New Years Eve WORD WALL (Patreon)

The title image is Bruce Wizard teaching a class at Wizard School.  You can't see it here but in the reverse shot it is revealed that his pupils are tremendously bored with his whispery drivel.

I want to say THANK YOU to all of you for your patronage this year.  I really hope that I have made a few things you enjoyed.  Without your support I couldn't continue to make eccentric cartoons with no commercial basis for existing.

I can't remember if it was for new years last year but I did a brief review of my first patreon projects approximately a year ago so maybe now is a good time to look back.  It's a bit of a word wall so I don't expect many people will read it all, but perhaps a few of you will find it of some interest.

January - Raw Latex 3: I'm really happy with this episode, it felt like it had a burden on it because it had been two years since #2 and #2 hadn't quite lived up to the promise of #1, but #3 seemed to please everyone and re-energised the series.  It was helped by me making a cartoon for vanossgaming at the same time which had a link to it, that was the last time I worked for him though so future cartoons did not benefit from this.

March - Let's go Clubbing!: I imagined Let's Go Clubbing as a saga of two storylines (from two different improvised comics drawn by my friends and I) interweaving with each other and clashing in a dramatic climax of surreal majesty but it didn't really come together in reality.  I'm not sure if I failed to turn two great comics into a great cartoon or failed to identify that it wasn't a great idea to combine the two in the first place.  Either way I don't think it's bad, I think it's a solid surreal sketch cartoon but it didn't quite live up to how I thought it be in my mind, and it's more playfully odd than it is funny.  Interestingly it's done pretty well without any external help...I think it's the boobs in the thumbnail.

April - Meth Orcs:  The source comic is great and I think I pulled it off.  I remember spending lots of time on the paintings and I feel like I succeeded in creating a good fantasy setting for the first time with this.  It did really well at first and then plateaued for some reason.  Not sure why, I mean come on it's got a curvy Orc in the thumbnail.  I would happily make a Meth Orcs 2 if I had a strong idea for it.

July - MOANCORE: I'm really happy with the musical element of this, particularly the end credit music.  Generally I like the second half at the open mic night.  I don't know how well it came together as a story, I struggled a bit with converying Gooseman's deception.  I also like the part with the tape and the boom box.  I think this one is pretty good but the story wasn't all that compelling.  I hope to tell some more interesting Fernando tales this year.  The moaning element was really fun and got a great reaction from people.

Sep/Oct: Calloused Hands/Final Form: I'm really happy with both of these, which were mostly written by people on the facebook page.  I kinda got bogged down in the third song, and also I noticed that facebook was showing my musical posts about making the songs to less and less people so it became harder to get good lyric suggestions, so I'd need to think about another transmission method if I was to keep going with this writing method - perhaps a second youtube channel.  Either way these cartoons were a welcome change.

November - Raw Latex 4: I think this one isn't quite as good as #3 but it's solid. It advances the story and sets up the last one nicely, and the jokes work.  Unfortunately it has totally bombed.  Compared to #3, the number of viewers is way less, which is a real shame but I have to accept that if I am going to make a web series the episodes should come out semi regularly or else people will lose interest.  

December - My Mother-in-Law is a Scorpion: To balance the faceplant of Raw Latex 4, MMLIAS has performed better than anything else I've made for my channel after 2 weeks, with the exception of Wrong Number, which received a massive boost from reddit back in 2013.  I think it's a really enticing title and thumbnail combination, but it doesn't disappoint once you succumb to the clickbait.  I've made songs that I like more, but I am really happy with the cartoon itself, I think the dinner table scene in the first half is one of the best scenes that I've done.

Generally my tactic to make music videos for a while has done ok.  It hasn't totally rejuvenated my channel but all three turned out well, were fun projects and were received well as standalone works.  Unfortunately I don't have any more top shelf music ideas for now, I should work on that.  I have a good idea for a horse song but I think everyone would just say "this reminds me of weebl's amazing horse song" if I did it.

Next project is Bruce Wizard: Magic Trick.  I'm starting a storyboarding job on Monday that will go for about 3 weeks and delay Bruce a bit.  After that, for the rest of 2017 I want to expand the world of Fernando a litle more, in a bigger way than I did in 2016, and I want to keep making music videos but I'm not sure which ones yet.

I hope you all have good new years eves, even if you choose to stay home.  I'm going to a party with a crowd that has a tendency to stay up until dawn drinking, don't know if I'll go that far but I'll probably feel rotten tomorrow.