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...for the marchy month of March, 2007. 31/03/07 (Visitor Counter=392,537): Not albino... When I was leaving Canada earlier this year, the border patrol guy looked at my passport, noticed that it said "New Zealand" and immediately asked me if I had seen "Black Sheep" yet. Well, there's a new stereotype for the collection: "All Kiwis get to see NZ movies months before they're released in North America". :) But although this bit of small-talk about how awesome we both expected Black Sheep to be allowed me and my sleight-of-hand to slip all those drugs and mooses through customs, IS this movie really as good as everyone all over the world is hoping? Well, today I went and found out for myself.
Can you make a scary horror movie about sheep that attack people?
Apparently not, but you can make
a FUNNY horror movie about that. The concept is funny. The characters are funny. Even the gore is funny. It's blatant over-the-top stuff, not like this "spooky stuff happening off-camera"
nonsense that you get in your run-of-the-mill contemporary horror. And it doesn't get repetitive. Every time someone gets gored by one of those brilliantly-made sheep puppets, there's always something new to appreciate, whether it's the spraying of blood, or the view of a sheep's gaping jaws crunching onto a victim's face, or the flapping of pulled-out giblets. And other similarly amusing things that I won't spoil for you! 01/03/07 (Visitor Counter=384,779): Reminiscing about stuff you've never seen before Last year I started making an animation for Chris, a Brazillian client whose class was graduating from high school, and they wanted* me to animate a music video for their song. It took a while, but Chris seems to think it was worth the wait. Check it out, although the in-jokes will probably mean nothing to you. "Best Friends" (Warning: Contains profanity (the "d" word), racism, heightism, hairism, and sentimentalism.) Meanwhile, in my graduating year at animation school, my project for 2007 is semi-planned and underwayish. It's got cats in it, but it's not a music video. It's also not going to be in the style of old school Warner Bros Roadrunner & Coyote animation (awww), but new school Spumco Ren & Stimpy animation (joy!). For professionalism's sake I may not reveal any material from the project until the whole thing is completed. * Paid. 03/02/07 (Visitor Counter=374,252): Ocular Confectionary The first TmsT Animation of 2007: "Dumbbell" 01/02/07 (Visitor Counter=373,528): Howdy y'all, I'm back eh! While I was away, I did the traditional thing of taking lots of photos of famous monuments obscured by my thumb. Some other people also took photos of me. Here are a few PHOTOZ FROM MY TRIPPPPPP!!! While I was away, my Christmas animation "Sheepie's Christmas" was unleashed by Albinoblacksheep.com just before Christmas. Download the (terrible) song if you like my singing. Shortly before I left NZ, I drew some pictures of dragons from various mythologies for a client. They are now on my comics/cartoons page. 10/12/06 (Visitor Counter=358,548): Bye! I'm off to USA today. Canada later. Pics & updates as they come to hand!
In the meantime, enjoy a couple of animations I made at school this term using "Toon Boom", which is to Flash what horse urine is to German beer.
o/ 30/11/06 | 01/12/06 (Visitor Counter=356,089): Midnight Update! One week to go in my 2nd year at Freelance Animation School, and I can announce that I've passed all the assessment for this year, hurrah! Also I seem to have become an unofficial Flash tutor, and have been tutoring my own tutor in "L337 Flash Skillz". Next year I plan to take over the school as director. (Then I will sell it to pay off my student loan. No, just kidding. Not even the school itself is worth THAT much money.) Tomorrow the school - the next day, the world!
(In addition to these, I did some detailed sketches of the tower and its room, as well as other miscellaneous objects, but they're not really that interesting.)The outline we were given for this assignment: Design characters and stuff for a graphical adaptation of the story of "Rapunzel". This Rapunzel stuff is also located at this link here and is (c)2006 Andrew Kepple.
05/11/06 (Visitor Counter=346,483): Guy Fawkes Day eh? From the penguin enclosure at Kelly Tarlton's Underwater World... And, from the eel tank:
And it just wouldn't be Guy Fawkes Day without remembering this little gem from a few years before V For Vendetta stole my soundtrack... ;) News from Animation School: I've finished all my assessment for this year. \o/ 03/11/06 (Visitor Counter=345,359): Pretentiously Portentious I saw something disturbing today. A sign of the Apocalpyse. No, not a harmless, flashing neon sign proclaiming "THE END IS NIGH", or four dudes on horseback bringing conflict and anorexia and bird flu and bucketkickery, or even a newspaper headline about what George W. Bush is up to, but actual evidence of the fact that the human race is screwed.
Picture, if you have a visual imagination, a drinking fountain. A very simple one: Clean, stainless steel, consisting of a spout and a button which when pressed will allow clean, fresh water to flow from said spout.
Vessel Not Included. I always thought, nay, hoped, that the main reason why people purchased overpriced bottled water was because you got a cool sipper-bottle with it. I guess I was wrong.
Mere paces away from at least two FREE WATER DISPENSERS there is this machine where people PAY to get exactly the same thing. (Please note, gentle reader, that the commercial name of this vending machine is, just to really rub our noses in it, "Wet Planet". Even when reminded that we live on the most watery planet known to exist, we'll still shell out money for half a litre of the stuff.)
Surely this is a sign that The Last Days are upon us.
Have we, as a society - or, dare I say it, as a species? - forgotten where water actually comes from?
It doesn't come from shops or vending machines, it FALLS OUT OF THE SKY for God's sake. Well, actually, for humanity's sake, but the gods are the ones who provide it.
But wait a bit, I hear you interrupting, bottled water that you buy from shops and vending machines also comes from rain, does it not?
IT COMES FROM HELL! Yea, listen to me, my brothers and sistahs, for we are in the grip of eeeevil! People are turning their backs on the holy Water From Heaven and instead suckling at the very teat of Evil Itself! Bottled water is a not just a gift from below, but also a trap. A poison. Those who drink it soon succumb to its satanic influences. They start engaging in unholy activities, such as Jogging, Engaging in Mass Consumerism, and Driving SUVs 5km to the gym to trot on the treadmills for 10km and then drive back home again, stopping only to refuel their SUV, scrape the bloody remains of innocent cyclists off the windshield, and buy more bottles of deviljuice.
Obviously, the Underworld, Hell, Hades, whichever name you have for it, is recruiting souls for their Army of the Damned, by corrupting people with these "water vending machines" and "bottled water companies". At the alarming rate at which people are buying into this demonic scheme, Armageddon cannot be far off.
And leading their army of darkness will be The Joggers. Now, I ain't sayin' that we should start trying to save the world and hug the rainforests or any of that hippie nonsense, because many of the Joggers are actually tree-hugging, whale-saving, ozone-hole-conscious sprout-munchers themselves in an attempt to balance out the sins that they know they're committing, before their consciences atrophy and drop off like a dried-up scab. What I am saying, is that next time you feel like throwing your money away because you have too much of it, don't do it in a stupid way that benefits the Legions of Hell (such as bottled water companies). Do it in a way that benefits mortals, for a change. Class dismissed. 02/11/06 (Visitor Counter=344,566): Faces I've done a lot of caricatures lately. Check out the gallery, in particular this year's IMHOSTFU Forums group caricature, where the theme is HALLOWEEN! 29/10/06 (Visitor Counter=341,562): Shoulda, woulda, coulda, woulda  Click here. This took me about six weeks to make. I'm going to sleep now. :) 26/10/06 (Visitor Counter=340,525): 30 Days Later Watch out for zombies! Coming soon.
But in the meantime, fellow Kiwis - if you want to see more of my animation, tune your televisions to C4 in the evenings...
Mail Bag! 26/09/06 (Visitor Counter=334,452): I've got some redubbing to do Is there really such a thing as amazing coincidence in this word of ours? Or is it just ordinary old everyday proof of some Higher Power? Or do our all-too-human minds simply draw connections between things because that's how we live & learn? As it turns out, if you take the TmsT animation I've Got Some Falling To Do and replace its soundtrack with Weird Al Yankovich's cover of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody (and delay the start of the movie by a few seconds), the new soundtrack lines up with the animation quite appropriately. Check it out. After watching the video, highlight the following text for a list of amazing coincidences that people have found: * "Open your eyes" - The letter "O" in "Video" becomes an eye. * "Look up to the skies" - Cloud floats past. * "I'm just a poor boy" - Enter the flight attendant Guy. * "Little low" - View pans down to floor level. * "Goodbye everybody" - Guy hangs up the phone on Death. * Wacky Instrumental - Enter Guitarist and Drummer, from the original's instrumental. * "WILL you do the fandango" - The exact point at which Guy starts writing his Will. * "Galileo" - Falling body... ;) * "Monstrosity" - Enter "Monstrous Squid". Funny how the word "monstrosity" from the new music lined up with the word "monstrous" in the original, considering that both words only appear once. * The "Let him/me go" bit - The Guy is caught in monstrous squid tentacles (and freaking out). * "Beelzebub" - Grave. * Crazy laughter - Dancing Death! * The Headbanging Interlude - Guy gets swung around dizzily. * "Just gotta get right outta here" - Guy escapes into space. * And many more appropriate scene changes and expressions/mouth movements besides! 09/09/06 (Visitor Counter=330,652): StrifeToons 3 is done, AT LAST! After months and months of slackness, it's finally here. Click the motivational poster below to watch the animation! 
And here's a larger, more printable version of the Lemmings motivational poster.
On a related topic... Bobo DonkeyTM has turned the fingerpuppet theatre of StrifeToons 1's "Duke Nukem: The Movie" into his own live-action movie for a school film project.
It's an extremely large file,and has been split into four parts for anyone who wants to watch it: 27/08/06 (Visitor Counter=327,078): New news! The Toronto Star ran another article on animutation today. I was mentioned! ^_^ Cut, Paste, Animate! In horrorscopic news, Pluto's sudden lack of planetary status is having a huge impact on the world of astrology. How do you think this deplanetisation affects people of the star sign Scorpio? How will they cope now that their "Ruling Planet" is no longer a planet, but a hunk of rock? Rocks cannot govern people's lives! Only planets and stars can do that!  I watched Snakes On A Plane yesterday. It was fun up until all the scriptwriter shot a couple of holes in the plot and all the high stakes got sucked out. Highlight the following white text for spoilers: Once the ground team had got the confession from the snake-smuggler that he had sold all those snakes to the evil mobster guy, then it didn't matter if the witness survived or not. If the plane crashed, then the evil mobster guy, with the help of the snake-smuggler's testimony, would rot in prison for the most heinous of all crimes: airplane terrorism. Oh well. It's not like he even starred in the movie anymore after the middle. :) 25/08/06 (Visitor Counter=326,514): Old news. Today Pluto was downgraded from "Planet" to "Dwarf planet". Cue "Snow White" jokes. This kinda outdates my animated newscast, NewsBleat. Well, that's news for ya! Relevant one moment, yesterday's news the next. 05/08/06 (Visitor Counter=320,841): The Cicierega Code - Finally cracked! WORD DISASSOCIATION: Peering into the mind of a lyrical genius. Just how "random" is the song Word Disassociation by the modern-day, ladies'-man, beardless Leonardo da Vinci known as Neil Cicierega? What thought processes governed the selection of lyrics for this song?
For a start, we know that the words were largely selected for their rhyming and rhythmic properties, but there are also interesting patterns in their overall arrangement. If we replace each word with its basic grammatical type (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) then we see typical patterns of English language structure emerging.
 "Adjective-noun" and "Adverb-adjective-noun" are common enough sequences in everyday English. They also turn up in several places in WD - for example, "Spidery concubine", "polyurethane smile" and "gentlemanly communiqué", are examples of the first combination. "Never undressing sneer" is an example of the second, and "already nested human wine" is a perfectly acceptible four-word example. We can also see other less-lingustic patterns emerging in our visual representation of the song's lyrics. Note the clusters of nouns and adjectives, and in one case, a lot of "noun/verb" words all turn up together. FASCINATING. Let us now stack all the tiles together and see if a visual pattern is apparent!
Most curious! If one blurs one's eyes, one can see all sorts of odd shapes suggest themselves.  Pretty spooky, huh? I KNOW! :D Now, while there are 196 unique words (excluding the two repeated words of the chorus), three of them are hyphenated compound words, which are counted as TWO words instead of one, in a word processor's "word count" feature (dust-bunny, a-capella, lickety-split).
We may speculate that perhaps this was an oversight on the part of the lyricist who may have used an automatic "word count" to get the final (misleading!) figure of 199 words. Or perhaps it is only by chance that it worked out at this number at all. Only Neil has the answer to this.
 And lo, more uncanny patterns emerge:
 Of particular significance is that the adjective-tile upon which Vatican City rests is from the word "Agnostic" in the lyrics. SURELY THIS IS NO COINCIDENCE. (Also be aware that "Naples" is on the "Explode" tile.)
Could "Word Disassociation" be an example of highly advanced cartographic encryption methods? If this song were played on the radio, could the signal be intercepted and decyphered by extratrerrestial geographical surveyors? Can YOU find more patterns in the pseudo-randomness?
Conclusion:  Neil Cicierega likes nouns more than any other type of word, I have way too much spare time, and if you've just read all this then so do you. :-) This lyric survey has a margin of error of 1.337% so if you find errors, I don't wanna hear about it! :-P 31/07/06 (Visitor Counter=319,551): Better update for this month, eh? NZ 5 cent pieces became obsolete today! 
Well....... Every NEW coin is embedded with a microscopic GPS system that records the coin's exact location and sends the data to a secret government agency via a simple microwave transmitter much like your cellphone... only smaller, and therefore more advanced. The coins also contain tiny, temperature-triggered receptors that open when the temperature indicates that it is likely to be held in a person's hand. These receptors take a miniscule sample of DNA from the person's skin, and digitally relay the genetic information back to said government agency whose computers can either identify the person who is holding the coin, OR, if the DNA is not yet identified, it is put through a test to make sure that it is human, and then this person's global location is logged and tracked until the coin changes hands. And what power source do these coins harness? Good ol' everyday, hand-made kinetic energy! That right - just like those watches that keep running as long as you keep shaking them every so often, these coins also contain tiny whatsamajiggers that generate and store the tiny amounts of energy needed to power their onboard computers and transceivers. But do not think of these coins as individual units, each one tracking a person. Think of them as a medium through which people pass, details of their DNA and location being continuously fed into the secret government computers. Think of these coins as being light; light of innumerable photons, by which the secret government computers can see; they see into our homes, our lives, our pockets. By golly, we must be interesting folks! 27/06/06 (Visitor Counter=304,250): The 2nd of the 2 new Flash animations!  See if you can find the hidden "Easter Egg"*
* "Easter Egg" is a common nickname for a button, hidden in an animation (often disguised as a component of the animation itself), and which may be clicked to reveal bonus footage or other secrets. 25/06/06 (Visitor Counter=302,957): Two Flashes? Must be Morse Code! The first of my two new Flash animations is a special quasi-episode of StrifeToons! 
And the second Flash will be released a bit later. Patience. Paaaaatiencccce. ^_^ 24/06/06 (Visitor Counter=302,029): LOLz. 
It had to be done. Done-done. DONE-DONE, DONE-DONE, DONE-DONE, DONE-DONE, DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-DONE-
It's the Jaws theme? 11/06/06 (Visitor Counter=295,254): Stargate isn't as original as you thought!  A word to bald people: Do not get a "crack" tattooed down over your head. 10/06/06 (Visitor Counter=294,850): UPGRADES! Two newish sections to the site: 1: The new and somewhat improved Flash ArchiveSo it looks like I survived 6/6/6, despite a "brownout" powercut that occurred just before I was going to cook some food. Oh and also despite the coming of the Antichrist into the mortal world, accompanied by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (namely Three-Sixty, Pee Ess Two, GameCube, and Wii). 31/05/06 (Visitor Counter=290,197): Happy "World No-Smoking Day" (also "World No-Tobacco Day" in some areas of said world). Toldja I'd be busy this month! So, this weekend, me and some other amateur film enthusiasts made a 7-minute movie for the NZ 48 Hour Film competition. Of the ten randomly(?)-assigned genres, our team was given "Superhero". I wrote the script on Friday night, we shot everything on Saturday, and then it was edited in the wee (and not so wee) hours of Sunday morning... and afternoon. It was fun to make, and even more fun to watch on the big screen at the Civic theatre, along with the other 9 entries in our semi-final, all of different genres. I might post evidence of our movie here, or maybe the whole thing might turn up on Youtube as threadbare homemade movies generally do. Today's Moral: Bill Volk has animutationally done it again. 12/05/06 (Visitor Counter=280,963): Old! Here's an old comic that'll seem new to you, because I made it for a magazine some years ago, but it wasn't printed and I forgot about it. I found it today while rummaging through some things. Attention Commander Keen fans: I also found this drawing, which is probably just as old.
30/04/06 (Visitor Counter=276,622): TmsT, Lemon Demon, and Newgrounds sittin' in a tree... Newgrounds is having a Flash festival for PICO DAY, which is today, and Pico is their site's little red-haired, gun-toting mascot, who is to feature in a whole bunch of new Flash animations made by Newgrounds contributors... myself included. So, thought I, what could be more Newgroundsy these days than an animation for a Lemon Demon song? Although there is the allure of "big cash prizes" with Pico Day, it occurs to me that animating something at the same time as a whole bunch of other people doing the same sorta thing is not the greatest strategy for doing something outstanding. But I've made it anyway because it's a fun little video, and Pico Day will hopefully boost its popularity a little bit. 12 days after selecting the right Lemon Demon track, I had animated a Lemon Demon music video starring Pico, and spent the next couple of spare days adding bonus footage, including a hidden scene accessible only by "easter egg" (that's Flashmovie jargon for "a button, hidden in the movie, that you have to click"). Here it is (click the picture below): 
25/04/06 (Visitor Counter=274,663): Life imitates TmsT animation ;) Since the release of the TmsT/Lemon Demon video Geeks In Love, I've had responses from many, many geeks and geek couples who claim to look like the two main geeks in the video, or to know people that resemble those characters. This is more than I bargained for when I designed those characters to incorporate traits of various geeks that I know (or am) with the idea that people would relate to the fictional characters better if they had familiar features! Even more astonishing are the likenesses of the latest geeks to claim that I have been stalking them and turning them into cartoon characters without their prior knowledge (left) to said characters. 
Check this out: This geek couple (who said that it's alright for me to show this resemblance off to everyone) strikingly resembles the geek couple in my animation (sans goatee & glasses).
So this gives me two ideas. The first one is that a live-action version of Geeks In Love would be awesome, and the second idea is a "TmsT cartoon character lookalikes" event. Starting ... NOW.
16/04/06 (Visitor Counter=272,166): Get off your kiester - it's time for Easter! 
Easter Bunny? More like the Easter PUNNY! See ya next year! o/ Oh, and very special TmsT Easter Greetings to Thomas Scott, who donated $10.00 to me through Paypal "for being awesome". Now I can buy Easter Eggs. Rock on! 2006: March February January
2005:
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2003:
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Right, so, here's some drawings from an assignment I got this year: Character design for "Rapunzel".
