😎 What the heck am I working on?

Four main things!

• Music
• Totally Good at Games
• Filmmaking
• Animation

Since 2016-ish, my focus shifted from animating to composing! Specifically composing for indie games. I find great life purpose in it and am currently pursuing it as a career. Finding financial stability in freelance is, as you would probably imagine, very erratic and searching for such stability in freelance is perhaps even futile by its very nature.

I have worked on so many game music projects. In the span of a few years, I've worked on DragonBlossom, Nexomon, the sequel to a certain Pokemon-like game, Dungeon Misadventures, Sonic Verges, a wizard game, a tower defense game, Ninja Gaiden 4, TellersTale, yBorg, Acid Marshmallow, PaperGami, Project Fuck, and Project Skates. Some of them get completed and published, some of them never make it past the preproduction stage. Currently, I am working on music and even sound effects for 13, a metroidvania; VentureBound, an RPG set in modern times; Spook Royale, a twin-stick shooter with Halloween imagery; and Ms. Director, a horror adventure game set in the 1930s.

Creating the sounds for all of these games have given me great pleasure, a sense of peace and self-worth that I have not been able to get anywhere else. I am both very proud and thankful that I am able to have this job.

Totally Good at Games is an internet let's play show that me and my best friend Darren Leeds debuted on Thursday, February 26th, 2015. Three years later, the show is still going, still growing, and has its fair share of fans! Some even sent us fan mail! (Thank you, Anastasia!)

We hired our friend Brad Jordan as video editor! The first episode you've seen him edit for is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on Part 2 where he did a bunch of visual gags! His work is great, so please welcome Brad. He originally started with our 2-hour Hot Shots Golf Fore! series, but the raw commentary footage I recorded was shit, so we may keep that series scrapped forever. (It had a lot of great, funny moments in there, so I may attempt to salvage it sometime in the future!)

Speaking of scrapping videos, there are a bunch of one-offs and series that me and Darren recorded in 2016 and 2017 that have just never seen the light of day. They are all perfectly good episodes, but they were never fully edited because of my own faults. Many of the games did not interest me enough to edit them for hours and hours. So while Darren and I's commentary were great, the episodes never went up for you all to watch.

 
But that won't soon be the case! I've painstakingly organized all the Premiere projects, even organized everything within each unfinished project, and have been slowly going through every each one to complete them. You can see that there were a bunch of series we did not publish like Mighty No. 9, Crash Bandicoot 2, Just Cause, and more. They will come out over time and will not be edited by Brad.

Lastly on the topic of TGaG, we've started a new(-ish) show! Now all horror games we let's play will be played under Totally Good at Ghouls! It was supposed to start during the Halloween season 2018, but Darren and I could not find a time to get together and record.

FILMMAKING! I've been contacted by the creators of Game of Honor, a game competition show, to be part of the film crew. I'll be starting on Saturday, January 26th. I was supposed to start in late 2018, but did not because of my own incompetency. Hopefully this time will be different!

ANIMATION! There's a lot of animation projects that are left uncompleted. Anti-Joke, OneyPlays Animated, and What's In the Basement? (Part 2) are all incomplete. Quickly going over the three's completion status:

1. The thumbnails and lineart for the first half of Anti-Joke is complete. I just have to do the thumbnails and lineart for the second half before I can move onto cleanup, coloring, background art, and sound design.
2. Progress on OneyPlays Animated has barely begun and is really more of something I would like to work on someday rather than something that should be worked on. At least for the time being.
3. Almost everything for What's In the Basement? (Part 2) is complete except for the sound design, voice acting, and one transition movement. I will have to contact Charlie Neider and Matt Starette again to have them do their roles (as well as some new ones????)

And that's it! I guess you can think of this as my New Year Resolutions! Thank you for reading and thank you for enjoying what I have to give. There is a Patreon if you want to donate!

— Alex E.

The SEGA Genesis cover of Encounter from Metal Gear Solid I created was used as background music in Metal Gear Awesome 3 featuring Egoraptor! I am very happy to see it used in a cartoon with one of my favorite voice actors, the guy whose work inspired me to become an animator.

Recently, the mobile game Nexomon released to the iOS app store. I composed about 16 tracks! This was the first time since 2012 that I made music for a video game, so it was a nice, refreshing, and learning experience for me!

• Here's all the Nexomon tracks I made so far: https://soundcloud.com/adesyndicate/sets/nexomon-samples
• The game can be played here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nexomon/id1254864644?mt=8

An Android version and additional story DLC with new music are currently in development.

I also composed a number of tracks for a PC game currently in development called DragonBlossom. I will release the songs when I get confirmation to do so. A crowdfunding campagin is planned to start when a demo has been created.

First thing's first, I have been on an accidental vacation from animating for the past week not because I don't want to, but because Mark and I have been closing up with pre-production of the forthcoming short film and also I left my laptop and tablet in the Clear View Pictures studio office. Ordinarily, I could just waltz right in and retrieve my stuff no problem, but Mark has the key and he was on vacation since Saturday through Monday, or Labor Day. I will be back at it tomorrow morning!

In other news, I recently bought a second-hand Wii U from GameStop and I hooked it up to the internet only to discover that Nintendo made a social media platform called Miiverse where you can make little drawings using the Wii U's gamepad and stylus.

I thoroughly enjoy this feature.

This means that Darren and I can now play Wii U games on Totally Good at Games! We've recorded a few episodes of Super Mario 3D World, making Miis, and whatnot. These episodes will be up after the Newer Super Mario Bros. Wii set of episodes are released.

On Livestreaming

I want to start doing livestreams on Picarto and Twitch again. I used to do them months back when I still attended Millersville University (and by attended I mean I sat in the on-campus Starbucks and animated all day instead of going to my classes), but ever since having walked out from college, the thought of livestreaming left a salty taste in my mouth. I think I've finally gotten over the anxiety of having left college, though, and that associative thought process linking livestreaming and school may have been resolved, so I very well may feel comfortable with livestreaming again.

That is not the only problem, however. I am unsure of how well my laptop can handle livestreaming and Toon Boom Harmony, not to mention the possibility of having a webcam, too. One of the main reasons I never livestreamed after having left college—besides the associative anxiety issue I mentioned—was that my home's internet is that it's (A) got a set limit of how much bandwidth can be used per month and (B) the internet upload and download speeds are atrocious, especially after exceeding a certain threshold. There are periods where my home internet upload speed is quite literally one byte per second. One byte per second. Let that sink in.

"Over 14 years." – Evan Huber

However, the problem of internet speeds could very well be fixed now that I almost entirely work from the Clear View Pictures studio office! My home internet speeds are, according to Google's speed test and as of writing this, ~0.4 MB/s for downloads and 0.25 MB/s for uploads. At the studio, however, the internet speeds are 2 MB/s for downloads and ~1.33 MB/s for uploads. If my laptop is able to handle running OBX to stream at a decent video quality and Toon Boom to animate, I'll do my best to keep a regular streaming schedule.

The office hours are every weekday from 9 AM to 2:30 PM. So, I imagine that in most cases livestreaming would take place from about 10 AM to 2 PM every Monday through Friday. If possible, I'd like to also record the streams to an external hard drive so that I can upload them to YouTube as unlisted videos, as well, since saving them to my on-board hard drives would slow down my computer. I would have to talk to Mark about that, since he is the one who owns them and uses them the most frequently; these drives are important for filmmaking and video editing, which is his forte, and I wouldn't want to interrupt him needlessly for a nicety. Of course, I could simply get my own external hard drive.

On Filmmaking

On August 15th from about 6 PM to 3:30 AM the following morning, Mark and I filmed a mostly improvised comedy skit titled About Girls. It was intended to release as a sketch on Sunday Sketch Show, Mark's forthcoming YouTube series, but after I and some others requested it be released sooner, we decided it will be released as is! I will be releasing my first, rough cut of About Girls to $1 Patrons only!

The first episode of Sunday Sketch Show has been filmed and the remainder of the season will be written by Mark. I am expected to direct at least one episode, though! I look forward to doing that. In addition to that project, I am in the pre-production stage of writing and directing my own original live-action work for the ADE-Syndicate channel and Totally Good at Games. 

Sunday Sketch Show will be released to the Clear View Pictures channel on Sunday, August 28th at 1 PM Eastern Time, or 10 AM Pacific Time.

INTRODUCING: The Fabulous Office Studio!!!

The Clear View Pictures studio office is officially up and running! This is where I do all of my animation and this is where Mark does all his scriptwriting, video editing, and planning!

This is my workstation. It's pretty neat.

I occaisionally do some video editing here, as well. For example, I worked editing together an impov short that features me and Mark called About Girls. I made the first draft and Mark finished up my rough draft. It will be released in the near future!

Mark's workstation. He has a lot of cables and books and stuff.

PAN-O-RAMA.

Public Service Announcement:

Don't Drink and Drive

I was in a PSA about drinking and driving! The video was filmed and directed by my friend Mark Swartz. He also played the law-abiding studmuffin in the video.

LINKS

Mark's personal filmmaking channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCidcjaDRo2TopmqTS6Ph20Q

Totally Good at Games, my Let's Play channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCM1-pfmI67coNLHj5vW9OFg

Patreon, for supporting the artists!: https://www.patreon.com/adesyndicate

I: Animation

There has been more progress made on the current animation project! Right now, I'm still working on roughing out the whole animation, but I'm also beginning to work on more well-rendered keyframes for certain characters. It's far from done, though; the point where I'll be doing proper lineart is certainly in the future.

There are a few things that I still need to have prepared, namely the music and the background music. I will likely be doing the background music here, but I want to have someone more talented in this area paint the background art. The only obstacles to this end are (A) finding an artist who is willing to work either for little pay or even pro bono and (B) finding a talented background artist. I am currently saving up money for animation (and Totally Good at Games—Darren and I are both saving up for a Wii U or an NX when it comes out), however what little money I do make is used almost entirely for bills and car maintainance. As an artist myself, I understand the disdain around expecting cheap and especially pro bono work from artists as artmaking is a very expensive service. It pains me to have to resort to searching for free work and hope to split what revenue there could be after the fact. 

This is where Patreon really helps! You have the option of donating to the animation, directly affecting the quality and production of the resulting cartoon! If you want to support my work, go to the link below and pledge an amount per month. On Patreon, there are frequent updates on the progress of the cartoon I work on, as well as a set of rewards for donating a certain amount!

Alex's Patreon page - https://www.patreon.com/adesyndicate

Pledging a donation is, of course, entirely up to you! You aren't obligated to do so; only if you want to help improve the quality of the cartoons!

II: Studio Office

In addition, my friend Mark Swartz and I have been meeting twice per week (on Fridays at 10 AM and Saturdays at 2 PM) in order to come up with ideas for live-action & animation and to plan out & budget these projects. This Friday, Mark and I talked about setting up a semi-proper studio office for working on our projects. This means that I will have a specific, designated place away from home to animate! The office is expected to open when the semester opens in a few months or so.

I'll post pictures of the office space when it's ready!

 — Alex Emenheiser

Currently, I'm working on a brand new, original cartoon! It's in early production right now, specifically the storyboard stage. It features the voice of my good friend Darren Leeds, who is available for voice acting here on Newgrounds. Message him if you need a voice over for your cartoon!

I don't expect that this cartoon will take an incredibly long time. For more updates on the progress of this animation, check out my Twitter and Instagram. If you want to super support me with my work, become my patron on Patreon! If you pledge a donation there, your name will appear in the credits as a thank you!