UPDATE: I am no longer writing these monthly updates, but rest assured that I'm still alive, quietly working on this project in secret. See you sometime in 2025!

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

Why is this post title in all caps? Wait... oh my god... is that...

IS THAT ANIMATION WITH A STEEL CHAIR??????

Before you continue, watch this semi-secret video below. Just click below and turn subtitles on, don’t read the rest of this post yet:

(If the picture link doesn't work, you can also just click here.)

Don’t scroll down yet until you watch this. Pretty please.

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Done looking at it? ISN’T IT AWESOME?

The gamble WORKED!!!!!!!!!!

Your eyes are not deceiving you: there has been a complete pivot for Snack Cactus to become a 2D animation series.

From the beginning of November to just last night, it has been proven viable for me to make 2D vector characters and animate them with full audio production (plus voice acting) in record time, just like Stickmen 2020.

“But why didn’t you do this way, WAY sooner?”

Switching to 2D would have happened a lot sooner had it not been for my very unproductive pivot to 3D printing. I even dismissed 2D as an animation idea at the end of that video. That aged pretty badly!

See, I was already on the right track when I was trying out vector art back in 2023. I’m not really a fan of drawing, as I prefer the CAD-like qualities of creating geometric characters with a computer mouse. The thought of using a pen tablet or writing implement to learn how to draw a character through sheer practice does not sound fun to me. But I found out I can get that same CAD-like satisfaction of creation using vector programs like Inkscape! However, I was still too focused on trying to shoehorn 3D into the picture.

(All the vector art pictured below is exclusively me modeling in 3D first and then tracing it in 2D vectors afterward.)

Something I’ve recently realized is that I’ve been clinging onto 3D like it’s my only creative identity, the one thing that separates me from other online creators instead of getting lost in the noise of the ever-expanding internet. But going 3D means nothing if you don’t actually like using it. It’s been very stupid of me to force myself to use 3D just because I was afraid of being less unique.

Coming to terms with this may be one of the healthiest realizations I’ve made this year. This has been a constant battle with myself to lower my crazy-high expectations for myself until I have a healthy relationship with my art again.

So is 2D-animated Snack Cactus the guaranteed promised land? We don’t know. It could be many more projects before I finally find balance, but at the bare minimum, Snack Cactus is a big leap forward. We’re getting there.

You’ll still see some 3D from me here and there, but the primary goal is to have it take a backseat and not use it too often. Maybe 3D will help with the occasional character reference, poster, or motion graphic, but I’d otherwise like to focus on vector art as much as I can.

Early 2025 is the (tentative) plan

While I would love to go at max speed and crank out those five Snack Cactus videos to release by January, I can’t promise Early 2025 as a guaranteed deadline.

In order to prevent my 100,000th burnout, I need to learn how to properly pace my video production like a marathon instead of a sprint. To ensure this, I’ve chosen to work with a storyboard artist and a background artist. Both of them will be revealed later on. Sharing the work in general will be a great way for me to slow the fuck down and not try to accomplish so much so quickly, and I’m thrilled I can actually do it this time with 2D. Trying to share the work on my old 3D projects was way too complicated in comparison.

People have told me this a million times before, but it definitely applies the most right now: I NEED to take it easy on myself, despite how much I love not doing so!

Thank you

I really appreciate it if you’re still watching me.

I am constantly self-contradicting myself and re-learning things I already used to do, and it’s been a struggle for me to figure out what I want out of my online creativity. But I won’t give up. 2025 has the insane potential to be a massive year, and I can’t wait to see what Snack Cactus could turn into.

And it’s okay if it doesn’t work out. I’ll just keep trying things until it does.

(I’m also saying all of this now instead of next month because I anticipate myself getting no work done in December whatsoever. Holiday season moment.)

Stay tuned!!!! Thanks for reading.

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

Welcome to the October 2024 edition of the monthly wavetro update! As you can see above, we now have a full cast of 3D characters ready to run your local neighborhood convenience store.

…Well, Teddy isn’t a Snack Cactus employee, but you get the idea.

The characters are done!

As stated in my very barebones newsletter last month, I finally got these guys squared away in September. In case you forgot, the characters pictured above from left to right are named Teddy, Ben, Carlos, and Vince.

It was actually a lot faster to make these models than I thought, which is a relief given that there’s going to be many more characters appearing in the comic. The only downside I ran into is that modeling clothes is a miserable experience: it took about a week to make the uniforms these characters are wearing compared to the week it took to make the models themselves. But they’re done!

The only thing I might do at this point is maybe change the colors of the uniform, since I really don’t like how both Ben and Carlos are both red and yellow in near-perfect opposites. I might also tweak Vince’s proportions a bit more, but let’s just move on…

About the comic title "Ben and Teddy"

After re-reading the five stories I wrote to launch this series, I decided to not go with the project name “Ben and Teddy” anymore. Carlos and Vince bring so much to the plotlines (rather than being secondary to Teddy and Ben’s interactions,) that the title of this comic should instead encompass all four characters. I tried to think of different titles, but I ultimately reached for the easiest option:

From now on, this project will just be flat-out called “Snack Cactus.”

It’s a little lazy, but there’s nothing better that I can think of. I nearly went with “Gas Guys” since the convenience store is also a gas station, but still it isn’t as unique and memorable as the store’s literal name. So that’s what I’ll go with.

Progress on the store itself

Speaking of Snack Cactus, let’s talk about how modeling the store itself is going!

This is what I’ve made so far. It’s been excruciatingly difficult!

I had a very hard time starting the store at all at first, since I had to take the five episodes I wrote and create a layout that makes sense for all of them. I pretty much didn’t do anything for most of September and part of October, stressing out over how I was going to tackle this.

Eventually, I came up with the idea to use giant text placeholders to define what will go where in the store’s footprint, from the refrigerators to the alarm panels.

Then I planned to use Blenderkit to furnish the store quickly and easily. Blenderkit is a 3D asset marketplace where you pay a flat monthly fee to use all the pre-made models on the site you want, which I was very happy to try.

However, it quickly became clear that combining various assets from different artists was going to look inconsistent and weird. You can see in the image above that this asset of a stocked shelf of snacks doesn’t look all that American, and the story literally takes place in Texas.

While I still think Blenderkit is a useful service (especially for car models,) I can’t use it here. I need to model Snack Cactus myself so that every background behind the characters looks stylistically consistent. On the bright side, I only need to model this store once, and then I can re-use it as much as I want.

To save on time and sanity, I also decided to define a new rule with the art style: backgrounds will be blank and un-rendered, excluding any items that characters interact with or point out. This is a trick from one of my old RobotUnderscore projects pictured above, from when I tried to get into video essays and/or storytime animation. Past me just couldn’t pick a lane.

So off I went, getting measurements for various all-American products, hand-modelling each one in 3D, and stocking retail shelves full of them. It’s mind-numbing to think about how much work it is to stock an entire convenience store, especially if you happen to be making every item from scratch.

As of right now in late October, I got as far as the checkout counter with the cigarettes and energy shots. I just need to make the cash register, and then I can move on to the refrigerated beverages section.

My entire brain feels like it’s been re-written to focus on this massive undertaking. All I can think about right now is the diameter of a soda can or the footprint of a checkout scanner, and how that will impact my 3D models. Something tells me I’ll need to find another corner-cutting method to reduce the workload on my plate. We’ll see what November wavetro comes up with.

Unconfirmed (but possible) complete pivot??

Speaking of time-saving methods, there has been something on my mind lately that could change everything about Snack Cactus. It wouldn’t change the stories I wrote or the characters I’ve designed so far, but definitely everything else about the series.

I don’t want to give away too much about what this idea is since I don’t want to promise something before it happens, but I am seriously considering doing it. It would let me not think about modeling this damn convenience store anymore. It would completely throw doing a “3D comic series” out the window. It could even make the release date for Snack Cactus as soon as this winter. It could be the best decision I’ve made in a long while.

But it would require me to change my entire creative direction for the 100,000th time instead of sticking with my current plan, and I would love to commit to something even though I recently established my constant switch-ups as the norm. Yet at the same time, I hate modeling the inside of this Snack Cactus so damn much. I think I gotta roll the dice on this one.

Stay tuned for the November newsletter in case I decide to do this crazy idea that would drastically simplify the Snack Cactus project, but in a way that makes everyone (both creator and audience) happier for it…

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net

Hi!

Unfortunately I don’t actually have a monthly newsletter for September. I’ll just keep what I planned to say to a few boiled-down bullet points:

• I finished modeling all the main characters much faster than I thought
• But I’ve been having trouble starting to model the gas station
• I’ve recently had very little free time with a lot of life stuff hitting me all at once (including my car recently getting totaled and having to find a new one and doing a lot of paperwork)
• Been trying to slow down working on this Ben & Teddy comic project to avoid burnout, resulting in dropping my secret personal goal to finish it by January 2025 (since something like March or April seems more realistic)
• Shoutouts to Blenderkit, genuinely a super useful website

I’ll talk more about all this next month, along with the usual visuals and information I usually put together. I just need a free pass from writing this month- it’s been hectic.

Thanks for understanding!

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

Welcome to the August 2024 edition of the monthly wavetro update! We’re finally entering the phase where actual visuals are starting to take shape. This all may seem overkill from how much planning I’m putting into this Ben and Teddy series, but it’s going to be well worth it in the end.

Let’s dive in…

Five whole storylines are WRITTEN!

In my last update, I naively proclaimed that I should write five finished episodes of this comic idea before going any further. As it turns out, five is a very big number.

There’s nothing wrong with writing five stories in itself, but DO NOT attempt to do this in a single month like I just

did. I ignored my health and doubled down on writing and revising so that I could reach the visual planning phase by the time this August newsletter came out. Had I not done that, I wouldn’t have much of anything to show you today.

I pulled this off using about 3 weeks of August instead of my original (and foolish) estimate of 1-2 weeks. Do note that it won’t be as hard for me to write future episodes: these initial stories were only difficult to write because I had to simultaneously finalize the main characters and solidify the rules/style of the Ben and Teddy universe, all while writing something funny. With the pilot episodes now written, I have a pretty clear idea of how an average day at Snack Cactus plays out.

Honestly, I only felt compelled to push myself as hard as I did because of how disappointing my last project (Call Wavetro) was when compared to my older videos. I really want to reach for my peak with this new project and give it my all, even if it means I sometimes skipped exercising or found myself at the Whataburger drive-thru at 4 in the morning this month.

I really want this project to be my next big thing. I’ll be careful to not burn out and give up, though I’m only really susceptible to that after I debut a new series (which is why I want to release five episodes at once in case I really do drop this project immediately after.)

The character designs are FINISHED!

Pictured here are the (mostly) finalized main characters you’ll be getting acquainted with in the coming months. Granted, they’ll be in 3D instead of 2D, and I might add a visor hat to Carlos, but this is pretty much the final plan otherwise. Not bad for only having a few days left in August to make these!

Let’s take a closer look at each of the four:

Ben

Ben is pretty much the same. The only difference with him is that his 3D model will be re-made from the ground up. I’m doing this because the standard Stickmen 2020 model has always been terrible at bending and posing:

(THIS EXAMPLE IS A URL BECAUSE I HIT THE IMAGE LIMIT ON THIS NEWS POST: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F67a7ce7f-bc5a-4e1e-bbb9-46fe321e4b06_1757x782.png)

Correct rigging and topology was the least of my worries when I did 3D animation. Making 3D comics is much easier to do though, so I’d like to go through the trouble of making Ben’s shoulders look cleaner.

If I can’t figure out how to model this properly, I might actually detach Ben’s arms and have them as separate pieces that are just “glued” onto his torso:

It won’t look as uniform as the old Ben, but there won’t be any more crumpled or stretched vertices. I’ll let you know which option I end up doing.

Teddy

Teddy has some tweaks to his design. He’s now more uniformly shaped, including a flatter silhouette and a tail that’s as tall as his torso. Something that’s always bothered me about the classic Teddy design is how uneven and lopsided his original shape is:

(THIS EXAMPLE IS A URL BECAUSE I HIT THE IMAGE LIMIT ON THIS NEWS POST: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49d40944-7762-4514-8eee-5cac06bf01d5_2976x1658.png)

Notice how his head is this uneven rounded oval with a tail that’s shorter for no reason? I’m not a fan of that. When I remake Teddy’s model, he’s going to have these new, cleaner proportions, and even a new shape for his fins that also makes more sense (which is also pictured above.)

Rest assured, he’ll still be the same old Teddy otherwise!

(Side-note: In my five completed stories for this project, I was actually unable to implement what I planned in my last newsletter post: making Teddy feel shame for causing his usual disasters, other than a brief self-reflection in one of the five. I did find other ways to add depth to his character, just not this way I initially planned.)

Vince

Vince is a brand new character, one where his design is based on a circular Shapien combined with a cloud-shaped head. Vince’s personality is that he’s a bit of a slowpoke with strange skills and personality quirks, so I made his head shaped like a cloud since it’s like his head is always “in the clouds.”

No, that doesn’t mean he’s a pothead. He’s just really spaced out all the time.

These first three characters were kind of easy to mock up, and their existence implies a universe where all the people are either stickmen, fish, or symbol-based Shapiens. But I wanted to squeeze in one more new category of character in the Ben and Teddy world. It took me a while to come up with a fourth, but I did eventually land on…

Carlos

Carlos is a brand new character, debuting a new character category of food-based people. Unlike Teddy being a real fish, Carlos isn’t actually made of edible pizza. His head just happens to be shaped like a pizza slice, and other food people will happen to have different food as non-edible heads too. His eyes are also uneven, just like when pizza toppings slide on a tilted pizza slice, though it won’t be possible for Carlos’ eyes to slip or fall off.

Carlos is the boss of Snack Cactus, so it makes sense for him to be the “tallest,” even if his shoulders are actually at the same height as Ben’s. However, coming up with a new minimalist torso design for this fourth character category was tough, so I did reach into my old 3D portfolio to bring back an old friend…

Yes! For those of you that remember: Carlos’ design is based off my “Blue Guy” character design from 2018, essentially keeping the same floating torso and eyes but with a new head shape. I did decide to omit the mouth, since Ben, Teddy, and Vince don’t have one either.

Snack Cactus

BOOM! I also managed to create the logo for Snack Cactus last weekend. I found a font I liked and paired it with a cleaner take on the one-armed cactus I came up with in the last newsletter post.

I used nuclear yellow and red colors to evoke the feeling of a local desert-themed business, like the multiple -Berto’s restaurants in the southwest (or even the flag of New Mexico.) Throw a black outline on everything to make it feel retro, and it’s good to go.

I even made a vague idea of the uniforms Ben and Vince will be wearing on their jobs. (You can view the image for this here, since this was the point where I realized I hit the limit for how many pictures I can put in this news post.) I’d like to give Carlos a name tag instead since he’s primarily yellow, but we’ll see what I end up doing.

…And that’s as far as I got! I want to be finished with all the new character rigs and models in September, and MAYBE get started on modeling the store too. I shouldn’t promise too much though. While I’m REALLY excited about this entire project, I don’t want to keep scaring you guys every time I get carried away.

And I hope you’re excited too! See you all sometime next month.

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

Welcome to the July 2024 edition of the monthly wavetro update! As we approach August, we find ourselves lacking the promised July travel video, but possessing plenty of progress towards that developing 3D comic series…

¿Hablas español?

If you or a loved one speaks Spanish, I have amazing news: someone finally dubbed the ENTIRETY of Stickmen 2020 in Spanish! The amazing Glenn Acy has finished re-dubbing all 20 episodes under his alias elwavetro, and one of the fandubs even features myself as a voice actor! (Glenn had me read lines as the New Yorker in the “bancarrota” episode. I hope my Spanish sounds good.)

Check out LA COLECCIÓN STICKMEN 2020 on YouTube now!

The travel video I was gonna make is now on hold

For those that saw the teaser that used to be on my website, there was going to be a sequel to THAT WEEKEND NAMED AWESOME with my friend ThatGuyNamedAndy this month. TWNA is one of my favorite videos that I’ve ever made, and for this second video, Andy was going to visit me in San Antonio instead of me going back to Phoenix.

However, we kept running into scheduling issues. We were originally gonna meet up in mid-July, but then we had to delay to late July, and then to August. Once it started to look like we had to delay to September, I called the entire thing off for the year. We might try making TWNA 2 again in 2025, but it’s a little uncertain if it’ll happen at all right now. (Maybe it’s better for us to just travel and hang out without trying to make a video out of it?)

Either way, my entire July was now suddenly free, so I got to work on the comic.

More groundwork laid for “Ben and Teddy”

Shoutouts to somekindofentertain for the comment on my last newsletter for mentioning how the gas station chain Circle K is very different internationally compared to the US counterpart! Because of that, I decided that Ben will instead work at a fictional convenience store called Snack Cactus. The logo will look something like my drawing above, but a lot cleaner and probably green.

It’ll also be easier to write for a fictional gas station than to try and make something accurate to the Circle K employment experience in America.

Other than that hiccup, the challenge this month was to carefully design a few new main characters for Ben and Teddy to interact with. The comic can’t just be our two primary subjects interacting and no one else, especially when only one of them actually works at the gas station. There needs to be other main characters that also work at this convenience store, ones that can create interesting dynamics from how they interact with Ben and Teddy.

It took a while to come up with something, but here’s what I got:

Ben is the grounded employee that sees things plainly. Teddy is the impulsive non-employee that creates absurdity hanging around Ben. Carlos is the store manager that enables Teddy’s ideas to make the business stand out. Vince is Ben’s coworker who’s a space cadet yet somehow more helpful than Teddy.

For the coolernow123 fans in the audience: think Teddy as Angiru, Ben as Fist, and Vince as Codi. Carlos is new.

Essentially, Carlos is the nice boss that’s way too interested in trying Teddy’s crazy ideas to bring more revenue to Snack Cactus, driving Ben crazy. Vince provides a new kind of comic relief by being a clueless (but never offended) victim of Teddy’s shenanigans. Teddy basically gets Vince hurt by accident for physical comedy and puts Ben in the other anxiety-inducing situations.

This dynamic works because I also want to try making Teddy not have plot armor anymore. His mistakes will actually have consequences that the entire gang has to fix. No one at Snack Cactus hates Teddy, but he will start having moments of shame and vulnerability to round out his character, just like how Ben will constantly face hardship to learn how to relax or be open-minded.

I have no clue what Carlos and Vince will actually look like yet. I have to create character designs for them that make sense in the same universe as stick people (Ben) and talking fish (Teddy,) and I don’t want to re-use what I already have from Stickmen 2020. But solving that is a job for later.

My highest priority right now is coming up with five fully-written stories with these characters. Doing this will clearly outline what I’ll need to include in the 3D environment of the gas station, since I would like to model it right the first time instead of trying to fix any design issues as I go.

I also don’t want to launch Ben and Teddy at all until I have FIVE finished comics that I can release all at once. Doing this will make it less painful if I suddenly get bored of making the series and want to move on to something else, since 5 episodes can still count as a miniseries instead of my usual 1-3. Emergency exit design moment.

I was actually struggling to write stories for most of this month, which I only recently realized was because I was trying to do way too much in the plotline. The first episode was going to be about Teddy installing a bunch of vacuum tubes all over the store, allowing snacks (and customers) to get moved around instantly, slowly devolving into chaos. You can see how refining that into a tightly-written story is basically a pipe dream. Ba-dum tsss.

Instead, I’m trying to start with SIMPLE prompts, like “Ben has to clean a soda spill,” and making that basic premise spiral out of control via Teddy’s impulses and imagination. Hopefully I’ll have five written stories with this new approach before August is over so I can switch to the character design phase as soon as possible.

It’ll probably take a couple comics before I can write with the efficiency and strength that Stickmen 2020 had, so I just have to remind myself to finish something at all instead of trying to make it perfect.

Hope I stick to that mindset…

Music will fade into the background

For anyone wondering, I also had time this month to finish the entirety of Syntorial, and it was an excellent program! I actually know how to operate a subtractive synthesizer now, and it’s quite fun, even if I’m still kind of a noob. I also started using Building Blocks by the same developer, which teaches you musical composition in the context of a DAW’s piano roll, and it’s also been a fantastic learning experience.

However, I would like to prioritize getting Ben and Teddy finished, since I’m still a very long way from making fully-fledged outro music for my videos. Because of this, I’m going to just quietly work on this hobby without mentioning it in future newsletters. It might pop up again later when you least expect it.

And that was my July! Sorry this newsletter barely had any pictures in it, hopefully I’ll have more cool visuals for you to look at in August. See you around Newgrounds!

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

UPDATE: Throughout this newsletter, I mention "a new travel video" that I anticipated being busy with this July/August. Please note that it did get delayed to September at the earliest, with no new date actually confirmed yet. Not sure what my new plan for the summer is now!

Welcome to the June 2024 edition of the monthly wavetro update! As you can see in the picture above, the summer season is off to a bumpy start.

However, I’m still alive, and I still have new things on the way. Let’s get up to speed…

The YT subcount is probably doomed forever

It’s so joever. (Sourced from viewstats.com/@wavetro)

Remember when I said I should be fine with switching up what I do on YouTube, as long as I eventually commit to a video format? Yeah, guess who just undermined his entire progress towards 100k again.

What essentially happened is that I did two more episodes of Call Wavetro before cancelling it anyway, completely contradicting my previous desire to “be consistent” and “commit to something.” The underlying issue here was that I actually started Call Wavetro for completely misguided reasons.

If you’re familiar with YouTube, you might know how anyone who’s a streamer (or adjacent to one) will have several different channels that can pump out videos nearly every single day, short or long, forming a massively addictive backlog of content. Even if the videos have artistic value and aren’t just ad space to milk the viewers dry of money, the constant churn of “slop” is still hyperaddictive by design. For some reason, I saw this type of creator last month, and thought that I should regularly churn out slop as well, except that I would only do it to have an audience ready for when I make my actually fun videos instead of chasing streamer money. You can see how unsustainable this idea sounds, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I do now.

I’d rather not make long, bloated videos anymore.

(While I don’t think the authentic voicemails and messages of Call Wavetro are “slop” on their own, the series was still primarily designed to trap lots of viewers into increasing my overall watch time. I think Call Wavetro dying early and only being a few hours long actually makes the episodes and individuals on the show more meaningful now.)

I know it seems silly that I once again forgot the rule of “only do what you love,” but I sometimes wonder if there’s other creators like me that still fall into the slop-making trap like I did out of the terrifying fear of being completely abandoned by the algorithm. I am extremely lucky to be where I am right now, as the thought of making things and not having a single other person see or react to them haunts me. There are much healthier ways to be happy, but this is the one I’m obsessed with. I do this because I love people loving my work and how far I’ve gotten with it.

I’ve also realized that I never needed to spend years beating myself up for not finding and committing to a project. Sure, it sucks that I made so many things that died after two episodes, but I still constantly want to make other new ideas that also have lots of effort. The spontaneity keeps my work fresh, and only now do I realize I need to lean into this strength rather than to try and unlearn it. Maybe I’ll find something that clicks with me again (like Stickmen 2020) and I’ll finally be consistent, but there’s nothing wrong with me if I never do.

This realization has been the most fulfilling thing I’ve realized in the past few years, so I’ve been in an especially good mood recently.

I just wish I could’ve learned all this faster. But regardless, we trudge onwards.

Some cleanup is necessary

These videos got banished to the Unlisted Realm.

Unfortunately, having another video talking about my struggles is yet another stain on my catalog that confuses new viewers, despite it being very interesting to existing fans. Those vulnerable videos make my channel human and show that this really is just a genuine hobby, which is great! But with this newest upload, it’s all starting to get too much for newcomers, and I want to make better first impressions.

While I don’t want to make all my weaker videos completely unavailable, I have decided to unlist a bunch of uploads and store them in this playlist. New viewers can watch my other stuff first, and THEN come back to this playlist to see the other stuff if they’re really interested. The videos I decided to unlist are videos that got too personal for a new viewer, and videos that seemed too long or bloated in general.

Future videos may end up in here too, though I would like to keep Call Wavetro public for now, despite my strong desire to only focus on projects that viewers watch actively with no time wasted.

The new videos page is here!!

Okay, let’s talk about something I actually finished this month. The new Videos page on wavetro.net has been completed!!

For comparison, here’s the old one. It’s a long stack of everything that just keeps going on and on and on…

Old and boring Videos page…

And here’s the more-interesting NEW page!

NEW Videos page!!

It has more of a Netflix feel to it, grouping all my videos into shows rather than throwing everything at you all at once. Colorful tags help you find the type of videos you’re interested in, and my best work (Stickmen 2020) is displayed front and center, finally being more visible to new visitors. There’s also a nice hovering animation on the thumbnails if you visit the page from a computer.

Example subpage of Videos

The video subpages themselves are pretty similar to the old page, but they now have color tags for each video AND dividing lines between the entries. Shoutouts to my boy ThatGuyNamedAndy for suggesting the lines- it does make the list easier to read.

You can check out this new page right now at wavetro.net/videos, and if you poke around enough, you’ll find out the title of that mystery travel video I’m making next month…

Brief fun fact

SHAPIENS LORE!

Before we continue, here’s a weird piece of trivia: did you know that my current mascots (the shapiens) were actually going to be the successors to the stickmen of Stickmen 2020? Had my prototype video format actually panned out, I was going to make comedy videos with the shapiens, which were initially designed as these 3D-printed pencil puppets seen above. Wow!

Unfortunately, my 3D printer has been collecting dust these days- I just haven’t really found a new use for it ever since the idea to make those puppet videos fell through. All the printers from Bambu Labs are still crazy good, but I’m probably going to donate my P1S to someone soon anyway. These things are a nightmare to resell, but it’s on me for buying one in the first place…

Music?

I wish I picked this program up sooner…

This section should really be called “sound design,” but regardless: I just recently finished the entire demo of Syntorial. It’s really fun. As someone who has tried and failed to learn how to use synthesizers for nearly a decade now, Syntorial feels like the only realistic way to learn this stuff inside and out. Pair this with the music theory video from Andrew Huang and a dash of micro-tutorials from synthet, and I could be off to the races soon.

However, I need to pony up $130 to get the full program, and I’m not sure if I can fit that in my budget yet since I’m gonna be spending money making that new travel video next month. Even if this music stuff gets put on hold again, I just wanted to reiterate: this is SUPER promising so far.

But as usual, don’t have high expectations yet. It'll be a long time before I ever start poking @Jatmoz to collab or something

The main event: COMICS!

I totally get it if you scrolled all the way down here instead of reading everything else. Let’s talk about the possible savior of the Stickmen 2020 legacy and the wavetro name: how’s the Teddy & Ben comic going??

Good! It’s going good.

A rare peek into my notes setup for writing all my ideas and stories. (Zettlr)

Hey don’t read the text in that image yet! Stay focused on me down here.

Anyways, I’ve started on the general story and writing, since you can’t have a good comic without putting effort into those things. After I had Call Wavetro blow up in my face, I realized that I really shouldn’t go into this project trying to do a multi-part story that could end on a cliffhanger if I get bored of making it. With this realization, I decided to throw away the idea of Teddy & Ben doing a big road trip across America. It would really suck to not see them finish it.

I need to start using something I’m gonna call Emergency Exit Design. I know it’s a dumb name, but the idea of emergency exit design is that whatever I make next, it should be able to stand on its own if I suddenly cancel it and move on, like a guy running to the emergency exit. Lots of things I’ve made actually pass this test, though not so with the bitter cliffhanger of the unfinished Cavefolder.

With this in mind, the better play is to make this Teddy & Ben comic something more like Stickmen 2020: each “episode” of the comic should be self-contained and enjoyable in any order, rather than an overarching story that spans across many volumes. I didn’t want to just pick Teddy & Ben back up from their abandoned animation though. They lived in an apartment in New Jersey because I was still living with my parents in New York City at the time. I’m out in Texas now.

I could go on and on with how much I love the risky life decision I made to suddenly move halfway across the country to this scorching hot (and controversial) US state, but the sense of adventure I’ve been feeling from that is best felt in those vector pieces I made last year.

Regardless, even though I’m no longer living like a New Yorker, I think there’s still one part of my new daily life that I can tap into…

The mighty gas station. (I never drove a car in New York, so this is new for me.)

Circle K is a large-scale gas station chain in the US that is mostly found in the Sun Belt: the warm states that range from Southern California all the way to Florida. I think it’s in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic too, but I don’t see it mentioned a whole lot there. So what if we made Ben a Circle K employee in Texas, kept Teddy as his roommate but have him constantly showing up to his job to bother him while occasionally going on B-plot adventures, and then added another character or two to the gas station Ben is stuck working at.

Make a few comics, gather some voice actors and sound effects to make an audio track, and then release the two together into finished videos on YouTube and Newgrounds. I smell a winning formula here.

So right now I’ve been making a giant list of story ideas for these characters to experience. I’m also trying to figure out what kind of characters would be funny to have interactions with Ben, the one who just wants to do his job and go home. I’m only now realizing that I’m basically ripping off the famous dynamic Spongebob and Squidward had at the Krusty Krab with Teddy and Ben at this Circle K. With this in mind, I’ll do my best to not rip off Mr. Krabs, but there might be a Patrick lol.

You know, Squidward really carries that show now that I think about it. He doesn’t get enough credit for being the relatable miserable adult that shoots down everything Spongebob does, so I think going forward, I’m gonna temporarily call this project Ben & Teddy. It’s different enough to show that this is something completely new from the original animation pilot Teddy & Ben, while still showing that the same characters are here to stay. It would make sense to call this show Teddy & Ben if it was mostly Teddy moving the plot along, but I think chaining Ben to a Circle K provides interesting constraints for me to approach this project. (Yes, I know it doesn’t sound as good when Teddy’s name comes second, and I also know there’s already some jazz album with the name Ben & Teddy, but it should be fine.)

Ideally, I want to start making the gas station set next month, as well as flesh out some actual comic plotlines, and possibly bounce around some ideas on what the other employees at the gas station could be. HOWEVER, I will be pretty busy with that new travel video, so I might not get a whole lot done.

But overall, not only am I extremely excited to see how Ben & Teddy could turn out, I’m also thrilled that this project can exist on its own OUTSIDE of YouTube, since it’ll also be a static comic you can read on Newgrounds or even in a physical book offline someday. Holy crap I’m so glad I actually have a project I can upload to Newgrounds again, and one that’s actually as interesting as my old animations.

(If this goes well, I could even try that Cavefolder revival idea through comics! Though I think something episodic like that should probably be ENTIRELY finished before being posted online at all. Emergency exit design or something.)

Okay I’ve got work to do, so I’ll go disappear into my lab again. See you in July!

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net last month. PLEASE NOTE SOME THINGS MAY BE OUTDATED! Sorry I didn't post this here sooner)

I figured since I have terrible long-term memory problems with my online work, and I also want to re-assure people that this weekly phone series is not the only thing I want to do, I’m gonna start something unprecedented… I’m going to actually talk about the things I want to do in the future every month, rather than keeping them a complete secret until they’re done! Yay!!

So here’s what’s on my mind…

I have this extension in my browser that hides the performance stats of my latest upload on YouTube. I know those numbers can be helpful advice, but as someone who wants to keep this a hobby, the last thing I want is to feel any guilt of uploading a video that doesn’t “perform well.”

That being said, I still noticed that my subscriber count went down after my last video went up. The little number under my name in the YouTube dashboard went from 42,800 subscribers to 42,700. However, this is fine. The current metagame of YouTube is that you only get rewarded for doing one type of video and doing it consistently. Losing subscribers happens naturally when you switch things up, and I expect my sub count to go down even further since all the fans that only want animations are going to leave. It’s within their right to do so!

The ACTUAL problem is not committing to a new video format once you do change, because the more you switch it up, the more you’ll just lose subscribers without gaining anything in the long run (excluding a very small subset of people that truly love everything you do and stick around forever.) This is something I’m trying to end my struggle with- I did enjoy trying all the different videos I’ve made over the past few years, but I would like to actually try committing to some sort of series again. And so Call Wavetro was born.

I’ll talk more about that later though, since you might be wondering if I’m planning on doing anything more original or interesting. Not that there’s anything wrong with Call Wavetro, but certainly I still want to make something that’s more than just playing video games with voicemails in the background, right? Right!

I’ve been considering getting back into comics again, especially since you can just slap an audio track on them and upload it to YouTube. They’re still a LOT of work, but there’s a lot more upsides to sinking time in them compared to animations.

My main issue with Stickmen 2020 was that it was a vicious cycle and a terrible lifestyle: building environments, modeling characters, animating them, etc… only to use everything for a 1-minute comedy video and then starting the process all over. You can take some shortcuts like re-using the stickman model, or having plain photos as backgrounds, but it still ultimately leads to burnout when I did this over and over again on each video.

Cavefolder was actually a more sustainable idea- it was a show that was more worthwhile to work on since it could compete with Stickmen 2020’s re-watchability. It was an original story that doesn’t rely on relevant topics or memes to make jokes, making it way more evergreen and highly satisfying to finish. Cavefolder only ended since it was a random experiment for college and I wasn’t that interested in the story, despite popular demand. But what if I put more thought into a different longer story, and did something with that instead?

This doesn’t mean the animations are going to come back (especially because I get REALLY sick of 3D if I spend too much time in it,) BUT comics are a promising alternative. They’re faster to make. They can be posted outside of YouTube. They can be printed in books. They can be enjoyed by people with hearing problems since they’re subtitled by default. They can even build a strong foundation to turn into an animation later, if I ever find a million dollars lying around anyway.

I had the right idea about this when I was experimenting with vector art last year, but I think I overlooked the comic part because I was only fixated on that vector art style I was trying, and that alone was just too labor-intensive. But bringing back standard 3D comics like the This Is It strip I made almost a decade ago? That might be the actual play.

However, I need to sit down and start writing a story before I can actually make anything like this, which I haven’t found time to do yet. I also want to evolve into making multi-episode stories, rather than doing the “funny one-offs” of Stickmen 2020 or This Is It again. Though it might not be a bad idea to do that anyway to get warmed up. I don’t know!

• Idea for a multi-episode comic - Teddy & Ben: Road Trip America in which Teddy majorly fucks up his life somehow and now Teddy and Ben are on the run in a road trip across America. Would be funny
• Idea for one-off comedy comics - Shapiens are the name I’ve given for the new channel mascots you’ve been seeing lately. I could maybe use them for Stickmen 2020-style comedy comics, but I don’t think they would be as funny as the animations I used to make. I would rather do the road trip idea

But yeah, that’s what I’ve been stewing on lately. Comics.

It is a natural part of every YouTuber lifecycle to eventually touch a music-making application. Usually it sounds mediocre as shit once posted, since a lot YouTubers that do this are more interested in being perceived as a famous musician rather than making music with effort and creative input, but I still want to give it an honest try. In fact, I’ve actually tried to get into music-making for many years now, but I’ve always put it off or gave up because I was busy with 3D animation projects.

With animation now out of the picture though, I might try this again at some point, but more seriously this time! If I do try this, it would be a LONG time before you actually hear a finished song from me. I haven’t even bought a copy of Syntorial yet, which looks more promising than the boring music production tutorials I’ve tried to sit through. But I would like to see where it takes me, especially since I did make that short outro tune for Teddy & Ben back in 2022. I would love to have my own library of music instead of trying to license other songs for use in my videos.

I was also originally going to attempt this with sample-based beats after I had some success with a PO-33 in my free time, but ever since I’ve heard about copyright scares and DMCA abuse from using even somewhat-known samples, I’d rather master a synthesizer first before I try to compose a song. I’m not interested in learning an actual instrument at the moment either, the sound design aspect interests me more than music theory right now.

Bottom line: don’t have high expectations for this, it might not pan out for a while or even at all.

For the handful of you that like to check up on wavetro.net once in a while, you might notice that the Videos page is going to get very annoying to scroll down once the weekly Call Wavetro stuff continues this year. It’s just a very long vertical stack of everything I’ve ever uploaded, and it’s going to get longer as time goes on, possibly even lagging for people visiting on a mobile browser.

So keep your eyes peeled for a new design later this month or in June: I want to rework this page to make it easier to browse. Maybe something like Netflix’s UI, maybe something like a YouTube channel grid- I don’t know yet! But this page is going to look nicer soon, hopefully before the next State of the Wavetro post drops next month.

These are all exciting ideas, but right now my #1 priority is to make Call Wavetro a viable show. I think the latest episode I posted isn’t the viewing experience I’m going for yet, especially because the intro could have been faster and it felt like I put too many voicemails in, among other things. I’m trying to create something that’s as satisfying as a series of YouTube Shorts stitched together, but without actually posting to YouTube Shorts because apps like TikTok or IG Reels are poison. I got some really good feedback so far, like putting all the texts at the end so that people can listen to just the voicemails in the background uninterrupted, or opening a Signal account for Europeans and other international people to leave calls and texts without getting crazy phone bill charges (which was supposed to be with Telegram like I said in the video, but I got banned on there for having a Google Voice number. So far Signal seems to be working better!)

But more than anything, I just want to stick with this for a while, even if I’m not currently happy with it. I already feel tempted to scrap this idea again after seeing my YouTube “metrics” go down after I posted, but I also just want to stop changing up my uploads so fucking much. I just want to have a video series that’s consistent and reliable, so that there’s a consistent and reliable audience ready-to-go when I DO try something cool like comics or music.

So if Call Wavetro isn’t your cup of tea, I hope you still stick around long enough until something new from me comes along, and that the weekly notifs you’re gonna start getting about this show aren’t annoying!

Overall, I think that within a month or two, Call Wavetro will be a lot more streamlined, and more new viewers will stick around for it. But that won’t happen before more people on YouTube continue to unsubscribe (sadly) and I finish ironing out the weaker parts of the show, all while enough people stay interested in continuously calling or texting 918-WAVETRO.

Here’s hoping I pull this off nonetheless!

Thank you for your time! Please let me know what you think in the comments.

George (wavetro)

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

New episode of Call Wavetro is here! It’s an hour long once again, and you can find it on YouTube as usual.

However, you may have noticed: THIS SHOW IS NOW MONTHLY INSTEAD OF WEEKLY. I go into more detail on this at 24:24 in the video, but I can basically do other things instead of spending all my free time thinking about doing this show. I cannot keep doing this weekly, it always saps up ALL my energy after my work day, and I’ve been constantly thinking about getting ready to organize incoming voicemails on all my weekends this month. Also I haven’t exercised in weeks and it’s currently 5:00 AM as I’m writing this. (Newgrounds: it's now 1pm when I re-posted this here)

But hey, the show’s not dead!! This change will allow me to actually start the other things I want to do, along with taking basic care of myself again. I really don’t do well with my priorities when I’m tied to weekly upload schedules…

I think you guys understand. I’ll see you later in June!

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

I had so many problems getting this one done! Wanted to get it out on Thursday and here we are on Saturday afternoon after a frustrating week at my job and even more frustrations with recording in OBS. But it’s here and ready to watch on YouTube! Hope you enjoy, it turned out to be an hour long again.

Thanks for being here!

George (wavetro)

(cross-posted from news.wavetro.net)

UPDATE: The account I opened on Telegram for international callers got banned because the show’s phone number is on Google Voice. Try using Signal instead!

SORRY ABOUT THE WAIT! I needed an extra week to pick out a shiny new game and make some nice visuals to open and close the series. (You will also notice new 3D characters in the thumbnails now!) You can watch this video on YouTube right this very second, and I hope you enjoy the start of a very promising phone-based era.

Let me know what you think about the new intro/outro and the show format! I’ll see you next week hopefully.

George (wavetro)

🌊 wavetro.net