It’s crazy to think that Newgrounds has been part of my life for this long, haven't always been the most active, granted but it’s been the one place to showcase my art skills over most creative driven sites that have come and went. Sheezyart, DeviantArt and even that fancy Artgrounds are “mid” compared to this place in all honesty. Which is partly why I’m still around.
Early Years
Back when I was known as MentalMyles, I discovered this site when (rudely) looking over someone's shoulder watching Mario VS. Sonic (VGDC). That led me to an obsession of watching many other stuff that Newgrounds had to offer such as other videogame parodies, Retarded Animal Babies and pretty much anything by LegendaryFrog. It was then that I decided that I wanted to be an animator. Some kids were busy trying to get laid or score some drugs before getting kicked out of highschool. But not me, my passion was in moving little people around a screen and trying to be funny in the process and that pretty much became my whole personality in highschool, for better and for worse.
Friend: That bastard broke up with me…it just really hurts inside, you know?
Me: …So my Metal Gear parody got 3rd place on newgrounds the other day.
My first batch of creations were crap I threw together over several weekends, some lost to time (thank God.) but the one thing I became well known for was a little animation called Sonic's Halloween Costume. In retrospect, I kind of hate this cartoon. Really hard to watch and in some ways a bit of a precursor to everything I personally don’t like about the sonic fanbase today (Sonic EXE, out of character bs, those creepy animations on youtube that trick kids into watching). Speaking of, this and along with many other animations at the time fell victim to a trend I like to call "stealing other people's animations and posting it on youtube as their own".
Getting Super Serial
I eventually moved away from sprite animations as I wanted to practice more with drawing stuff with a mouse and the cool thing to do on art sites at the time was to follow toxic trends like hating on sprite animations. By the time I was in college, I got the interest of a couple of guys who were planning on making a small Sunday segment on Britain’s Channel 4 (which was a big deal at the time). Working on this project helped build my self-taught skills up as an animator but inflated my ego which didn’t really help when it came to my schoolwork. Around that time, I put together Can I Play with Madness for 2008’s Madness Day. This I felt was where I sort of peaked in terms of popularity because it somewhat went downhill for me for my career.
So around 2010, there was a lot of studying 3D animation and being broke as fuck. Despite being accepted into university, I really didn’t want to go. My plan was to take a year off and get a job. However, with family pressuring me to go, I grudgingly went. University didn’t go well.
University Saga
If I were to give any form of wisdom to anyone reading is this. If you feel that you need to take a year off, fucking TAKE IT and tell people who suggest otherwise to fuck off and mind their own business.
I had little money as is and there was an hour and a half travelling time (to AND from). I was a year ahead of almost all my classmates, so I wasn’t sharing any classes with them. The one guy that was on the same level with me mysteriously vanished halfway through the first term(even his roommate asked if I knew where he went). On the plus side, I did manage to shift my energy to where my strength lied which was in 2D animation (which in retrospect, goes against on why I went to university in the first place). This led to a couple of animations I made for my classes, Rabbit Exterminatin’ and Coffee Teim! Both heavily inspired by Tex Avery and Chuck Jones’ style.
Despite these breakthroughs in my skills, I was heavily burnt out and it seriously affected my relationships and schoolwork. Halfway through the final year, I pretty much dropped out and failed my final year. I still got the bachelors but not the honours.
So, for funsies I made a couple of parodies like how I used to before I took this whole animation thing too seriously.
Not that university mattered. Having the qualifications meant diddly-dick. I still never got accepted into any companies or studios because despite the grades, they were expecting you to have had slept with several big names and what have you.
Life after University...
This killed my interest in animation for a while. I took a full-time job at amazon where I would surprisingly sometimes work on some stuff with human resources, health and safety and minor promotional stuff. This was due to managers taking note of what I do for fun and have me hide in corners of the office, paid to make little doodles. Unless Amazon magically goes bust beyond repair, I can sadly never show these to anyone outside my closest friends.
Nowadays I pretty much just stick to art and animation as a hobby. Right now, I recently signed up to an online business school for Computing and IT and have even less time for being creative.
I do sometimes get DMs and comments from people that told me how they used to watch my old stuff all the time. I'm touched until they tell me they watched my stuff at an age they shouldnt. Fuckin Youtube, man.
Here and Now...
Nice story Myles, but what does this have to do with Newgrounds? Not much to be honest, just some background stuff that went on behind some of the animations I posted here. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Newgrounds has always been that one place I can go to when things get too much. A familiar bar to take the edge off, enjoy some fun stuff people made.
As I pointed out at the start, other art sites come and go but Newgrounds has always been something more honest with itself with an edge that other places don’t dare have in fear of losing money or something. I’m just hoping that it’ll still be around for another 20 years.