Saw this posted on LineBoil, and I just had to share it with everyone here. You’re hard pressed to find anything that is as well animated and designed as this short from Gobelins. It’s pretty great. Enjoy!

Welp, finally made it to the moment where Volume 1 of Read Only Memory is complete. It’s hard to believe I’ve been working on ROM for half a year now!

So, Volume 1 is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll get into it one more time. Each month we’ve produced a Nintendo related short for GoNintendo.com, and this month we’re bundling them all together to create “Volume 1″ of the series. Included in this set is Turnips In Love, Simon’s Supper, The Return of Captain N, and Pizza Links.

Oh, you’ve watched the four ROM episodes already? It’s okay, watch them again, and see how I “seamlessly” blended them together! But really, if you’re a long time fan of our work, please let me know if you like this format!

Read Only Memory: Volume 1 is around the corner! So, what’s new for you loyal Shamoozal fans? Well, unfortunately, not much. That doesn’t make this release of ROM any less important though. Actually, it’s the most important one yet!

So here’s the rub. The idea was always to package 4 shorts together and then that would be the one I release around the interwebs outside of uploading it to YouTube and having GoNintendo link it. My original idea was to include some bonus stuff in between the shorts, but unfortunately, time has gotten the best of me and that won’t be happening. Instead I focused my efforts planning just how these shorts are going to interconnect to make it feel like one cohesive piece, which as you’d imagine is pretty tricky!

Today is actually the first day I’ve been able to work on putting them together since the birthday of my kids almost a month ago. I knew they were on the way so I put all my effort into finishing up Pizza Links before they were born. Good thing I did, because the kids came five days after Pizza Links debuted. Talk about timing!

Assuming you don’t hang out on our forums all day, my kids spent the first two weeks of their lives in an incubator since they were born early. As you’d guess, my wife and I spent our nights there while I worked during the day. I basically had to put Shamoozal on hold for a little while. Now I’m on two weeks parental leave from my office so I can figure out just exactly how to raise these little dudes. So with one week behind me and a grasp on their schedule and how to work around it, I’m finding time to fit in work on ROM Vol 1.

I recently sat down with Justin from the Radio Free Gamer podcast to talk about Read Only Memory. I’ve included a portion of the interview that goes into how the series came about, what old video game cartoons inspired me from the past and why I sort of still like the Zelda cartoon. If you click on over to the rest of the show, we dive more into how the NES era has affected an entire generation. My interview takes place around the 42 minute mark, but be sure to enjoy all the sweet game music that helps make Radio Free Gamer the show that it is!

Enjoy the interview and be sure to check out the show. I’m in the latest episode titled World 2 Level 20.

I’m a couple days later than I wanted to be, but the latest episode of Read Only Memory, Pizza Links, is here! So watch the above clip, then read the rest.

As many of you guys might know, this was actually the first episode of ROM I started working on before switching to Turnips In Love. I was tinkering around with this idea way back in February but didn’t really start to build all the assets until the middle of March. Once I had the big pieces in place I recorded my script and made the animatic for it. I absolutely hated it. I hated it so much I honestly didn’t think I could salvage it, and because I wanted to get something to Kevin over at GoNintendo, I came up with Turnips In Love. In Love was easy and cute enough that I felt it was a good replacement for what I was currently working on. Plus, it was perfect for nailing the “30″ second run time I was aiming for.

While working on The Return of Captain N, I was trying to figure out exactly which idea I wanted to work on next. I decided that since I already put so much work into this short that maybe I should revisit it. I took a good look at everything I had script and audio wise and decided to throw away half of it. One of the problems with the original version is that it was much too long, going on for probably close to three minutes. You’re not missing anything as I managed to get to the point in a fraction of the time, though I didn’t quite hit my magical 30 second run time. Regardless, once I was able to really narrow down the key points, I felt much happier with what I was shooting for. It’s longer than your average ROM, but it is no where near the bloated beast it once was.

It’s hard to believe I haven’t come up with a new short for The Zoinks since 2007. The final episode I produced was Fruit Smoothies, and the entire creation process was streamed over UStream and made in about 12 hours total.

The Zoinks shorts were originally intended to be produced on average of once a month (along with everything else, can you believe it?) but that obviously didn’t happen. Seriously though, none of these shorts actually took much time, I just never really bothered to come up with a bunch of worthwhile ideas for the characters. Each of them probably took a solid day worth of work, sometimes spread over the course of a weekend. They’re very simple, and that was always the intention. Thinking back, I think I banged out Finger Paints in about four hours one night.

Carboard Box was actually the first Shamoozal short ever produced. When I originally bought this domain I had nothing but a logo up. Not much later I had a link for the forums, and then about a month later I had put up Carboard Box as a teaser cartoon. It stayed there until I finally assembled a basic site layout and our first “real” short, Candy Corns.

I’m really sorry about the lack of Nerdlog posts on my part. I’ve been meaning to write more (I actually had a review of Galaxy 2 written but decided I hated what I wrote) but since I’ve actually been busy making shorts (FOR ONCE!) I decided my time is better off spent doing just that. The above is a still from the next episode of ROM.

I dropped probably too many hints during the last podcast (which should be up soonish) so I’ll save myself from going further into it. That said, I’ve been having a lot of fun with this short so far. It has given me an opportunity to merge two of my favorite things, and I’m enjoying how they play off of each other. I’m not exactly the greatest digital painter, in fact, the last episode of ROM was probably the first time in ages where I actually tried to sit down and paint something. I thought about going with backgrounds done in Flash this time around, but I think doing these backgrounds have been pretty good exercises for me. The one you see above has taken me about two nights to get through. I could have easily sat there and added more and more, and fine tuned the images to the best of my ability, but at some point you have to stop. Since I’m falling behind a bit on the short thanks to these backgrounds (another one which I thought about showing but gives away too much) I have to decide when enough is enough for certain elements. To be honest, I’m having trouble believing I can get this done by the deadline I’ve given myself. I might miss it by a day or two, but believe me, I’m trying.

So the idea for Simon’s Supper obviously stems from the fact that in Castlevania games the protagonists usually find food stashed away in walls. Old monster walls. In a castle that’s been around for centuries. Thought I’d have a little fun with that idea and play with it some. For Simon, I really like the “barbarian” style old school Castlevania characters and decided that was the best route to take for him. I like to think of Simon as something of a brute and I had some fun making him that way. In fact, the way he acts almost reminds me of our very own Frankensteiner. Also, my love affair for Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream has shown through in this one. I hope you enjoyed the second episode of Read Only Memory. Oh and don’t forget you can watch it in HD. See you in a month!

Uhhh, what a weekend. Nothing better than sitting in a computer chair almost the entire time, only having to go to bed tonight and wake up first thing in the morning to do it all over again, but that time to make a living. I’ll be in pain for sure this week.

I promised I would have these Read Only Memory shorts done monthly, and while the wife and I are busy getting the house together for the kids, I’m trying my hardest to stay true to the promise. As a result of all that, I had to take a whole weekend to get up to speed on this short. I had to make a few compromises to the short, but the general idea is still there. The next short has to do with Castlevania, and it’s a little more involved than two Turnips making googly eyes at each other. I did some storyboards earlier in the week, but I wasn’t happy with the direction I took with it, so yesterday morning I scrapped those and essentially started over again. I spent a few hours building a Simon model to use, and then recorded audio, timed out the short, and began to animate. I crunched a lot of work in yesterday. I spent most of today animating and a good part of the night doing a key background for the scene. I’m not much of painter, so I’m not super happy with it, but it’ll do. To save a bit of time, I axed a line of dialogue from Simon that I didn’t really think helped. It wasn’t part of the original script, but I thought it would help some of the context. After looking at how much work I had left, I decided to just ditch it. It wasn’t there to begin with, so whatever, you know?

Like Turnips, it’s a quick snap, snap and it’s over. I’m thinking maybe fans of Frankensteiner might enjoy this one. Not because it’s really like an episode of that, there will be no eating people, and shitting them out, but I sorta channeled the character for Simon. I mean, just look at that face!

I caught this over at Lineboil and was wondering how it was produced. Turns out its done exactly how it looks: hand drawn on 3000 napkins. It sports some nifty animation by a buddy of mine, Dan Forgione, at Flickerlab for BNY Mellon. There’s a small videohere that shows some behind the scenes stuff. Check it out.