Hania woke me up at 8AM today to watch the awards live on stickam - it was a shock to see that both of us had come away with Tank Award each! I can't tell you how grateful the two of us are for the awards! I've been coming to NG since I was making stick figure Flash's in highschool, and this place has always been a huge source of inspiration to continuously improve my animating skills.

Thanks Newgrounds!

It's been a long time coming, but we finally knuckled down this week to finish off the soundtrack release of Tarboy.

Some of the tracks have been extended, but what I'm excited about is the new remastered 'Two's a Party' which ended up at 3 minutes in length. Hania put a lot of work into it this, writing new material for it. She's also included some concept music for Tarboy II.

Download the Tarboy Soundtrack HERE

There's also another CD of bonus tracks, for those that are interested in hearing more concept music that Hania created for Tarboy I - and some different variations on the existing music.

The albums are free, but you're welcome to donate. It would be greatly appreciated :)

In other news, I'm reworking the Tarboy site from scratch as a Wordpress blog, hence why our latest updates and releases have come through Hania's blog. Once it's up and running, this should give me much more flexibility to update as I'd like to a lot more in the future.

After a few months of Newgrounds/Tarboy inactivity, I thought I'd give a brief rundown on whats new and where I'm at.

Latest news is I've posted Popstar to youtube:

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Lately freelance work has consumed most of my time so all of my creative projects have taken a back seat for a few months. Good news is that from March I'll be back into working on my own stuff, and getting started on a larger, top secret project that's Tarboy related. :P

If all goes well I'll have something Tarboy related out by the end of the year. Before then I plan on releasing two other films that have been finished for a while, one which was created before Tarboy, and another I finished last year.

Aside from that, there's still a bunch o' other stuff that I promised which is way past it's due date (tarboy store, shirts, album soundtrack etc)- They'll be out at some point, just don't give your hopes up that they'll be out any time soon :P

Below's a WIP painting Ive been doing - I'm thinking of introducing some more painterly elements into Tarboy, might make a nice contrast against the crisp vector graphics?

We have three Tarboy shirt designs currently getting printed, and I thought I'd make a news post letting people know. We only have a limited amount, so if anyone's keen to make sure they get one, email the following details to orders@tarboy.com

Name
Address
Which shirt design
Size

There shirts will be ready in about two weeks. We'll be uploading photos so that you can confirm your order after you've seen them. Payment will be available through our online store, credit cards and paypal will be accepted.

Check out THIS LINK for the selection and details.

The Tarboy soundtrack will also be available to download on the same day the shirts are out.

James

I've taken note of all the comments about the shirt designs, and we've condensed it down to these 4 most popular designs (please view it large to see it in detail) I've included the image from my avatar, which quite a few people had suggested.

So if you could please let us know which of these 1 or 2 are your most favorite, that would help us select our final designs for print!

Thanks everyone for commenting!

It's been a while posting because we've been hard at work getting the music of Tarboy ready for release. We've also been getting some designs together to start printing Tarboy t-shirts!

We can only run with 2 designs (3 max) so we just want to gauge which of these designs are the most popular. Could you please view all of the designs in larger detail here and let us know which one or two would make the best shirt? If you don't like any, let us know why :)

In case anyone's wondering, there will be women's shirts as well. :)

I just realized I never made a news post about Tarboy coming out, so I'll use this post to give a huge THANKS to everyone for your support with the film! It was a nerve-wracking few days before putting it out, wondering how it would be accepted, but the response completely blew away our expectations :O

We've actually got 2 more films we'll be putting out over the next few months. I'm just waiting for one of them to complete it's festival circuit. The sucky thing is that more often than not, the bigger festivals don't accept films that have been already shown to the public, so I hope you guys don't mind waiting a while :P

Tarboy's begining to make it's way around the net. In case anyone's interested

It's up on Deviantart here: http://jameslee.deviantart.com/art/TAR BOY-134560109
and youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACHVwA1 D8fE

Here's some random Tarboy II concept art...

If you're a fan of Hania's music, check out Roller Coaster Junkie here

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/
480492

We put a lot of work into this one and it's good to finally get it out on NG!

This is the first time I've ever uninstalled a new version of Flash. I really WANTED to love this program, there was so many new features that sounded cool but seem so poorly implemented.

I could get over the unfarmiliar interface, and even the clunky new features, but the fact that it couldn't even open my CS3 documents was the deciding moment to uninstall.

Is anyone else experiencing issues to this degree?

I can see where the bones tool and the 2.5d features could come in handy here and there, but it seems like whenever they give us a new feature, they leave out tiny little things that could make them incredibly useful. In Flash 8 it was the blending modes and Effects, but they could only be applied to movie clips. Why not graphics? Movie clips are such a pain to work with, and they don't export to video properly.

In Flash CS4, they gave us the ability to set up multiplanes, but no 3D camera. What the hell? The bones feature is so hard to properly control, I've yet to see anyone produce any work at anywhere close to the level that can be achieved in Solo or Anime Studio. Just a couple of extra controls here could really help us out.

My guess is that Adobe don't want Flash and After Effects to overlap too heavily or else customers might think that they don't need After Effects with a 3D camera already built into Flash. Hopefully with CS4 not selling so well Adobe will wake up and realise they need to put a little more polish on their new products in future.

Anyway, there's my rant.

Has anyone checked out Hania's new song in the audio portal? It's called "I want my life back" and it's freakin' awesome!

It's amazing how her voice and piano playing can be so captivating.

You should check her out on youtube too... she's really hot.

Till next time.

- James