I got a demo of Canthos up on Sheezyart (my name there is Gandoofthewise)

Also,

Legends of the Black part 1 is 24% animated, which is 7% of the entire trilogy. that means it'll probably be done in January.

if we keep up the same pace, the entire trilogy should be finished by March or April, something to look forward to!

I'm excited to officially announce that the anticipated 3-Part flash movie, Legends of the Black, is officially underway. For anyone unfamiliar, Legends of the Black is a remake of the series "Shadows Of Azeroth" that got through part 1 and than failed to see anything else.

More in detail, when I got about 85% of part 2 finished, I kept watching the movie and knew it just wasn't that good, and I felt to embarrassed to let it out onto the net. After some time (and many moves around the country later) I jumped back onto the project but this time with a much grander idea. I took it away from video game parodies to make a totally original plot set in a totally original universe. I was happy to see two very good friends of mine, Joseph Blanchette (Legendary Frog) and Mark Schnider (Th1rt3en) onto the project as well, each of us bringing in our own strengths to really make the entire thing a wonderful production.

There is no set release date yet, but work is well underway, and i'll be able to keep news posted on the progress of the project.

-Xiphon

What Happened

A lot of people keep asking me about projects. I get asked about "Shadows of Azeroth" quite frequently, and to a lesser extent, "The Quest".

I can't stand keeping things secret, so i'm gonna go ahead and share a little of what all's happened.

I was making Shadows of Azeroth part 2, in fact it was nearly done. At some point though I lost my willpower to keep the series going. Honestly, i really liked the story, I loved the jokes, but something didn't sit right.
There's a number of reasons why this might of been, I never planned out a real ending, just sort of wrote the script based on whatever I felt like doing at the time, so it really didn't have any structure at all.
Also, i've never been good with parodies, in fact, Shadows of Azeroth wasn't really a WoW parody, it was an original story where I stole the names of locations to have as settings. All in all, i felt like the project could have been much better and I wasn't doing it real justice, so work got slowed down as I felt more and more depressed over the matter.
Than my computer fried and I lost everything.
I felt bad that it was lost, but at the same time somewhat relieved, and I'll get to why in a moment.

Between constantly moving around cross country, coming out to everyone, finding jobs, losing jobs, and diving into the fast paced media industry head first, life was pretty busy. Nonetheless, Somewhere I got the idea I wanted to start making video games. I started work on "The Quest" you can find demo's of it on Sheezy Art. It was a neat game, but my lack of Action Script knowledge held me back in the extreme and I had to restart work more than once.
David Orr was writing the soundtrack, and doing fantastic with it as well. But since work kept getting held back and ultimately lost when my computer got fried, he wanted some of the work to be shown. (The Quest boss tune can actually be heared in Castle Crashers at the final boss. When things weren't panning out he gave the track to Tom Fulp. It's pretty neat, you can actually hear the theme song he developed for the quest in part of the song)

Ultimately however, everything was lost and with my world going crazy, i wasn't really able to get things back on track.

Eventually, Joseph Blanchette started up "The Matrix Has You Again" and i got my dream part of doing the Highway Chase scene. That project didn't work out either, but it rejuvinated my want to get back into the flash world,
and that's when I started working on Canthos (my current major project) which is nearing completion.

What's going to happen now!

So there's everything that's happened to me. I'm sorry to the people who've been let down, HOWEVER, don't despair. As it happens, I made the decision that I wanted to re-invent shadows of azeroth as an original trilogy. I've got Joseph (aka legendary frog) doing voices and character design, I'm working on scenery and script as well as production and direction, Mark Shnider (Th1rt3en) doing the animation, and i'm so far undetermined as to who will write the soundtrack.
I didn't round up 2 other artists because I wanted to be lazy, keep in mind, but because I wanted it to be like a real movie. I wanted to have a team of people dedicated to their individual part of the production.
The new working title is "Legends of the Black" and the groundwork is already being laid while i finish up Canthos and the Compass of Fate. All 3 parts of Legends will be released in a row so there's no chance for me to get sidetracked.

There's other future projects in the works as well, I won't name any titles or ideas yet however untill they're more developed.

Keep your eyes open for Canthos! I'm only days away from finishing up the demo (first level and first boss with cutscenes in place)!

Update,
Canthos and the Compass of Fate (game) over halfway done, around 75% i'd say. I'll be releasing the first playable demo for open testing soon. If like exclusive updates or screenshots or maybe even play testing, just get ahold of me on AIM.

Thought i'd give an update,

i'm working on a game based off a character i developed some time ago. The whole thing is a bit of a mix between Prince of Persia and Sonic the Hedgehog, so there's a lot of flipping, wall-grabbing, swinging, sword flinging fun across 10 levels, each with it's own epic boss. It has an original soundtrack, and low and behold, work is actually being done on it!

i've got around 2 or 3 level's worth of content finished, and hope to release a demo, and a preview, in the near future.

stay tuned!

I've decided i may try to apply my skills to not only help out the flash community, but also make some extra money as well.

I'm going to start doing commission work for anyone interested in it.
Untill i get an official post or page up on this, a simple run down of offers would be as follows:

Posters
Characters
Logos
Logo Animations
Scenery
Backgrounds
Voices
(this isn't a complete list, this is just off the top of my head. anything can be brought up and discussed reasonably)

as far as prices are concerned, it has yet to be officially instated, but i'm a pretty workable person, and i'm willing to negotiate.
for artwork, i'd charge between 5-10 dollars per piece, and than an extra 5 if it's to be used in a flash movie. maybe a few dollars more here or there based on the quality or difficulty of the work.
for something like voices, i'd charge 1 or 2 dollars per line, again based on the actual quality of it.

if you need any work examples, most of my newgrounds.com work is pretty old by now, compared to what i've done recently. but you can view my sheezy art page here:
http://gandoofthewise.sheezyart.com/

help spread the word! if anyone you know may be interested in this sort of thing than PLEASE try to get my name out there!!
if your interested, than e-mail me at Casey_McD@hotmail.com!

-Casey McDonald

Sorry for all the Inactivity. the truth is that I'm still working on projects, i've just been slowed down by issues at home.
Along with that, my knowledge of flash grows weekly and i find myself going back to re-work on things that i've already finished to make them better.

For "The Quest" I'm about 3/8 zones finished, including the bosses of said zones. The soundtrack is all finished up and everything and i'm just working hard to make it all work.

At the same time (So i didn't pull my eyes out with boredom of the project above) I started work on a platformer game based in the world of warcraft universe. I'll have more info on that as it develops but so far it's pretty cool.

With both of those massive projects, there really shouldn't be time for much else, but i'm working on 2 large flash projects in collaboration with friends.
One of them is a work of my own called "The Outlaws of Fate". It'l be a lengthy flash movie that's being produced as if it were a professional film. As it is completed i'll likely set up a site for it along with individual parts to put on Newgrounds and eventually a full product i hope to stick on DVD.

The other, and last, flash project i'm seriously working on i can't say much about, except that longer fans of Newgrounds will be pretty excited for it when it's announced i'm sure. I'm not the original founder of the project, but i'm working on one of the scenes in it along with 4 other flash artists from the portal.
Besides all that, i'm still working somewhat on the fly on Backgrounds for the second Hobbit movie by Legendary Frog, but i'll leave it up to him to announce all that.

In other news, sadly i don't know what happened to Shadows of Azeroth. I have interests to persue it someday, but i'm likely going to have to re-write part 2 from the ground up, and if i'm going to go through all that trouble, i'm considering just remaking the series entirely. I'll keep people posted on that and where it's going.
In the meantime, below is an environmental shot i took from a scene in "Outlaws of Fate" my original animated flash movie!

First post since the account updates, thought i'd throw up a thing here for everyone to see, if anyone actually reads it of course.

I'm not dead! i know i've not been churning out movies much lately, this is really to the fault of my living habits lately. i've been kicked out of my house twice and am constantly on the move it seems. BUT i'm still hard at work.

I'm still hoping to finish shadows of azeroth, it's just a slow process because honestly the disk with it on it is lost somewhere (probably in my car...) part 2 really is almost done though as soon as i find it.

On another note, i'm working on a few major projects. One of them, and probably my currently most anticipated work is "The Quest" which is actually a massive flash game stlyed much to the same flavor as legend of zelda. the game is about 8 entire dungeons long (each with their own unique boss), and i'm 2 out of 8 finished, working on the third. I've included a pic from the first boss of the game below if anyone is interested in seeing it, i know it's kind of small, but hey! I'm really excited as this is my first flash game and first attempt at video game design ever, and it's really the thing i've wanted to do since being a kid, so every day of work on it is really getting my hyped up. It has an all original soundtrack by David Orr, one of Newground's many good musical artists!

I'm also working on a couple major projects with LF again, it looks good, but that's all i'm gonna say! dunno the release date, but it's getting close. I probably shouldn't say anything else, but we're also doing some contact work on another flash movie i'm a part of that a lot of people have been waiting for.

Aside from that, not a lot going on. i'll keep you all updated as much as i can!