Go! Go! Parody Rangers T-shirts are now up for Pre-Order!

...on the ever-so-amazing Sharkrobot! Available in delicious Meat & Renaldo flavors! Part of a balanced breakfast, contains Vitamin B for BADASS. Go up to evil's face and go BIZZAM or decorate your torso with the face of the greatest man ever. Makes for a great holiday gift!

BIG thanks to Snafu-Dave for makin' this happen for Psy and I. For my first t-shirt designs I think they turned out okay. I'm really proud of Meat and Renaldo as characters and I know they're some of the big fan-favorites, so I hope the Rangers fanbase get a kick outta these and help support us! :]

Also if you guys who follow and enjoy my animation work have any ideas for other t-shirt that you'd be interested in seeing on the site, lemme know and we'll talk about additions to the store. Hope all's well with people and that your holiday season is kickass. I'm starting off this December with my second recording session, as mentioned last post, so I'm excited to kick-start what's usually my favorite month.

(NOTE TO NEWGROUNDS READERS: My apologies for the last post, probably wasn't a good idea in retrospect. The money situation is being handled and thanks everyone for the kind suggestions.)

So lots 'o stuff has happened in the past month!

I've been continuing with various school projects and I've decided to compile of all of 'em all together at the end of my 3rd year, which will be in early May of next year. After that I'll be going full-throttle with my thesis in the following 4th and final year, but by that point I'll have plenty of material to put into a little reel of various animations I've done over the course of my three years at SVA.

In the meantime, I'm thankful to say I've got another set of shots to color for my freelance job on the side from schoolwork. I've often spoken of Rob Kohr's independent film, "Once and Never Again" (which may be getting a title change to "The Lift") and perfect timing: Rob's been uploading some videos of the WIP
cartoon. This one in particular you can see a bit of the coloring work I've done!

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I've also been fortunate enough to double a few of my assignments for Celia Bullwinkel's class with some animation I've been doing on my current super-secret project. I should be able to finish one complete part of it by the time I finish this semester and hopefully production will kick into full gear over the next couple of months. I'll also be officially announcing what the project is at...

MAGFest! The Music and Gaming Festival taking place over 4 Days (Jan 1 - 4, 2010) in Alexandria, VA. I'll be making my first official guest appearance at this convention right at the start of the new year! I'll be there alongside the likes of LittleKuriboh, Jon St. John and the creators of ThereWillBeBrawl...Best...Birthday Present...EVER. All thanks to KROOOOOOOOZE.

I'm also very honored to say that I've just recorded my first professional voiceover gig on a show that I grew up with for over an entire decade. It took a long while before all the stars and planets aligned in just the right pattern to help me luck out...but ladies and gents, I've landed a guest character on the Pokemon animated series! I can't go into any detail about the character until after their appearance in the show, but once I have the exact date of the premiere, I'll post with a bigger update on that. I -think- I should be on around February, we'll see.

Lastly, Christmas vacation's coming up and I've still got so much to do. I really wanted to try and finish Go! Go! Parody Rangers THE MOVIE Part 3 while I'm home and have a spare month to do so...but, I still have a huge desire to finish the original game concept I came up with along with Richie Zirbes, who've been dedicating a LOT of time into the programming of this action-packed adventure. I feel like an original project should heavily take precedence over all else, so I'll be working a lot on the cutscenes for the game during that time instead. Sorry GGPR fans, but hopefully I'll get to the rest of the movie eventually!

P.S. I may have a liiiittle somethin' planned for Christmas. Look forward to that ;]

Takes me another month to make a journal entry, joyous.

But, I'm havin' the time of my life right now, so hopefully it's forgivable. No, I'm not dead! Really! Well, maybe. Wait...no. Okay.

So I promised I'd upload some schoolwork and I figured this'd be a good opportunity to show some of the crap I've been up to. So far we've done three homework assignments for the class and are already working on the fourth. Here's what I got for ya:

Our first two assignments went hand-in-hand; they were exercises in character design, which I gotta huge kick out of. First, we picked an animal of our choice and were asked to draw as many designs as we could manage; typically around 10 from everyone. I had taken some photos of the cat often seen at our local art store and had them on hand as reference. So while a cat is usually a bit generic of an animal, I went more in-depth with it and tried to apply a specific personality to character. After choosing our favorite design of the bunch, we were asked to create at least ten different poses of them displaying as much of their personality as possible. I think I did about 16 or so and put my favorites in the final collage.

Our third assignment was the first piece of animation we produced for the class, which was to have a character carry a heavy object from one side of the screen to another. I went an extra mile and did two characters, with one of the two having two different animations. This was a good exercise for getting me back into the animation spirit, since I hadn't done any -real- movement in quite a while. Not bad for a start, I hope. Our next assignment is to make a fat character sit in order to display a sense of weight in appliance to the character itself, as opposed to them interacting with weight of another source.

In between the stuff such as this, I've been still working on a big secret project, which I've been applying some of the new stuff I've learned. It's not turning out too bad at all and I've got some good feedback, so I'm real excited about this one, oh yes. Also, mostly thanks to a certain class of mine, I've been doing some MAJOR networking...in fact I've gotta little meeting this coming Teusday I'm very looking forward to. We'll see how that goes. Still got other stuff in the pipeline and doing my best to keep track of it all.

Happy Halloween this weekend, kiddo's!

Okay, first and foremost...dear internet:

Specifically everyone who uses Facebook that knows me, anyone who you've friended or has tried to friend you who goes by "Chris Niosi", is NOT me. I DO have a Facebook account, but it's under a fake name, mainly for privacy issues, but also because Facebook isn't really "for me". I use the account for specific purposes, but flat out, I do not have an account labelled with my name. So to the many I've spoken to who're like "why won't you friend me back!?" it's not me. There we go!

ANYWHO. So New York Anime Fest was great yet again. Had a lotta fun as I did the previous two years, did a little bit of networking, made some new friends and hung out with a few I haven't seen in quite a while, though I was glad to have a lot of the same company as last year's con. Good to see Crystal Lonnquist, Lucien Dodge, Casey Mongillo and the like. I also dragged Mike Ruocco along with me on Saturday to see the American premiere of Soul Eater, which is awesome. I met the cast of the show and the director, gave 'em some nice gifts of which they very much enjoyed too!

Aside from that I've gone through about 3 full weeks of school thus far...and I don't mind saying at all that's been freaking GREAT. Truthfully, I've been "unproductive" in the sense of online projects; I haven't touched Parody Rangers or the Po3 game in quite a while now. The only side project I've been doing any work on as of late is the super secret thingamabob, which for now mainly concerns overseeing other people's work until I get going on my contribution. Point is, I like not being tied down to a million things at the moment and primarily focusing on schoolwork and just livin' life. Plenty of close friends living in the general area, or close enough to where I see them on a regular basis. Odd's are, over the Christmas vacation I'll "get back to work" on certain things and I'd dare to say before then I'll be doing work on some stuff, but we'll see. Regardless, I feel great and just wanna keep pressing forward. I've come to grips with a lot of personal stuff about my future and what exactly I wanna do as far as a career goes. Still plenty to sort out, but I'm tryin' to stay level-headed and logical about everything.

I'll be uploading some stuff from school soon most likely. Thanks for readin'!

I've made it through nearly two weeks of school so far.

I LOVE being back in NYC on a regular basis. While I've not quite reached the point where I'm sustaining myself on my own income, at the very least living in a dorm here in NY feels great and gives me a sense of responsibility. I've had all five of my classes for this semester at least once so far, all of which have been very beneficial. Advanced Life Drawing and Layout & Design are workshops for exactly what they mean, giving me crunch-time on major stuff I need to work on. My main class, Advanced Animation Workshop, which I'll be taking once again with Celia Bullwinkel (who's also teaching a 3rd Year class for the first time!), is crunch-time for everything I've learned. Light & Color is my one humanity or "regular school class" as I often slang-term them to others, but it doesn't seem like it'll provide too much distraction. I'm glad most of all to be taking the elective Developing An Animated Series in which to focus on what I wanna do with my art, stories and characters most of all. I'll probably be posting a lot of the stuff I'm doing for school here, so those've you who have any interest can check it out.

I'm starting to have to put a lot of things on hold, but I AM continuing to try to work on stuff on a daily basis and keep track of it all. I'm overseeing a big group project and sending out material for people to work on in hopes that I can that relased at a reasonable time from now. I'm also continuing to work on Rob Kohr's film which is coming along nicely and helping me maintain a small amount of income while at school (it's a bit more difficult for me to keep up a normal job while I'm here). He's looking into showcasing his film at one of the ASIFA events coming up, which is gonna be amazing, so look forward to that...among other things. We'll see.

I also wanna start making more blog entries on specific subjects that hopefully I may end up getting more feedback on. With my thesis coming up next year and a lot of really in-depth things about animation flying around in my brain I'm curious on as getting as many retrospectives as possible. Time will tell.

Later kids!

What a Summer, yet another already come and gone.

I wasn't NEARLY as productive as I wanted to be this season, but what I -did- get accomplished I'm very proud of. I'm glad I got my writing spark rekindled, had a ton of fun with character designing, did a few storyboards and a just a tad of animation. Nothing fully completed, sadly, but PLENTY in the works.

The game I'm working on for Newgrounds' Power of Three Event definitely ain't comin' out at its appropriate time, but Richie and I refuse to give up. We'll most likely be continuing production on it over the Fall in bits and pieces because we think it's a great concept that shouldn't simply be abandoned. I think it'll be something that will really surpise people, especially from the standpoint of a flash game. Meanwhile I've also started production on a BIG new project involving some close and INCREDIBLY talented friends. I'm actually not sure which project will finish and release first, but both are -very- worth looking forward to.

The Summer's been fun AND draining. I've made new friends, lost a few, revived friendships and relations with many people that I'm very grateful and appreciative for. There's been some sickness issues at home between my getting my first cold in a long while, not to mention my mom's condition, but she'll be fine thankfully. Also Comic-con was still amazing. I think the filthy laziness bug will be sprayed off once school starts in a few days. I'm just about to move back to my dorm in NYC and despite some small concerns, I've gotta damn good schedule of classes this year. I'm also glad to have a couple 'o Mikes around the area to hang with, eat with and watch ridiculous amounts of stupid animated movies with.

I've got high hopes for the future and plan on goin' full-throttle with this next year of school at SVA, hopefully doing even better than last year and the year before it. Wish me luck!

We're back!

...and NOT like the Dinosaurs! Seriously though, not touching the internet for a solid week is...scary, but refreshing. Going to the opposite side of the country for something a 'lil more important justs makes ya all "other worldy". I swear, the group I roll with always wants to just STAY in San Diego and never go back to NY...and frankly I don't blame 'em, this place is drop-dead gorgeous.

Comic-con 2009 was amazing; topped last year's in a lotta ways, too. I travelled with a heftier group 'o chums this time and met up with several more upon getting to San Diego...which I swear half of us didn't wanna leave once the trip was over. I had the honor of meeting a WHOLE slew of people this year, not simply from my homebrew of Newgrounds, but some great folks working at Cartoon Network, a truckload of different voice actors and other really talented artists scattered about the con. Ended up buying a lot more this year too, but I got a nice haul of DVDs and comics.

Took a bunch'a pictures this time too, be sure to check 'em out!

Also thanks to the godly productions of Overnightprints I managed to scrounge up a bunch of business cards to bring with me and as with last year I'm glad to say I've dished out well over half of them to people these past 10 days. Not only that, I stayed productive and tried drawing as much as I could with two sketchbooks on-hand. Here's a few key points of interest:

- Thursday, we all met the Cartoon Network triple threat of C.H. Greenblatt, Thurop Van Orman and Penn Ward, the last of which threw an "Awesome Beach Party of Awesomeness" not far from the Con center. All sorts of cool folks there ranging from fans of the shows, to fellow artists, to working professionals on Flapjack and Adventure Time. Thurop was so gracious to everyone throwin' fanart his way and conversin' about the biz and Penn was a great host to everyone who came to join. Adventure Time's gonna rock the house.

- On Friday, of all things, I met Stan Lee. The Viz Media panel had a big focus on the manga "Ultimo", conceptualized by the man himself and brought to life by Hiroyuki Takei of "Shaman King" fame. I thought that series was really underappreciated and was glad to see him working again, plus Ultimo looks fantastic. The friend that attended the panel and I got tickets for their autographs later on and shook hands with the masters, HUGE honor right there.

- Newgrounds/Behemoth did a bigger and better job this year with their entire set-up. The booth was gigantic and had tons of awesome exposure for their upcoming 3rd Game, which is mad fun to play, and Saturday Tom Fulp threw another party that was just as huge. Lots more guests this time around, including a few surprises. Met some great animators and artists I didn't catch last time and even met a few really nice Parody Rangers followers. There were lots of fans at the booth too, giving autographs is a rare treat and a humbling experience for me.

- Tara B. has tons of contacts out in Cali and across the world that I had the chance to join and converse with at different times. We had a big drawing session on Friday night with a whole slew of artists and we even made a mini-comic together spoofing Space Jam. Then Monday when the festivities was over and done with I met Ricky Garduno of Dumm Comics fame, who graciously treated us to the best freaking pancake breakfast I've ever had. Ever. Got tons of inside info about the industry, t'was a great cap off to the days that made up the con.

- In general I ran into lots and lots of people, expected and unexpected; Matt Mercer the co-director of "There Will Be Brawl" was a nice surprise, for one. Several members of my group actually met some of their biggest heroes. Ruocco and Corinne met "Bone" creator Jeff Smith. Zach and Tara met John K. and finally got the chance to know their biggest inspiration. For me, some BIG ones were John DiMaggio along with some legendaries of the Futurama cast...and right after that awesome pancake breakfast was Stan Freberg, voice of Pete Puma, one of my favorite Looney Toons. He and his wife were both really sweet, we traded business cards, talked for a bit, etc.

SO YEAH DID I MENTION IT WAS AMAZING.

Now that I'm back, there's no time to rest; all of August is gonna be crunch-time for me. I've still got two games to finish, for both the Power of Three event and the new side-scroller I pitched and started for EduWare. Plus, I'm conceptualizing and character designing a third one as we speak, but that may have to hold on for a bit. Got storyboards to draw up and audio to be spliced for various projects. Oy.

Thank you so much to everyone who made this weekend an absolute joy, I hope next year'll be even better!

Whipped up a quick Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen spoof after me a bunch'a friends wasted our money on the flick a couple weeks back. Thanks all of my VAs and special guests for bein' part! My friends and I enjoyed this silly thing and I figured it'd push some hits to NG, though I was annoyed I couldn't get it done sooner since obviously the movie's been out for almost a month by this point.

Work at EduWare's been heavy lately, which is a good thing on my part since it means more work for me! Things're startin' to turn around for my financial situation.

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Speaking of EduWare though, suddenly I find myself working on ANOTHER flash game! While reaching the end of all my recent projects at the company, I approached the boss about a new game concept. Remember all of those ol' educational games involving your favorite video game characters having to answer questions you'd find on a test in school? Yeah we're doin' one of those, in a way. Basically we're creating a platformer using some of the EduWare characters, where they navigate their way through a stage and must answer questions to progress forward. It's been fun doing a lotta character animation and soon I'll be designing levels, which I haven't done since I was a kid dreaming of making platformers.

It's great prep for our Po3 game, as well. I just finished recording the star of our game last night, all of the lines for the in-game dialogie and the cutscenes. For as simplistic as the concept is I managed to work what I feel are some really fun and interesting characters that have some reasonable development throughout the length of the game. I got storyboards to do for the cutscenes and hopefully soon some more sprites as well.

No rest for the weary, even now I got more shots to color for the indie film project I'm on-board for. I've got audio to cut together and storyboards to draw up for other secret projects in the works (of which are of a MUCH grander scale than the Transformers flash) all while still working on two games and more cels to color. Oi-vey. Can't complain though, I'm always glad to be productive. Wish I had the time to be working on the next part of the Rangers Movie, but it can wait. This is stuff I think is really worth appreciating.

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ALSO! You guys like Over 9000! right? Course you do. The creator of this internet meme explosion, Kajetokun, is in fact far more than just a video editor. He's a DAMN good musical composer as well! I recently convinced him to get a profile on NG so he could submit his stuff online, so you guys should check out his music! Particularly if you guys love the feel of ol' Super Nintendo style music, which I'm big into, his tracks are absolutely addicting. Hijack Train Hero and the battle themes I could listen to for forever. He's a pretty cool guy, so be supportive of Kajet and give his tracks a listen :]

Real quick update. I've been workin' constantly on a billion different things, with a billion MORE things in the works, too. But in the midst of all this, I FINALLY managed to construct...

MY NEW SITE!

There's a few kinks that need to be worked out, but for the most part this is the final product. Made a new blog to go with it, so I'll probably be making updates from both here and there, starting now. Big thanks to Richie and Psy for the technical help. Maybe those've you who happen to read this and are pretty in-depth with actionscript, I had one main issue that came up of which we couldn't figure out. I tried setting up the "Animation section" to make little windows pop up that are the appropriate size of each movie (they're not all the same basic 550x400 proportions) when you clicked the buttons. I had a similar layout on my older site with the TTA Feature Movie, but apparantly the code is now defunct and just causes errors. If any of you guys happen to know a solution, please feel free to get in contact with me through e-mail, PM, or even just a comment here. Whatev. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway, back to work for me. Thanks for readin' and any feedback would be appreciated!

UPDATE (7/1/09): Okay, made some more adjustments. Changed the boring Times New Roman font to Verdana, added a little header to the site, fixed a few spelling and grammar issues...now my main problems lie in the actionscripting. Corey suggested making the links create a new tab instead of taking you right there, but I don't wanna make the wrong code and screw the whole thing up. If anyone knows the right actionscript, and/or knows the solution to my other problem about making the movies work, please lemme know! Thanks guys!

I RETURN. Just finished up AnimeNEXT and Wizard World Phili, both of which were not just conventions, they were privaledges!

Ironically, in the last post, people seemed to misinterpret my mentioning of "Convention Appearances" as if I was chalking myself up to be a guest or something of any importance...but funnily enough, I ended up sort of getting guest-like opportunities at BOTH of these cons! It was a huge honor on both accounts :]

At AnimeNEXT, when I wasn't rollin' with the SMA Crew, recording videos and plugging the hell out of them at every turn, I went to a few different panels. One of which, was an Abridged Panel where the fine folks at yugiohabridged.com had LittleKuriboh himself over Skype to answer questions from people. The people running the panel, out of NOWHERE, asked me to come up and be PART of the panel roster! I've gotten pretty aqquainted with LK since his cameo in the 1st Part of the Parody Rangers movie, so I made a point to be at his panel and show some support. When I was put up there, I was alongside a few other random Abridgers...and obviously since I don't do YouTube parodies the only things I had to say in that respect was that I did a few random voices for DBZA and SMA. But I started listing off a few of the flash projects I had done on NG and this crowd FULL of people had a gigantic response to each one! I was blown away. A bunch of others from the audience came up to me after the panel was over to ask questions, I took a picture or two, gave an autograph to someone, I could NOT believe it. LK and the others from the site thanked me for joining them, what a huge honor, seriously. Check out a few of the other photos I took here.

Then this past weekend at Wizard World, Mike Ruocco and I took a road trip from Long Island to Philidelphia for the Friday of that convention. After walking right past Lou Farigno 5 seconds after we get to the con (DERP.) we went on a search for the Newgrounds booth and in going the wrong way, ran into HappyHarry, who pointed us in the right direction. All of the big guns were there of course, with a SURPRISE TOMAR I WAS LIKE HOMAIGAAAAD. We all just chilled out at the booth for like 3-4 hours, conversing with our new and old allies, drawin' up a storm with our sketchbooks. Spoke with Tom about some upcoming stuff I'm veeeery excited about AND was approached by lots of people that had seen my stuff before! They were really nice :] Then afterward, when the con center closed down for the night, we headed out for a walk and went to a Bar/Restaurant with tons of awesome bobbleheads everywhere. Me, Mike, Josh, Harry, later joined by Ego, Stamper & Swain, just shot the shit for a few more hours talkin' about all sorts of animation banter. Headed back home afterward, wish we could've stayed for the whole weekend, but I accomplished what I needed to do and thankfully Mike had a good time so I didn't waste his time and gas comin' out there.

To everyone at both conventions that came up and had some nice things to say about Parody Rangers and NiN10Doh! etc, if you happen to come across this, thanks so much :] Also thanks everyone from NG for showin' us such a good time and hope to see y'all at SDCC.
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Richie, Psy and I of TEAM KRONECKER DELTAAAAA are continuing to work on our Power of 3 Game. We've made some good progress lately: The script for all of the cutscenes have been written, the character designs are finalized now, we've just begun the voice casting for our lead character (good luck, girls!) and the levels are coming along. Psy continues to score...music, Richie continues to code and I'm happy to say I'm continuing to draw. This game really got me off my feet and back into an artistic flow. I've been working as hard as I can the past several weeks to write, draw and just CREATE overall.

Look forward to our game later on, we're really puttin' our all into it :]

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Lastly, I figured it wouldn't hurt to put this out here as well.

Currently, things are pretty rough. I'm trying to work as much as possible so I continue going to school, but without getting too personal, conditions are making it difficult to continue forward. As I usually plug on these things, I take drawing commissions on DeviantArt. ANY cash you can throw my way would be greatly appreciated and I'm always more than willing to draw some pics for people (Kirbopher1111@gmail.com is my Paypal address). I'm sorry if this sounds desperate, but desperate times call for such, so hopefully you guys'll understand. Thanks and hope you guys'll stick with me!