Animator vs. Animation


This is the animation that went viral. I don’t remember exactly how or when I came up with the idea. I was kind of fooling around with Flash when I started it. As I worked on it, the story became more and more complex. It took me three months to finish it, from March to June 2006. I submitted it to Newgrounds.com, hoping that people would like it and give it a 5/5. Next day, I find out that it won 2nd place for the whole day! Wow! I didn’t think it would do that well. That’s just great. But then it won 1st place for the entire month, and I got a T-shirt, $250, and a Retarded Animal Babies DVD. No way! Awesome. After that I signed onto AIM, and I got deluged by new fans and website owners. I almost sold the rights to my animation to some random website for, like, $75, I forget, but Steve from AlbinoBlackSheep.com saved my butt as I was about to email the contract. Long story short, I developed a relationship with atom.com, at the time known as AtomFilms. They hosted my animation non-exclusively and sponsored the making of Animator vs. Animation II, which came out the end of that summer, ’06.

You’ll find this in 34,982 videos on YouTube, all with different names, different image qualities. I didn’t upload it to YouTube myself until there were already 4,576 copies of it already up there (I’m making up these numbers btw).

Since this became a viral video, my name became internationally recognized. I would meet people for the first time and they would go “aren’t you the dude who did the animation with the stick figure?” And half of people I talked to about my animation would say “oh yeah my friend showed me that a while ago..”

This animation has been on CNN, Wall Street Journal, and in film festivals around the world. Who knows where it will go next.