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!

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.

All you Frankensteiner fans will be pleased to know that on October 24th of 2009, yours truly will be hosting a 12 hour living stream event for the next episode in the series, titled “Frankensteiner: Biceps & Triceps.” Taking place on a Saturday around noon, I’ll guide watchers through the entire process of the making of this short. Unlike last year, I most likely will not be using Mario Paint for the creation process, but instead will be using Flash. However, I do plan on taking a bit of a different route this time and most likely presenting Frankensteiner in a bit of a different way. So mark your calendars because this episode of Frankensteiner will be the most insane, over the top, ridiculous and vicious episode seen yet.

You won’t want to miss it.

Oh, in case you need a refreshing on Frankensteiner, the version I cooked up last year is after the jump. BA-BAM!

We Jack Bauer fans have a lot of waiting to do over the next few months. Okay, so this past season of 24 certainly wasn’t the finest in the series, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss spending Monday nights with my favorite CTU agents.

That said there is a whole world of 24 out there, including plenty of ways to spend time with Jack while we wait for Day 7 to arrive in January. You might be surprised by the amount of options, ranging from books to video games. Take a look.

24: Declassified Books

There is a hard truth I must face every day with Shamoozal.com and in particular, the Flash animated series that the site is built upon. It isn’t that I’m doing the work for “free.” The “starving artist” does this stuff because they enjoy the work, right? Exactly. The problem is that it pains me to see that people are making money off of our work. That is the problem for us Flash animators, many times we’re handing our work away for free, and in return we hope for a handful of hits back to our site. Does it really pay off? It depends on what you want to get out of it. The following is an account of the experience I have had with getting exposure and the price it cost.

In the year and a half Shamoozal has been around I have done some serious whoring of the material. The fact of the matter is that there aren’t any “guides” to making a successful cartoon series without selling your soul. By this point, I kind of know what works and what doesn’t work. Flash portal sites like Newgrounds.com, and the cleverly titled FlashPortal.com do exactly what they say. They allow you to upload your work and have it viewed by potential hundreds, thousands, even millions within days. What you’re doing however, is handing them the SWF file, and with that they’re able to do whatever they like with it. When you click that little agreement box, you’re basically allowing these sites to own your material. Because of this, I picked and chose the websites I uploaded to very carefully. Newgrounds is an obvious choice, and the most popular Flash portal in town. You upload to them and you will have a couple hundred views to your short within hours. I won’t lie, but I get a little giddy whenever I upload something to that site. It’s fun to read the “reviews” even though they refer to animation with terms like “smooth” (it’s called timing) and site owner Tom Fulp has been genuinely nice to me. Though it must be said it is a little maddening when something you worked on for weeks, sometimes months, gets brushed to the side by something that was clearly done in a night.

The key here is that you’re giving your SWF to these sites. You’re handing them the keys to your car and trusting them to bring it home safely. Well, we’ve all watched Ferris Bueler’s Day Off, and we know these people like to drive off hills in slow motion with the Star Wars theme playing. The problem with a cartoon that does well on these sites is that they seem to “appear” onto other sites, and before you know it the thing has spread like wild fire. What do I mean? Well, let’s type “Shamoozal Ninja” into Google and see what pops up.