Flashforward Interview - 10 Feb 2006
From Homestar Runner Wiki
Matt and Mike Chapman, creators of HomestarRunner.com, will be presenting “How and Why Homestar Runner Cartoons Get Made” at Flashforward2006 Seattle. Learn more in this audio interview with Lynda Weinman: what it’s like working together every day, why they still proudly use Flash 5, how they incorporate audio and video, how they are able to offer free content with no ads, the importance of interactivity, and what other projects they’ve worked on.
Twenty-two minutes and forty-eight seconds of pure Friday fun!
Transcript
LYNDA WEINMAN: Hi, you're listening to the Flashforward Confrence and Film Festival Podcast. The largest Flash user confrence in the world, sponsored by Adobe Systems and produced by lynda.com. I'm Lynda Weinman, founder of the conference. If you'd like to learn more about Flashforward, please visit flashforwardconfrence.com. Listen to the end of the podcast for information on our upcoming confrence in Seattle, on February 27th through March 2nd, 2006. In each podcast episode, I will be conducting a phone interview with one of our speakers, sponsors, or film festival finalists. In today's Flashforward podcast, I interview Matt and Mike Chapman, The Brothers Chaps, who are the creators of the homestarrunner.com website. They will be speaking for the first time at the Flashforward Conference and Film Festival on Tuesday, February 28th, from 3:45 to 5:00pm in Room 6B. This is their session description: "How and Why Homestar Runner Cartoons get Made: Take a step back in time as Mike and Matt Chapman show how they still use Flash® 5 to make the weekly cartoons featured on HomestarRunner.com. Learn the secrets and not-so-secrets of making a 3-5 minute cartoon every week. Hear about their six years on the web, watch some of their stuff, and learn how they've managed to make a living doing something they like."
LYNDA: {now over telephone} Well, it's really great to connect with you both over the telephone, I have Mike and, uh, Matt Chapman over the phone with me. Welcome!
MIKE CHAPMAN: Hi, thank you.
LYNDA: Hey, we're really excited to have you at Flashforward, is this your first speaking gig at a technology conference?
MIKE: Absolutely.
MATT CHAPMAN: We're very thrilled to be part of it and we're kind of... we still think it's sort of an accident, probably.
LYNDA: {laughs}
MIKE: Flashforward, since I think I maybe heard of it in 2000? Pretty much right when we started using Flash.
LYNDA: I know, I was, you know, looking at your bio and seeing that you started in 2000 and that's when the conference started as well, so we share the same birthdate.
MIKE: Yeah.
LYNDA: Yeah.
MATT: Flashforward was really, I think that's what exploded {?} in terms of–
MIKE: Yeah, we got Flash 4 in, I guess, 1999, late 1999.
LYNDA: So had you ever done animation before you got Flash 4?
MATT: Yeah, we'd done it in lots of other forms, we'd done stop-motion stuff, we'd messed, you know, with just cell... very crude hand-drawn cell animation. Growing up we did a lot of that stuff. All very crude and not very advanced.
MIKE: We'd do stop-motion with a video camera where the smallest chunks of time you could give would be about two or three seconds.
MATT: {laughing} Yeah, you couldn't come anywhere close to frame-by-frame animation.
LYNDA: Well, I mean, those roots really show in your work, even though, even though a lot of people would look at it and say it's crude, I think people who are trained in animation recognize that there is artistry to what you're doing, absolutely.
MIKE: Well, thank you.
LYNDA: Yeah.
MIKE: So when we got Flash 4 we were pretty thrilled with how easy it was to, you know, to manipulate things and to sort of have this library you could pull from instead of having to redraw every time, so that was very nice, we were pretty- pretty psyched.
LYNDA: Yeah I think Flash started its life as a different product and it- it didn't have any interactivity at all, it only had animation and drawing tools, so it- it had- it had- it was the first program I ever saw that had onion skinning, it was called SmartSketch. {pause} And-
MATT: Onion skinning comes in very handy.
MIKE: Was that FutureSplash?
LYNDA: FutureSplash, there you go. That's what it was called, oops. {laughs}
MIKE: I did my homework.
LYNDA: You did what?
MIKE: I did my homework.
LYNDA: Yes you did. Um, and your- your memory is better than mine. So, where are you guys based?
MIKE: We're based in Decatur, Georgia, which is just east of Atlanta.
LYNDA: And, um, this is a family affair even that extends beyond you two brothers, correct?
MIKE: Yes, pretty much everyone; our sister, dad and mom, and uh, inlaws, everybody helps out whenever they get a chance. Us two and our sister are full time employees. And everyone else pitches in when something needs to be done.
LYNDA: I'm sure you're all quite amazed by the success of this, do you want to talk a little about that? I mean were your parents always supportive of this sort... of your drawing and animation experiments and things like that?
MATT: Yeah, Mike and I, we, we always say that we had the sort of curse of having the parents that were too interested and too supportive of everything you were doing, and our dad and mom would drive four hours to see my crappy band play in college in a (?) bar {Lynda laughs at this}, stuff like that, and it was sort of like "I kind of don't want you guys to be here at a crappy club, I can't swear on stage then."
MIKE: "I won't be able to drink beers then."
MATT: Yeah. But, I mean obviously it was wonderful, and it was very cool our dad's a retired accountant, so Mike and I started tinkering around with Flash and when we got the website up it had a lot of stuff going, he kind of encouraged us to try and sell some t-shirts or whatever, he's definately our biggest fan, and he's always supported us in all our creative endeavours. I think that's part of his thing, he definately always wanted to be a writer and ended up being an accountant, so I think sort of through, you know, he was getting his creative jones through his sons, which we're totally cool with, so....
LYNDA: That's really neat. So you have a musical background as well as writing and drawing.
MATT: Yeah...
MIKE: Yeah, our musical background is just as mediocre as all of our other backgrounds... College rock band... "Technically..." What did you call it?
MATT: Trained? Technically trained?
LYNDA: Well, I think in some ways the mediocrity is the charm, because it makes it sort of... people can identify with the pure creative spirit that's coming out of Homestar Runner. You know, the stories and the characters and the humour I think are really approachable to most people.
MATT: We hope so.
MIKE: "Technically Proficient", that's what I was trying to think of.
MATT: "Technically Proficient"?
MIKE: Proficient, yeah, that's a hard word for me to come up with.
LYNDA: So, speaking of Technically Proficient, what version of Flash are you guys using right now?
MIKE: Proudly using Flash 5.
MATT: Yeah. And have been since, since 2001 or whenever it came out.
LYNDA: Wow. Is there a reason why you have not upgraded?
MIKE: There's several reasons, and we'll let everyone know at the Flashforward conference what they are.
LYNDA: OK.
MIKE: Lots of little small things. We actually publish everything in Flash 7 still, and we'll get Flash 8 just because the compression is so much better, the filesize is generally about 30% smaller...
LYNDA Mmm-hmm...
MIKE: ...so that's always good. But there's lots of little minor things, like the color selection, and...
MATT: Frame selection, syncing...
MIKE: Yeah, see not only do we use Flash 5 but we use the Flash 4 timeline keyframing style.
MATT: Yeah, we set it, there's that setting, you can set it to Flash 4...
LYNDA: Right...
MATT: ...for frame selection, and we still use that actually...
LYNDA: I'm kind of with you, I really preferred the way that it used to work, and I set mine back too.
MATT: Yeah... It's, uh, I dunno, there's just something streamlined, and it's the sort of thing where we... probably if we just worked it for two weeks and just forced ourselves to use Flash 8 we would be fine, but, uh, I don't know, it's one of those old habits die hard situations, I guess. There's definately a couple of things with syncing up dialogue that seems like it's way easier and we haven't been able to duplicate a couple of the things we've tried, we go in and, cause we... the newer Flashes are pretty customizable, and we actually had our programmer guy, Johnathan, went in and tried to make all these weird, like, presets and keyboard shortcuts to try and mimic everything that we do in Flash 5 in 7 and even that was still, like, several... we'd have to do like several little keyboard shortcuts just to do something you can do with, you know, one click in Flash 5. We keep wanting someone to prove us wrong and give us a copy of, you know, a new Flash that works exactly the way we want it to, but nobody's been able to do it.
LYNDA: Hmm! Well, I bet that could be arranged. {laughs} I think you're going to coming to the source by coming to Flashforward here. So, you also use a lot of sound, and I'm curious, you know, what platform you guys use to author your materials, and what kinds of sound apps you use, and things like that.
MIKE: Weeeee... use, um, I guess, Adobe Audition now...
MATT: Used to be Cool Edit.
MIKE: Yeah, Cool Edit Pro. Um, so we just use Mobile Pre-Amp, um, USB Pre-Amp, to, uh, plug the mikes in, and just, uh, record it all in Audition and clean it up in there.
MATT: We have a little sound room here at the office, it used to just be me sitting in front—We always had a decent microphone just cause, with, you know, from recording our own home music stuff, we had at least a decent microphone, and, like, a four-track and stuff, and so, but it was still just me sitting at the computer, and you could hear Mike doing the dishes in the background, and like, lots of room noise and stuff like that, but now... {Lynda laughs} ...little sound room looks fairly soundproof, or at least soundproof enough.
LYNDA: Yeah, I think the audio sounds great on your site.
MATT: Thanks. You should go watch some of the early emails and you'll really appreciate it, yeah, especially with headphones you'll really appreciate how, how much...
MIKE: Trucks going by...
LYNDA: Rig
MIKE: Parking and stuff...
LYNDA: But, you know, I still maintain that adds to the charm here. I mean, I really think that part of what is the appeal is that, you know, people can relate to this sort of crudely-drawn stuff, and I love how you intermix, you know, sort of, a lot of just visual metaphors of like old, you know, black and white footage, and funny videogames, and it's such a, you know, collage of different files and influences, it's really neat.
MATT: Thanks. That's a, yeah, we always feel like it's fortunate we can always put whatever we want on the site, it's a nice sorta catchall in terms of any creative idea we can come up with, we can probably cram it into the Homestar Runner universe in some way, be it, you know, a hair metal band, or, like you're saying, an old crappy Atari game, or any of that stuff, just can somehow get in there, which is cool, as opposed to, you know, if we had set out to make it be just some sci-fi cartoon or something, where you're kind of pigeon-holed into a genre, so it's nice that way.
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Fun Facts
- FutureSplash was a freeware animation program (made by FutureWave, a company that also made "SmartSketch", a vector-drawing program) that was eventually bought out by Macromedia and renamed Flash.
