PilotRedSun

Garfielf just hit 12 million views so now’s a good time to answer. In 2008 my mom showed me Voiceforge’s cartoony text to speech voices which blew the monotone and sterile “microsoft sam” website reader voices out of the water. They were ridiculously amusing so I kept them in mind for later. 5 years later I used them in an animatic where Garfield has a smug brooklyn accent (Wiseguy) while Jon (Jerkface) repeatedly lambasts Garfield’s insolence. As a kid I read every Garfield book from the 15th to the 40th book (I didn’t like Garfield’s early style), so naturally it was an early target for my parodies. The choice to make Garfielf an animatic instead of an animation was partly inspired by the lowbrow Garnfield shorts by couchpotatotheatre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CauzHCR1r9s There were four of them total, the only one he hasn’t reuploaded is the short where Garnfield huffs gasoline...  The pacing of the animatic I intended to be an explosion of information every few seconds. Janked up voice with janked up drawing. Janked up voice with janked up drawing. It was important that the drawings were somewhat intricate so that Garfielf could have its own chaotic identity. The music took a very long time to pick out... I listened to 50 different eastern european avant-garde rock songs on Grooveshark (rest in peace) before deciding on Begnagrad’s Coc ‘n Rolla for its iconic starting riff and freeform rhythms. Songs that I also considered using were Debile Menthol - A Nos Mamans and Alamaailman Vasarat - Delhin Yöt.

I used to listen to a lot of Finnish metal and I got Adobe Flash after repeatedly watching the music video for FM2000 - Hyvä silokki-laulu, which entranced me with its deformed artstyle and bizarre sequence of events set to the music. I made the Supermetal Kraft Dinner video not long after this. (Fennoman bonus fact: the earliest fanmade Garfielf was made by a group of Finns speaking the lines phonetically backwards, then playing the clips in reverse).

In the early 2010s if you wanted to make 2D animations for the internet they were expected to fall into 1 of 2 camps: traditional style with lofty standards pursued by university students, or Newgrounds Flash parody style. In 2012 I sought inspiration in animations that didn’t fall into either of those categories. Priit Pärn of Estonia was my biggest traditional influence, I recommend watching his jubilant and playful animations. Meanwhile my biggest contemporary influence was Cboyardee’s Dilbert 2 and 3 which seemed to take the piss out of animation as a whole, with its wayward mspaint lines and questionable aesthetic choices. It was novel to see a stigmatized art style delight so many people, so I adopted several of his tropes, while using my animations as a vehicle for cheeky IDM tunes. Since the build up to and release of “Achievement” I’ve learned a bit of animation fundamentals, branched out to other styles, and veered from meta internet context now that the internet is mostly telephones, but I still adhere to the rule that every animation on my channel should have a dysfunctional aspect to it.