For those of you who just got a bit turgid looking at this… Please move along.

Caption this Crap, and we’ll smear your funny all over the airwaves on RetroNick Radio!

Recorded on: 08 May 2013

It’s mmm mmm good! Click to buy yourself a copy!

Steve returns home to so we decided to break out of our regular schedule and host a podcast immediately following  Sunday’s Retro Rumble. Tonight we’re joined by the man watching over Steve’s domicile as we talk about pen & paper RPG games converted to video games. We also reel in horror and intrigue at the reality that is the Natural Harvest cookbook.

Drinking rules! Drink every time the words cum or semen are used… If you drink something besides alcohol then please just keep that to yourself.

Your cast: Nick, Steve, and Matt

Joined on twitter by @NDArkie89, @usfhbomb

We talk about things on this show (derp), so naturally we’d like to link you to a few of them:

The Natural Harvest Cookbook

Shadowrun Returns

We’re also available on iTunes! #KermitFlail

Please check out our Podcast in iTunes and, if you like it, Give us some STARS! Feel free to leave comments about the shows, the hosts, or your favorite games!

As always you can listen to the podcast here:

Recorded on: 06 May 2013

Sunday’s Retro Rumble get especially crowded when Nick invites too many cohosts to join in on the action! Beyond that, Infidel Steve makes a surprise appearance IN PERSON! In all honesty, we had no idea he was back in the country and he apparently went to great lengths to make certain it stayed that way. On this episode we talk some about the bit wars and about various different kinds of beer that Nick has brought to the table, including the Will Wheaton special! In the interest of getting the episode up some time this year I’m not bothering with going into detail about each beer tried here. Just listen and you’ll get an idea .

Drinking rules! Drink every time there’s an awkward silence or someone substitutes the word “literally” for “spiritually”. Slam your drink when either Steve crashes the podcast or Nick makes his inappropriate pederast joke… Or do something safer like scream racial slurs at a crowded Harlem street… Maybe stick to the drinking.

Your cast: Nick, Ben, James, Steve, Ben Wu, and Curtis Silver

Joined on twitter by @NDArkie89, @usfhbomb

We talk about things on this show (derp), so naturally we’d like to link you to a few of them:

Heathens of the Planes (The Fake Travel Blog)

We’re also available on iTunes! #KermitFlail

Please check out our Podcast in iTunes and, if you like it, Give us some STARS! Feel free to leave comments about the shows, the hosts, or your favorite games!

As always you can listen to the podcast here:

Recorded on: 08 May 2013

It’s shit like this, Hollywood…

Nick and James talk about movies turned into bad games, movies turned into good games, bad movie adaptations of games, and what their dream game movie would be. After that the boys talk about Batman for 30 minutes past the show’s regularly scheduled end time. We also read you captions from weeks 14 and 16 of Caption this Crap!

Drinking rules! Don’t stop drinking until Nick finishes his grizzly description of M. Bison tearing his daughter from his baby-momma’s gullet with his bare hands… Or do something safer, like having M. Bison deliver your child by performing a cesarian on you with his bare hands.

Your cast: Nick and James

Joined on twitter by @NDArkie89, @RealityGlitch, @Neuralclone

We talk about things on this show (derp), so naturally we’d like to link you to a few of them:

We’re also available on iTunes! #KermitFlail

Please check out our Podcast in iTunes and, if you like it, Give us some STARS! Feel free to leave comments about the shows, the hosts, or your favorite games!

As always you can listen to the podcast here:

Given it’s varied system compatibility, there were several revisions of the box art done over time, the one featured here ostensibly being the worst. You can read more if you’re interested in the game – but let’s be honest, you’re only here for one thing.

So without further adieu, CAPTION THIS CRAP!

The origin of Goatse?

Recorded on: 17 April 2013

The episode where we find out how many dicks our girlfriend has sucked (37?!). Or maybe it’s just the episode where Nick and Louis get together to discuss their very different experiences with the Sega Genesis and its various expansions. We also mention the recently unearthed Sega Pluto prototype, wish a very happy birthday to listener Frank, of the Cross-Border Gaming podcast, and read your captions from week 13 of Caption this Crap!

Drinking rules! Drink whenever Louis mentions the Genesis was his first console. Whenever Nick starts going on about the TurboGrafx-16 you should start drinking and not stop until he finishes… Or, you could do something safer like say, beating a wookie at holo-chess.

Your cast: Nick, and Louis

Joined on twitter by @NDArkie89, @Emaster1980, @USFHBomb

We talk about things on this show (derp), so naturally we’d like to link you to a few of them:

Sega Pluto Prototype

The Aura Interactor

Sega Activator Training Video

Click here to subscribe to the podcast!

We’re also available on iTunes! #KermitFlail

Please check out our Podcast in iTunes and, if you like it, Give us some STARS! Feel free to leave comments about the shows, the hosts, or your favorite games!

As always you can listen to the podcast here:

What were some challenges you faced during the production of this short?

The biggest challenge was the complete lack of budget.  We scraped some money together to rent a greenscreen stage for a day to take the photos, but aside from that we used all our own equipment: cameras, lights, computers, software, and a lot of people donating their time and creative energy to help out.  This being an ‘extra’ project for everyone involved led to it taking 2 years to complete.  Granted, it was a metric assload of work, but I also gotta pay the rent.  Before I even finished GNSPM I made a completely separate commissioned short using a similar style in 3 (mostly sleepless) weeks. Here is the link if you wanna check it out.

Was this a labor of love, or a project that was either commissioned or assigned?.

Very much a labor of love, and that is really the only reason I could spend so long working on it.  I had a pretty complete rough cut after a year that to the untrained eye could have passed for ‘done’, but overall it wasn’t really working for me yet.  To know whether a project is actually finished I watch it on a loop, sometimes for up to 2 hours nonstop, and just absorb it for a while.  Make mental notes of the places I can tighten, things I can add, how to rearrange shots to make it flow better, coming to terms with cutting shots completely that I love but don’t work with the flow anymore, etc. Being an animator is like being a micro-editor—in addition to cutting between shots, you also get to edit every element of every shot, and if you have new ideas as you go, you can just conjure them up. It’s magic.

Can you tell us a little about the style and technique you’ve used to tell your story?.

The style is kind of a mishmash of many of the various techniques I have learned over the years as

an After Effects pro. I have previously used the program for character animation, VFX and compositing for feature films, video games, Nick shows and documentaries, and animated motion graphics for the web, so the piece ended up being a unique combination of all those things mashed together in a way that made the most sense to me. I’d call the technique ‘non-linear stop motion’.  Coming from a traditional animation background, my brain still operates under the assumption that the camera is static and that I have to create the illusion of movement by manipulating the elements in the frame.  So the actual technique feels old-school, but I’m using the power of modern technology to accomplish it.  Which was also the precise theme I was trying to convey with the piece, re-imagining something old and simple and familiar without losing what made it special in the first place.

I began by storyboarding the shots I had in mind and cutting a rough animatic (originally set to Fresh Hex, by Tobacco as temp score, this track powered the creation of GNSPM for a long time), and had actors perform the actions for each shot in front of a green screen.  We took about 10,000 high-res still photos, and I combed through all of them to eventually use about 1,000 of them. The car is a 12” die-cast model that we put on a lazy susan, then took pictures of it rotating around a complete 360 so I could choreograph the fishtail and camera moves however I wanted later (this is what I mean by non-linear stop motion, take a ton of pictures and rearrange them later).  Then I cut out the characters and colored their skin yellow and Ms. Pac-Man’s dress red (each pose by hand using Photoshop) and started filling in the rough animatic.

The music fits the feel and action of the animation perfectly! What sort of direction did you give your composer?

Glad you noticed! I mentioned earlier about games with great music and weird humor always making the biggest impression on me. I love imagining the composer of Mega Man cruising around Tokyo in 1986, just rocking the fuck out to King Crimson and getting super inspired, going home and shredding on his midi keyboard. Since music is so integral to conveying tone and pace, my main direction was to keep consistent with the relationship between these new visuals and the source material, as well as the underlying themes. Instead of having an actual 8-bit score or remixing the original Pac-Man theme, compose something that reminds the viewer very strongly of those 80’s riff-tastic action games of yore, maybe with some 8-bit chip elements thrown in for spice.  I broke it into sections for them with the general sound I was going for in each spot and from there the composers totally nailed it.  I actually had to ask them to dial back the shredding a little bit, they got a little carried away with it on the first pass, just too much fun.

If I had to choose what I like most about this piece, the short answer would be the ghosts. What are you most proud of in this piece?

Wow, that’s a tough one. Probably the fact that it is actually finished. Glad that it’s out of my head and people can watch it. I feel like a proud exhausted parent, after an obscenely long time in labor.

Now that you’ve barreled through and completed this video, do you have plans for another gritty retro-reimagining, or perhaps extra levels for GoodNight, Sweet Pakman?

I definitely have ideas for additional levels and other scenarios for Pac-Man (maybe bring Pac Jr. into the mix in a less gross way), but I think it would be a lot of fun to adapt a different game in an equally unique fashion.  Now that GNSPM has set the stage, maybe a more obscure game next time… might be time to put together a Kickstarter pitch…

Anyone in particular you’d like to thank since you’ve got the floor?

Chris Osbrink for coming up with the initial idea and shepherding it through with me to the end, Kenny Madrid who modeled, textured and lit the city street background and Brian Casey and Danny Burke who composed the score.  No one was paid to work on this, and I’m incredibly thankful that such talented people were willing to donate their time and efforts to the project.  And thank you for being interested in the process!

I also gotta thank the internet, it has shown me some amazing shit over the years and it feels good to give something back. Crazy to think that even though I graduated from college in 2004, YouTube didn’t exist until 2005. Gotta keep evolving along with the tech!

Again, special thanks to Chris for taking the time to go into such excruciating detail on producing this work. If you haven’t already seen Part 1 of our interview, you should really check it out now! I would also encourage you to check out his site and comment on more of his work.

Whoa whoa whoa! What’s this I hear about you, my wife, and fruit? Also, why am I suddenly clothed and double jointed?

Hey! RetroNick here with another harrowing entry into the growing Caption this Crap! archive. This week, we’re looking at the not-terribly rendered, but ultimately perplexing cover for Wonder Boy III or as it’s known here, Monster Lair.

Caption this Crap, and we’ll smear your funny all over the airwaves on RetroNick Radio!

Wasn’t that badass?!  My favorite bit had got to be when the ghosts eat it and the little scores pop up over their heads. Since I loved this video so much, I took it upon myself to track down the parties responsible, which lead me to the super-talented (and all around standup guy), Chris Weller, a professional motion graphics artist hailing from Minneapolis. He agreed to an interview with RetroNick.com, so we could get a better idea of what all went into this amazing piece. His answers are so detailed that we’re actually breaking this piece up into two parts so as not to bog you, the busy reader on the go, down with copious amounts of text. Here’s a little info about the man himself, and then we’ll get to the meat of things.

Chris Weller was born in Minneapolis in 1981 (making him about the same age as Pac-Man). He still enjoys playing the old Nintendo games of his youth, often finding them way more challenging than newer games. Chris went to film school at the turn of the millennium and played a lot of CounterStrike in the dorms (natch).  Post-college he broke completely from video games to minimize distractions while learning his trade. Chris has since returned to gaming and generally gravitates towards shooters with excellent art design, like Fallout, Bioshock, Half-Life and Dead Space.  Though he can still destroy at Mario Kart.

Chris started doing animation in high school, drawing on notecards and shooting on Super 8. He continued through college, but never really thought it could be a feasible career choice as drawing by hand was time consuming, and the tools to do it on a home computer weren’t very sophisticated or available to him at the time. Once Chris graduated, he began getting hired for animation projects, learning Adobe After Effects as he went along. Nearly 10 years later he’s still learning new aspects of the program. Chris currently creates motion graphics for documentaries, animated retirement plan videos for various corporations, visual effects for Disney XD shows, and of course, is ever busy developing more of his own stuff.

Thank you so much for agreeing to speak with us here on RetroNick.com.

No problem man, thanks for tracking me down.

What inspired you to create this gritty, violent, nearly surreal vision of Pac-Man’s world?

One of my college chums was putting together a sketch comedy pilot, mostly live action with a couple animated bits.  He had an idea about Pac-Man becoming the victim of a drive-by at the hands of the Ghosts, and the piece just kind of exploded from there.  Video games have always been a big part of my life and a definite influence on my art style, so it really felt like a project in which I could immerse myself.

If I had to guess based solely on your work, I’d say you’re a big fan of retro games. Is that a fair assumption?

Oh indeed. I feel like my generation is unique when it comes to video games, in that the technology got more and more sophisticated in direct correlation with my own development; NES in elementary school, SNES/Genesis in middle school, N64 in high school, etc. Kids today (get off my lawn) are born into a world where the visual potential in video games is off-the-charts hyper real and most games are made to be ‘beaten’ by whomever plays them, lest the consumer feel cheated that they didn’t get to see the end of the movie.  Back in MY day, you got 3 lives, maybe 3 continues, then you had to start over.  If you wanted to see the crazy artwork and hear the awesome music they saved for the very end, you had to MASTER that shit. I used to keep a handwritten list of all the games I had beaten, to remind myself of that moment of satisfaction. Now you can just look it up on YouTube. Additionally, with the NES at least, it was a challenge just to get the goddamn thing to work in the first place.  In retrospect it almost seems like getting the controller cords untangled and getting the game to start up without freezing WAS the game, and getting to play Zelda after solving that puzzle was the reward. Probably helped me develop the temperament and patience to be an animator. At least coming up with a very specific technique of blowing in the cartridge, bouncing it up and down in the cradle 11 times, and doing a little dance and a backflip on the couch to get it to work spurred my creativity.  Now the controllers are cordless and you don’t even have to get up off the couch to switch games! I always wonder how my 8 year old self would perceive a modern video game back when I thought Super Mario Bros. was the most amazing thing I had ever seen, without the gradual technological buildup. Would it look completely real to me? My little brain probably would explode.

What games did you play as a kid?.

One of my favorite things about going out for pizza as a kid was getting to play Ms. Pac-Man while we waited for dinner. Obviously the game stuck with me.  One day I will own one of those table-top Ms. Pac-Man cabinets.

I never had a ton of money so I didn’t own many games ($50 was a fortune to a 7 year old in 1988), but I saved my allowance for months to buy the original gold-cartridge Legend of Zelda. I explored that game endlessly, pouring over maps and dungeon guides and developing my neurons and problem solving abilities in the process. I still rock through that game once a year or so (both quests) and plan to use it as my totem to hold on to reality as an old man – if I can still remember hidden caves and burnable bushes throughout Hyrule, I’ll know I still got my marbles.

I also have the fondest memories of games with fantastic soundtracks.  Mega Man, (Super)/Metroid, all the old Mario Bros. games, ToeJam & Earl…there is something really awesome about how creative the composers and game designers were able to be with such a limited chipset. 

As far as the story and style of the piece go, what were some of your major influences?

When I was younger, I always worried that I would never have my own style, and that I was always just pinching off my heroes.  But you learn by aping others, and my visual style has kind of grown into its own thing in the years since.  This piece was very much influenced by the ‘Gallery 1988’ art exhibits that are frequently about town, wherein the artists re-imagine 80’s pop culture in unique ways.  I’m not that great of a painter, but I’ve been working on my animation skillz for over half my life and wanted to make something worthy of a gallery using my medium of choice.

My initial goal was to make the piece as faithful an adaptation of the experience of playing Pac-Man as possible; the first level is really easy and you’re like ‘Oh, I got this, no problem’ and then you die immediately on level 2.  When I started dissecting Pac-Man as a concept, I realized that the first Matrix movie is basically an adaptation of Pac-Man.  The agents are the ghosts, you kill them and they rematerialize elsewhere to chase you anew while you run around a maze, looking for shortcuts and the eventual exit.  The Matrix played heavily in the look and feel of the piece, but it was influenced just as much by The Blues Brothers.  I’ve probably seen that movie more times over the course of my life than any other, and still count it amongst my all time favorites.  Aside from the black suits, there are other visual references to both those films sprinkled throughout, my favorite being the really quick close-up shots of Clyde shifting into gear and stomping on the gas pedal.  Those were 2 of the last shots I added to the piece, and I took the pictures one night in my office using my own arm and foot.  The shots were done by morning.  The future is awesome. Other big influences were the collective works of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.  DIY guys that made filmmaking look like so much fucking fun.  Their visual style and dark and violent storytelling obviously played a major role in this piece, and also initially inspired me to go to film school, as they were really hitting their strides when I was 16-17 years old.  I was also fortunate to be in college when Adult Swim was brand new and blowing my mind.  I had never seen ANYTHING like that on TV before.  As I type this I’m noticing an interesting continuation in the maturing of technology and entertainment with my own.  What do college students have now that could possibly blow their minds like that?  With the availability of Everything on the internet and after 11 seasons of Aqua Teen, you kind of lose that first-time-feeling.  Or am I just an out of touch geezer already at 31?

Anyway, animated influences: Venture Bros’ brilliant mix of action and hilarity still sets bar incredibly high for artwork, storytelling, character development, and the richness of the world they inhabit.  Also, an animated feature called Redline (done by one of the directors on the Animatrix) helped me out of a creative block regarding how best to end GNSPM, and heavily influenced the action of Level 2.  Also love Bill Plympton, Don Herzfeldt, and Jhonen Vasquez.

Pretty interesting stuff, eh? Chris’s answers are so detailed that we decided it wouldn’t be fair to just cram the whole interview in one post. Tune in next week to catch part 2 of our in-depth interview with Chris Weller!

Edit: Part 2 of our interview is up. You should check it out now!