hi newgrounds!!!

this year's been a quiet one!! or at least it feels like it

i spent a lot of time this year working on myself. and also working on my cartoon but i wrote a whole post about that already last month lol

i did some fun stuff this year!! in march i visited my boyfriend, and in july i visited him again with a quick stop in toronto on the way there to hang out with some newgrounds peoples

i also drew ALL THIS ART!!

and i put out a couple short cartoons!

to be dead honest, i'm not too incredibly proud of the animations i posted this year, like they're fine but it all feels very ehh :P but i guess part of that is because im dedicating a lot more time and passion towards the larger cartoon im making with greta

another fun thing is i helped with art for GIMMIKO! im p happy with the bits i made for the demo and i'm even happier with the stuff i'm helping with for the game now (which ill post someday!!! after the game comes out!!!!)

this year felt really long for some reason. i think that's probly because a lot of stuff happened in my life outside of all this stuff. but it's all been for the better and i am growing up more and more each day

also it's my birthday today! december 25th 2023 marks my 21st trip around the sun.

hope everyone is having a good holiday! stay warm out there folks

sincerely,

amanda pollyanoid

https://youtu.be/Ptk7DEYY6LA?si=rBVUCBOpbxaJRGcy

hi newgrounds hi hi hi

im still working on my cartoon with @gooberthed ! and i'd like to talk about it a bit just for fun because its fun to talk

2023 is nearing its end, and while there's still over a whole month left to do work on stuff, i feel like reflecting on the work i've done for this project so far

before 2023, most of what was done for last soda was just prep stuff like storyboards and voice acting, and a bit of animation but not like a ton

so far this year i've animated about 65 shots of animation for this cartoon, with 35 of those shots being finalized visually (backgrounds and 2d assets and stuff)

i've also spent a good chunk of the year traveling and being a full-time college student so last soda has become the project i get to chip away at whenever i get a second to sit down lol

october 29th marked 2 years since me, greta, and carol thought to make this silly idea into a cartoon, and the last 11 months have probably been the most productive i've been on this cartoon

last soda episode 1 is looking to be exactly 15 minutes long. throughout the past year we've made tiny tweaks to timing and stuff but i don't think we're gonna be messing with overall timing of the episode any more than we already have from here on out

the first year making this was spent doing a lot of prep work and figuring out how to make a big cartoon like this, when we first started this project i'd never really reached out to voice actors or sent scripts over or ANYTHING and i cringe a bit when i think about how i approached the voice actors initially sometimes lol

and this second year was spent really defining the style of the cartoon more and just doing as much animation as i can between busy life stuff

as of RIGHT right now, november 17th 2023 1:52 pm as i write this, 54.5% (ABOUT 8 MINUTES 17 SECONDS) of last soda is animated. 29.4% of that is completely finalized in the visuals department, with the other 25.1% still needing things like 2D assets and backgrounds. and the other 45.5% of the episode has completed storyboards and music and stuff like that cuz @icymire32 is a beast and already made all the music! but also as i've been animating and me and greta have been making art assets, icymire's been refining a lot of those older tracks and not to be biased but i really like the sound she's created for this silly little cartoon world we're building, she's posted tiny early snippets of stuff but seriously the music in this blows my mind sometimes. and greta's art direction for the thing is really kick-ass and i love working with my friends on this

here is a fun little graphic showing off the progress on last soda

and here's a fun little poster i made last night while hanging out with greta. we saw other cartoons getting cool posters and wanted in on the fun lol

follow the last soda twitter if u wanna see like semi-frequent updates and little sneak peeks at the thing .... i don't use it a ton but i like to let people know we're alive lol

https://twitter.com/lastsodaonearth

and that's what i have for right now! i wish i could show off all this cool animation stuff i've got done, but i think it'll be more than worth it to see it all packaged as intended in one nice 15 minute long episode

being the only animator on this project is wild but its very rewarding to see work get done

with almost all of the animation so far being made this year.... im optimistic that last soda episode 1 may see the light of day sometime around october next year? being hopeful but i think its possible. i wont pressure myself though

i made a cartoon for the live action jam!

here's a post going through the processs

first things first, i knew i wanted to do SOMETHING with motion tracking. but first, i had to figure out WHAT i was going to focus on. in May, i made a little robot character for fun, and was immediately drawn to her because i could just animate her floating around and also she looks funny. i also used this cartoon to test out a shader i had previously made that replicates the texture of my painted style, which feels a little odd because this focuses on live action? but i like how it ended up looking on the character

so i got to that motion tracking business

and in animating this, i wanted to do something a little weird. it'd been forever since i did stuff with motion blur, and for the last nearly 2 YEARS (ouch) i've been animating a project with some friends where characters are mostly animated on two's. so going into this i wondered: how would motion blur work on a character animated like this? and the answer to that ended up being that it looks ok lol. sometimes the motion blur plays into the funniness of a shot and i think it helped the 3D stuff blend in with the live action backgrounds, but it was also kind of a hassle sometimes cuz motion blur is an uncontrollable beast.

then after a bunch of storyboarding and brainstorming, i got the usual @icymire32 on music, and @emizip voicing the lead of the cartoon! emi and i need to finish playing battleblock theater together but i keep forgetting. also she made this character sound very whimsical and funny thank you emi. all the stuff i wrote for this cartoon was written in a very tired haze and hearing it read back to me was a funny experience

after setting everything up and starting animation, i realized i had no idea what to put on the walls of the little room alix was set to live in. so i told a bunch of people in my discord server that they could send me any drawing of theirs they wanna make and i'd put it on the walls of the room. this is what the room looked like with no art and no materials:

and this is what it looks like with a lot of art and materials:

credits for the drawings are listed in the cartoon and its description!!! if any of these artists post their pieces online i'll like those posts here and in the cartoon's description as well.

and then over the course of just a couple of weeks i made this whole dang cartoon. here's a bunch of fun and silly progress screenshots

this is my friend marko's car. i put it in the digital realm. to make it up to him i let him squish brains around in the intro of the cartoon

this is the beginnings of some confusing scenery i set up to hide a woman walking her dog

we love a&w here

i fucking hate smoke sim. I HATE IT

a baby

and thats like most of the interesting stuff i have to show off for this cartoon i think..... shoutouts emi for the voice acting and carol for the music

shoutout to @tiltro for being the most supportive mother fucker in the world love u buddy. shoutout to laundry detergent quest i probably wouldve finished this cartoon a day earlier if it wasnt for that game

bye

HI newgrounds

ive tried writing this recap like 3 times here is attempt number 4

THE NEWGROUNDS TORONTO MEETUP 2023, i was at that, and the past couple of days have been really really eventful! i'll go through this day by day

BEFORE IT ALL

BEFORE JULY 27TH

i got ready for yet another trip to canada! @ninjamuffin99 told me back in march that he had this idea for a toronto meetup in late july

i usually pass through toronto to visit my dear boyfriend oliver (@rumblelurin), so i thought i could do something fun and plan both a brief visit to toronto and a longer trip to oli's at once. and that is what i fucking did!!

JULY 27TH

with my bags fully packed, at 10 am, i left for........ Not canada. i had to get bloodwork done a couple towns over. lol. BUT THEN 2 hours later i would take a train....... also to Not canada, but to boston, where i would catch a flight to canada the next morning!

in the time between bloodwork and the train ride, i went to see barbie! but i only saw the first hour of it because i was worried about missing my train. who knew if i would ever see the second half of it...

after the train to boston, i spend the entire night texting various friends about how much i want tim hortons.

OK NOW IM ACTUALLY IN TORONTO

JULY 28TH

6 am, after chilling in the airport for the night, i take an EPIC flight to toronto from boston. i arrive there at like 8 am, and as soon as i get off the plane, i go up to an airport worker and ask where the nearest tim hortons is. then i had tim hortons and it was really good

also from like 8 am to 11 am i was texting my good buddy @DROID and fighting through exhaustion saying HI FRIEND IM IN CANADA WE NEED TO HANG OUT RN. then at 12 pm i checked into my hotel and accidentally slept for 6 hours. but then AFTER THAT i did a bunch of fun shit ill talk about that right now

so like at this point im still pretty tired, i'm well rested but i'm a bit jetlagged... i follow my dear buddy droid's instructions to meet up with him and other newgrounds peeps there and i end up in a big city square with big screens and lots of music playing. droid and his crew are approaching me, but in the haze i was in, i did not even notice, but i DID notice connor grail's gorillaz t-shirt, which then led me to notice that droid and @connorgrail and @crashtroid were standing RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME.

they then led me to the rest of the NG people that were out and about at the time, which included ninjamuffin, @wandaboy, @snackers, @brandybuizel, @cadaver, and some more people i dont remember the usernames of at the moment (sorry!) which amounted to a small group of like 14 people!! we went to an all you can eat place and i had some squid rings and pork katsu

and after that... would you believe it... we went and saw BARBIE!! i finally got to see that second hour of the movie and it was really good

after the movie, we went to a bar and i met @luis and @teravex in person!

and then after all THAT.... i took an uber back to my hotel cuz it was almost 2 am and then i had a very good nights sleep excited for the day ahead of me

JULY 29TH

this was the BIG FAT EVENT DAY.... day of meeting like a lot more people and seeing newgrounds cartoons in a big theater....

at 12 pm i checked out of my hotel and proceeded to meet up with a bunch of the homies in eaton center and we got food before the big meetup. we was eatin in eaton.

and then we headed to christie park and GOOD LORD there were so many people like i thought the group of 14 from the previous day was a lot but there was like AT LEAST LIKE 80 PEOPLE by the time we left for the theater. i met a lot of really talented and cool people here and it was really cool to put faces to names i already knew and discover knew people who i didn't know. big highlight though was meeting @POSTBOY he was really really chill and cool. ALSO I MET TOM FULP and we fistbumped he's very kind as well

after we all mingled a bit, got a little bit rained on, i repeated the same joke with what had to be at least 7 different groups of people, it was time to go and walk to the royal theater.

we watched a buncha newgrounds cartoons there! bunch of people were playing marko kart ds waiting for the show to start and i was playing solitaire. then the show started! i think the selection for the screening was pretty good, really good variety of like recent good newgrounds stuff. lots of fun audience reactions.

then, would you believe it, we went to ANOTHER bar! but this time we had way more than 14-16 people. ninjamuffin had to walk in and ask "can i bring 90 people in here right now" and thankfully the worker was like "ya sure"

i had a lot of fun in the bar as well! i don't drink, so i was just chilling doodling and chatting with people for the most part. shoutout snackers and wanda and caddy and postboy they were all saying some really nice things to me in the bar they are some lovely lovely people. there was another guy saying some really nice stuff to me too but i forgot his name oops lol.....

i got to draw in a lot of peoples sketchbooks and a lot of people got to draw in my sketchbook!! that was really fun, i'll put the pages from my sketchbook at the end of this post

AFTER the bar, the group split up between people who went to a barcade and people who went to like... a restaurant with board games? i dont know what youd call it but i was at the board games place, and with postboy, ninjamuffin, brandy, and @elitemastereric, we played a game where we accused each other of stuff and ate a lot of really good fries. it was a really fun way to end the meet, wicked chill. eric is really really funny and nice and this was my first time ever talking to him hello eric if you're reading this u are epic

and then after all THAT FUN STUFF.... it was time for me to head out for the night. postboy was really cool and offered to let me hang at his place before chilling at the airport for the night, the two of us took on the toronto streets by ourselves and spent a bunch of time on streetcars and busses to his hotel. he checked into his hotel, where he was randomly given A WHOLE SUITE to himself and then he was like "yea u can just crash here for the night" and i was like "cool epic!"

i showed him the first 4 minutes and 46 seconds of a cartoon i may or may not talk about in nearly every newspost, he said he liked it!

i said goodnight and farewell to him, left him a little note saying thanks, and headed to the airport, where i would fly away to oli's place at 8 in the morning on the 30th.

END

THIS MEETUP WAS CRAZY FUCKING FUN. it was really different from previous NG meetups i've gone to, like there were SO MANY PEOPLE THERE, and it was really fun. ninjamuffin is a real one, postboy is a real one, caddy is a real one, wanda is a real one, snackers is a real one, droid is a real one, brandy is a real one, everyone i hung out with was so damn cool and fun to be around. everyone was so damn nice and respectful and funny and cool

i hope more of these happen, i wanna go to more of them!!! and @ritascounterattack YOU BETTER BE AT THE NEXT ONE i cant believe i met postboy in person before i met you in person we gotta hang out together.

as of writing this, i've been situated at oli's place for a couple days, and it's really cozy and awesome and would you believe it i love my boyfriend. THIS MEETUP WAS SO FUN have i said that yet

LOVE U NEWGROUNDS LOVE U CANADA LOVE U EVERYONE I HAD CONVERSATIONS WITH

anyone im forgetting the names of sorry bout that im writing this at 8 am :P

also forgive me i forgot i was making drawings in this post i am lazy

if u were at the meetup and im not following u let me know under this post and i will follow your ass immeidately

HELLO NEWGROUNDS on a whim i spent like 2 days on a short 30 second cartoon involving my character claudia and the little ghost crab that haunts her

in this post i would liek to show off the behind the scenes stuff like concept art and storyboards for this short thing cuz i put a good amount of love into this tiny skit

heres a gif showing off the 3D scene in the animation, the 2D animation was on a plane that moved with the camera so that it was always facing it, this is cuz i wanted the lighting in the 3D scene to affect claudia

this is the full storyboard for the thing, i made this after waking up at 4 am after a very stressful day and thought this would be funny

immediately after making that, i thought "itd be cool if the screen was a pre rendered 3D thing" so i sketched out how i'd like it to look and then i made that in 3D

a few of my friends who saw the thing early asked if the mario model was ripped from mario 64 and then edited, and the answer to that is No

afterwards i made the 2D character animation in adobe animate, nothing interesting to show off for that cuz that is all seen in the final cartoon :P

here's an idea i quickly drew for claudia's room as i was trying to figure out colors for it:

do u like the homestar runner reference on the wall i think its pretty awesome

this is the final room without claudia in it, i included a gimmiko poster on the wall cuz zizou voices the crab, and a drawing i had made of icymire previously cuz she provided a fun music track for this cartoon

and that is pretty much my process for making this cartoon!!! its a short one but i like it, i may make more short claudia content in the future, its a fun and quick way to let out a lot of creative energy at once

i haven't made an update post since january.... lol!!!

this post won't include a bunch of huge things, i just want to share sum cool stuff i've been doing :P

since january i've continued work on me and @gooberthed's cartoon THE LAST SODA ON EARTH, began my second semester of my second year at college, and traveled to and from canada again!

the more i work on last soda the more i realize how ambitious it is, but it's so satisfying to see progress on it that i think it'll be more than worth it

we recently started using the twitter page for the cartoon again, both to vaguely show off assets and in-progress stuff, and also so that i don't explode from not showing people random progress on this cartoon

i dunno how often we'll post updates, cuz i do still want it to be fresh when ppl get to view the finished thing, but it's worth keeping up on if ur interested in it :]

i've also been working on my sophomore film for school, but honestly i dunno if i'm attached enough to it to really upload it anywhere once it's finished. we'll see!!!!! in like may probably

in terms of real life stuff, i just got back from a short trip to canada to see my boyfriend @rumblelurin again, got to visit both for his birthday and for our 3 year anniversary, which was very fun :]

on the way there i had a 20-something hour long layover in toronto and got to hang w @ninjamuffin99 for the day, he showed me around toronto and it was super slippery and snowy out and i made this drawing for him after i finished flying to oli's place (thx again cam u da goat!!!)

and NOW im back to dorm livin, returned to the boston area less than 24 hrs ago after a day of going thru airports and im gonna continue to work on silly cartoons and artwork and do fun stuff with my friends

also check out this picture of me i think i look pretty cool

thats it for this update thx for reading bye!!!

i changed my username!!!!

if you've got a keen eye, you might've noticed this change a few days earlier. i wanted to wait a bit before writing anything publicly about it, because i want to present another mini announcement about myself alongside it.

at the beginning of 2022, i started my wacky and wild transition to female. funny enough, i never actually chose a new name for myself, i've just been going by my birth name this whole time. until now!

after almost exactly a year of thinking on it, i've finally settled on a chosen name for myself. going forward, i would love love love if people could call me....

AMANDA!

this is a big step for me, and part of me wishes i did it earlier, but better late than never, right?

i was gonna wait a few more days to make this blog so that i could get it in the Artist News section, since i think i can do one of those every two weeks and the last one i did was on christmas, but i am impatient lol!

thank you to my friends who i was able to talk to about this before making this big post, and here's to a badass 2023 with my more complete self.

sincerely, and for the first time,

Amanda

merry christmas! im 20 now

this year has been a long one but in a good way

at the very start of the year, i uncovered one pretty huge revelation regarding my own identity, and i think that led to me being a lot more outgoing this year

the beginning of this year was really fun, pixel day was a huge highlight

i got to do a bit of work on 3 games this pixel day, making UI art for pixel art, some small assets for parallel panic, and dedicating a majority of my attention to gravity shift

much love to @jack, @nokoi, and @tombdude for letting me help with those

following pixel day, i was commissioned to make a bunch of emotes for needlejuice's discord server, and as small as that is, it feels like a highlight just for how fun it was

i also tried to contribute to more collabs this year, and going into 2023, i hope to contribute to a lot more

august led to the 1 year anniversary of working on LAST SODA, a thing me and some friends have been making (more on that later?)

another huge highlight this year was FLASH BASH!!!! in may, me and a bunch of my ng buddies met up and went to a little art exhibit that was pretty close to my school, that was super fun

(pic includes @hekdiggity @heyopc @domromart @droid @brandybuizel @linethickness @nokoi and @icymire32)

and at the very end of may, my productivity with a lot of stuff began to slow down a bit, but for pretty good reason

i spent 3 months in CANADA this summer!!! i was living with my lovely boyfriend @rumblelurin, and some pretty fun art came out of that

i also spent a lot of summer working on assets for a little game with the people i worked on gravity shift with, and i'm still making stuff for it right now

https://twitter.com/mbjackng/status/1552393668769742848?s=20

and i made sum artwork for zizou's game GIMMIKO, which i am also still making some stuff for

following what might be the best summer i've ever had, i went back to school, where i became roommates with long-time internet buddy and newgrounds artist @gooberthed !!!!!!!!!!!

this has also led to some fun art

(she shaved her head)

living with greta, i finished my first semester of my sophomore year at college, and that brings us to now

throughout the year i also spent a lot of time on random commissions, here are sum of my favorites ive done

and ALSO throughout the year, i've been working on LAST SODA with gooberthed and icymire and rumblelurin, working with the lovely voice talents of @meulinex (and others) for like a year and a half now

i don't want to turn this into a boring progress post, so all i'll show off right now are some incomplete shots i really like

https://streamable.com/fswake

https://streamable.com/z4st36

https://streamable.com/k4ya9b

(that last one is using mostly placeholder assets)

and now im trying to think of what else i might want to talk about. im writing this at like 7 am, i hope i didnt forget anything lol! this year was really cool, i wish the second half of the year was more productive with side projects but overall i think this mightve been the best year out of the twenty i've lived so far. thank you to newgrounds for providing me with all these amazing opportunities and introducing me to a million amazing friends, and for being better than twitter. much love to u guys, and happy holidays.

oh wait 1 more thing. at the beginning of the year i wrote a list of goals to complete for the year. lets see where i got with that

lol

i havent made a new post since the year started........ oops!

first things first, lets check where i am on that list i made at the beginning of the year.

i think im on track with this!

with that out of the way, what have i been up to for the past 6 months?

life-wise, i've been LIVING living. i finished up my first year of college and flew out to canada, where im currently staying for the summer, living with my awesome boyfriend. so shit kind of rocks. about a week after making that newspost in january, i made a crazy wild and wacky discovery about myself, one that everyone who follows me already knows about at this point (im a girl!), and recognizing that and acting on it for the last half a year has made my life just a lot better. i still have low points, there's just less of them now. been really great knowing myself like that.

enough with the LAME SHIT......... lets talk about how the past 6 months have been for me ARTISTICALLY.

i've spent the year so far drawing occasionally (not as much as i'd like to but whatever), contributing to friends' games, and half-secretly animating and co-directing a 14 minute animated pilot for a cartoon me and my friends are making. i say half-secretly cause i show progress to my friends constantly, lol. a lot of the exciting stuff i've been working on has been under the radar, and a lot of the stuff i've been putting out has been regular. and how's that been?

...

....

.....

shits been awesome. im still here, still making the art i want to, experimenting whenever i can, and working with my closest buddies ever. it's getting done, steady progress all that cool stuff. by the time it's out it might've been in development for over a year 😬

as for what im up to RIGHT NOW, i've been spending july so far working on commissions and making drawings for my buddies on artfight. taking a break from big things for a bit to just have fun. and i'm still living with my boyfriend for another 2 months, i love him very much. i've also been listening to siivagunner's rip of Flying Battery Zone Act 2 - Sonic Mania on loop for like 2 or 3 weeks and i dont know why but its cool its cool

this is a big fat bloated news post, no real reason for writing it cause i've got nothing to update on, i just figured it'd be fun to write. and it was! until the next news post, dear newgrounders <3

• contribute to at least 3 newgrounds games
• finish and post at least 5 animations
• eat a whole pizza in one big bite
• CONTRIBUTE TO THE NG SECRET SANTA THINGY i so regret not doing that in 2021
• find out who tony is

at the end of 2022 someone needs to spam me with a link to this post and i'll see how much of this i was able to do