How does Youtube work, exactly?

This 4-second clip of a kid yelling over one of my clips has nearly 2000 views. The actual cartoon has less than 150. Can someone explain to me how Youtube works?

Maybe comics, maybe not?

Dammit, I don't know why I tried to promise weekly Friday updates. Even with comics, I don't think it could happen consistently. I think I did it at a bad time too, since the first cartoon after trying to update regularly was for another site, so now I'm kind of screwed up. There is a new cartoon ready to be animated, and I want to animate it, but there's no way it'll be done in time for tomorrow, so I started doing this comic (first page pictured above, sans the top title panel). And then I realized...I suck at doing comics. Or maybe it's just doing them digitally. The last time I made a comic was in 2004, and that was with good ol' pen and paper. But either way, I just have an awful time laying things out and trying to fill in panels. I mean, I'm going to try and keep going with this, and maybe partway through something good will happen and cause me to think, "Oh hey, maybe this isn't so bad." Either that, or I may just screw the whole idea of doing comics. Don't get me wrong, I want to do comics, and it's always been a dream of mine to publish a comic book (though animation is more important to me), but I just don't think I can. Whatever...

Having a Wonderful Time on Youtube

The Geoweasel music video from 2006 set to Tiny Tim's "Livin' in the Sunlight, Lovin' in the Moonlight" is now on Youtube. Go check it out, and do what you have to.
Oh, yeah, and here's a video of me earlier today recording lines for the latest cartoon.

Here's a doodle

I've been playing the new Punch Out, obviously.

Obey, obey, you must obey

I'm going to probably add some more items to the store soon, mainly Weas "Obey" designs like I had once in the past. I don't know if anyone remembers them though, no one bought any. I bet Paul remembers. Anyway, just some novelty stuff like buttons and such. Also a mug, in case you need a place to put coffee, or pencils, or if you're a talk show host. I may change the design from what you see above though; that image of Weas actually kinda creeps me out.

Old ideas brought back

Back in 2006 I was going to do a cartoon about Nar giving summer safety tips. I think I might resurrect that idea, but I'm contemplating on doing it with Jimbob instead. Maybe. I dunno. Also, here's a couple screens from a cartoon I finished yesterday about N64 in Bible times:

Sound issues and new stuff on the way

Because I haven't been beating myself up enough over various audio issues in my cartoons, I decided to look into the actual quality of the audio itself in the past couple episodes. Now, on my computer, everything sounds fine, but a few people have commented that the audio sounded weird. Well, I've been working on this cartoon with a voice track that I didn't record that was originally sent to me in WAV format and I converted it to MP3 to save space, which is what I normally do. Today, I was using headphones and when I played the cartoon with the MP3 sound file, it sounded weird, like the characters were underwater. I went back to the WAV and it sounded fine. So I checked on the files for Overreaction and sure enough, the MP3 files sounded gargly, but the original raw audio sounded normal. I was totally oblivious to this before, but I guess now I know to just keep everything as WAVs. I would go back and fix the Geoweasel episodes that sound like this, but I only save the raw audio as a WAV, and when I edit them, I save them as MP3s, so I would have to go and splice all the audio together perfectly again.
Also, someone asked why the Having A Wonderful Time music video wasn't on Youtube and the answer is simply because of the song. Even if I do upload it, Youtube will reject it. So I may upload it and see if I can find an alternate public domain track that will suit it well. Maybe I'll edit it for HD too.
And finally, the non-Geoweasel cartoon I'm working on is almost done; I'll probably finish it today. Since it's not for my site though, I don't have jurisdiction over when it goes live, so it won't be tomorrow's update. It might be up on Sunday the earliest, but if it takes longer to go up, I'll try and do a little comic to make up for it.

FOX-Aniboom Holiday Animation Challenge

So I've been hearing about this pretty epic challenge on Aniboom all day long. Part of my brain is saying “Go for it,” and the other part of my brain is saying “don’t bother.” Maybe if I teamed up with some friends for it… I dunno, I need to think more about it. ‘Cuz I’m not doing enough of that already.

Thoughts on voice acting

After I finished "Overreaction," I sent it into Cold Hard Flash and a couple days ago, I got a response from Aaron Simpson saying the following:

"i really dig your writing and your unique character style. i'll throw out some crit, if you're down for it. i think the voice acting takes this from a 9.5 to a 6. your jokes are tight, animation smooth, but i'd recommend reaching out to some folks who will do some voice action virtually.... like sending you MP3s over the web. anyway, i'll get off my high horse now. thanks for passing the link - i hope you'll continue to do so down the line...."

Now I'm not upset about that in any way, not at all. In fact, I really appreciate the critique because it's not something that I get that often in comments, and rarely does anyone say anything about the voice acting in Geoweasel at all. But as I always do, I started thinking about it. Probably too much.
When I first started making animations in 2004, my intent for Geoweasel was to be something short and easy to do that I could release each week, so I decided on doing all the voices myself because I wouldn't have to wait for other people to get back to me and I wouldn't have to bother trying to direct someone back and forth via email since I knew how I wanted everything to sound in my head. But even early on, voice acting was one of my least favorite parts of making the cartoons.
I would take Arron's advice in getting other voice actors on the web to do the voices on the show, but I just feel that now after it's been around for so long, it would be too weird and confusing to just up and change all the characters' voices. In future non-Geoweasel projects, I can safely say that I will not be doing many voices, if any, but I just think it's too late for Geoweasel itself.
So I'm just curious as to what everyone else thinks, since it's not something that I hear about too often. Do you think there are problems with the voice acting? And if so, what about it bothers you? Or do you think using different actors would be too weird? I'd really like to hear your thoughts on this.

Everybody's doing it

Starting with the next episode, Geoweasel will be in high definition. Well, you'll be able to watch them in HD on Youtube, but on the main site, that would be way too big; they'll just be at a smaller 16:9 ratio. I had contemplated doing it for a while, but I was unsure if I would be able to do it since I've always had problems with exporting and converting Flash to video, but I tested it with Overreaction and it actually worked. So once I get through these two non-Geoweasel cartoons, we'll see how that works out. Also, I have some more important stuff to post about later..

Watergun

I really want to have a watergun fight. Anyone want to join me?

Site updates, comics, other projects, and getting noticed

Hey everyone. I changed a few things around on the site last night, mostly on the main page to fit some things to my liking. There is now a small news box and the menu has been changed to accommodate a link to the upcoming comics section because...well, I plan to start doing some comics as well. The cartoons page has also been changed a little bit with different categories and links to each episode's Youtube page. We did have some problems last night with a "gumblar.cn" trojan in the site, so today, I had to take out every page of the site (including each cartoon's page), delete them from the server, remove the trojan's script, and then reupload them. Everything should be fine now, but if anyone encounters any problems, please let me know immediately and I'll see what I can do to fix it.

Now, I'm really trying to promote the Geoweasel Youtube channel in order to reach new people and a wider audience. Of course, no, I'm not trying to go viral, but I am trying to increase the series' popularity. It's kind of a downer to see only 50-something people watched your cartoon while thousands of people flock to see a kid talk to his webcam in a high-pitched voice. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea how to promote anything; I don't know how to get stuff noticed. I try to put things out there, submit things to sites, but nothing ever seems to happen. I would spend money on advertising or Youtube's Promoted Videos service, but...I have no money. So please, go check out the channel and rate, comment, favorite, share, Digg or whatever you can to help get Geoweasel out there. And for those of you who are already helping promote the show, I thank you. In fact, the most recent episode, Overreaction, was featured on The Daily What and POPTUB, which was amazing because this is the first time I've been featured anywhere.

I'm currently working on two non-Geoweasel projects for other people. I don't know if I can say what either of them are, but you'll definitely be able to see them when they're done. So I won't have the next Geoweasel cartoon, "Chitterbug" done for a while, but in the meantime I may be able to get the first comic up, so look out for those.

Mall doodles

Some stuff I doodled in my Moleskine while at the mall yesterday. In purple. Personally, the only one I actually care for is the girl sitting at the table.
I'll have some more actual news about what I'm doing later. Maybe today.

Geoweasel comics: a prototype of sorts

Regarding my growing interest of getting into comics again, this is one of the first stories I’d like to do. This, however is not the actual cover/title/whatever; I was just testing a texture set of screentones. There’s no way I’ll be using that much in the comics themselves.

NEW CARTOON ABOUT SWINE FLU!

Here's an all new Geoweasel episode called "Overreaction." Check it out and spread the word!

Youtube link
Vimeo Link

Work in progress

The more I work on this episode, the more I think it's going to flop. Badly. It's probably just my normal self-doubt, or at least some of it is, but something just doesn't feel right writing and humor-wise, and it was the same with the previous episode. I guess I'll just have to see how it turns out, and hopefully whatever comes after this captures the same feeling of some of the old episodes in terms of writing and humor..

Cartoonists Day

Shout out to all my cartoonist friends!