOOVVVIIIEEE!!!

Earlier this year at the Melbourne animation festival, I met and saw a screening of films by Chris Landreth. This film, "Ryan" won the 2005 oscar, and is about his meetings with Ryan Larkin, an influential animator from the 70's who's life in the following decades was rough to say the least.

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I also found a perfect version of Ryan Larkin's Walking film which you see a snippet of in the film above. Amazing!!

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Okay, so what the hell am I doing? Well... I've been given the task to make an animated clip for artist and friend Geoff Tolchard's track 555. It's a great soundscape type piece and I'm going to take my time and really plan out my response to it. I'm giving myself a deadline of the 19th of January to get it done.
if you like have a listen to it and his other music here.

As a warmup leading into that I'm going to make another sketchy friends dance style clip to the track
Wax Your Crack by freezwalm

Look at this... it's pretty choppy because I had to compress the hell out of it to be able to attach it to this post. As you read this your body is doing this millions of times per second... or something :3

HEY!! Happy Halloween and all that jazz!!

I didn't make anything scary this year, I've been really flat out getting my folio ready to submit for a post grad design course I've been doing, you can check out the work on my site(but I warn you it's pretty boring).

I did find five hours to make something for this months animation club, it's a cow eating grass. Cows have really elastic faces so I wanted to have a play around with that.
Check it out!!

Oh and I've found some amazing videos to show you this week, created by Sticky Monster Lab
They basically have a city populated with these blobby men and they get up to stuff...
this is just a short thing they did for valentines day

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This one was created for nike, but it's so charming that I can't hold that against it

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And this is the epic story of The Monsters!

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anyway, watch the cow thing I made, there are lots of weird expressions on his face, such as...

Without Tex Avery we wouldn't have sexy chicks, racism, paranoia, rapid fire quick gags, and death in cartoons. In other words there would be no Newgrounds. What do you think?

This is a great documentary on the man.

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Here's my favourite of his films, Bad Luck Blackie. it's a difficult choice because almost everything he touched turned to gold.

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A close second is this, King Size Canary!

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Oh, and I've been sick a lot lately so I'm doing a 21 day liver detox to clean out the old booze processor. For the next month I can't eat anything other than fresh or just cooked fruit and veg. No bread, no meat, no sugar, NO BEER!! I can eat some nuts and wholemeal pasta or brown rice. It's going surprisingly well, except for the fact that I'm constantly running to the toilet.

here, have some of my germs!

seriously, watch Wild Wind and tell me you don't love it!
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/
514138
It's pure stylish frame by frame gold but it's only got a score of 3.61!
I SAY THAT'S CRAZY 8O

if you want to see my latest screenprints go to my site
I've just printed my first tshirts too, but they need washing before I can put the images up, so stay tuned for later in the week.
http://www.neilsanders.com.au/silk.htm l

I really should upload the prints to the art portal, but after already updating my site I can't be bothered. Ahh, laziness. And I'm still getting my head around adding a sales function to the site, I'm hoping I should be able to add one by the end of the month.

anyway, lets talk animation. I've just been watching some amazing stuff, Sykohyko who won today's daily first for You Give Job has created loads of amazing works, my favourite being the four part series Neenja. I also stumbled across Squigo who created a sweet little series of animations of a guy killing himself in interesting ways.
And on vimeo I found these gems;

this is so atmospheric I fell into a dream state while watching it
it's called Trichrome Blue and it's by Lois van Baarle
click here to visit her website

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sexy farting hot rod chick alert!

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Sweet Jebus moonwalking on water! The animation is heavenly!

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so, there you go. only one thing left to do now and that's add the obligatory animated gif. These octopus guys are waiting in line for the toilet, they REALLY need a whiz!