Now that I have your attention; here's an article.
So, for those of you who live under a rock, or even worse, run normie lives with normie responsibilities. BABScon was this past weekend. The Bay Area Brony Spectacular saw it's biggest year yet (or so we think, they never really got around to telling us a final attendee count), and all those big horsefamous names some of you autist care about were there! We totally ignored them and interviewed some far more interesting people. FimFlamFilosophy, Peterip and Norman Wrangle of the DawnSomeWhere crew.
FimFlamFilosophy is the creator of the Mentally Advanced Series, Rainbow Dash Presents, and more recently Gym of the Romantic Journey. He also holds voice acting and writing credits for all of his work.
Petirep is a full time artist who is probably most well known for his work animating Rainbow Dash Presents. Additionally, he works with the likes of Monstercat and various other musicians drawing up promo art for their various works.
Norman Wrangle might be a new name to some of you. He currently collaborates with Greg and helps with animating Gym of the Romantic Journey.
What follows is a transcript of some awful sounding audio, mostly because of some shitlords laughing in the background like special ed kids on free ice cream day.
HN: Could you guys let us know who you are?
Petirep: This is Ryan Petree, aka Petirep
Norman: This is Norman Wrangle
Greg: This is Greg, FimFlamFilosophy
From Left to Right: Petirep, Norman, some old dude who's in all the photos for this interview, and Greg.
HN: Alright! So, starting at the beginning. Greg, Peterip how did you guys meet? How did your paths cross?
Petirep: Well I met Greg through the Mentally Advanced Series. I was a big fan of his work and I just did some fan art for that
Greg: On the internet!
Petirep: On the internet.
Greg: On the internet!
HN: And he just happened to message you and was like “Hey this was cool, wanna work on some other stuff?”
Petirep: “Hey this is good, wanna work on some other spin-off project that I have going” yeah, that's how it went. Yeah.
HN: What, that was 20...11?
Greg: Well-
Petirep: Well, that was 2011
Greg: Was it 11?
Petirep: 2011, yeah
HN: That was the same year you guys did work on Bubbles right?
Greg & Peterip: Yes, yeah
HN: What was the writing and animation process like for the early episodes?
Greg: Basically I would just sit down and write a script, and I would send it off to Peterip, and usually I would send him, I think voice acting? Like, piece meal more or less
Petirep: Yeah, he would send me the voice acting and based off the voice acting I would draw the stuff in the script; and it started off more as a children's picture book thing where it wasn't suppose to be animated.
HN: More like static images right?
Petirep: Yeah, it wasn't suppose to be fully animated, but over time it just became more and more animated to the point where it was just still frame animation, and actual animation
HN: Was that when, you guys woke up one day and discovered you had an audience?
Petirep: Well, that happened slowly over time. I think we got big when, uh...
Greg: “Biker gorilla.”
Petirep: When “Biker gorilla” came out.
Greg: Because we made that fuss about Equestria Daily and then everyone had to start spammin them to get that in and then suddenly because it was such a big deal and everyone had to see why we weren't allowed on Equestria Daily!
[laughter]
HN: So, uh [spills spaghetti] you guys saw you had an audience. You saw you had people watching these videos now, did that alter the process or put on an additional pressure?
Petirep: Well...no, no it was still the same process we were just like “Let's keep making them better like we have been”
HN: A staple of RBDP was a lot of the music and songs that came along with it. Was there any specific song you were proud of or you didn't feel it got enough attention?
Greg: Well I dunno; for “Haunting Nightmare” that song, a lot of people like that apparently, but I always felt like it lacked something. I could never figure out what exactly it lacked.
Petirep: “Bones and Skin”?
Greg: Yeah, the “Bones and Skin.” I don't know, I never really was very fond of it, but other people are! So that's good, and a lot of people tell me they really like the Bittersweet “Sinking Ships” song.
HN: Yes! That was a good one
Greg: [chuckles] Yeah.
There he is again, the ham.
HN: In the last year though, the music and songs they've become less and less common. I think your last “Music Monday” was a year ago. Why is that?
Greg: Partly because they didn't really get a lot of hits, and they took awhile to put together. Another thing is that I tend to use, libraries to put them together, and libraries are a little susceptible to the content ID system. So for something that doesn't get a lot of attention that has the potential to be a copyright strike on the channel, eventually I quit doing it.
Petirep: Just wasn't worth the effort.
Greg: Yeah.
HN: Wasn't worth the possible hits towards your channel
Greg: Yeah
Norman: Well there is one in the works, isn't there?
Greg: Yeah, I am actually working on a song yes, with Ved who does the 4chan cup stuff.
HN: Ah Yes! ...Really?!
Greg: Yeah yeah! He's working with us. He actually did the folly for this upcoming thing we're doing right now. As well as-
HN: That thing that's going to show at the panel?
Greg: Yeah! As well as the new MAS episode he did the folly for that as well. It's way better. He's an actual sound engineer it sounds so much better.
HN: Going back to MAS, where did that idea come from? At the time there were a lot of abridged series floating around, was it just an offshoot of that?
Greg: There was someone who put out an audition because they wanted to do a abridged series. I went in to try as a voice actor, because I sounded like Braeburn. You know, young and sorta twinky [laughs] and so I could the southern accent because I was from the midwest and I was real close! They were like “Yeah, come in and do this” then they pulled the project for a long time and I got mad so I did my own.
HN: So you decided “You know what I can do this better, I'm ganna do it”
Greg: Yeah “I'm ganna do it!”
HN: Yeah, and look where it's gotcha! When you started writing for the characters where does that compare with where you are right now with them?
Greg: I dunno, the show changes your perspective a little bit. I had to go back and watch the old, you know, Season 1, Season 2 and remember what it was I was even making parodies of sometimes. Because Twilight has changed so much! Since S1, S2, and Pinkie as well a little bit has turned around from where she used to be. So I dunno the show's changed a lot, and the characterization, so...
HN: Would you go as far as to say Flanderization?
Greg: Not necessarily federalization. Sometimes. Some cases. Twilight wasn't flanderized, Twilight went the opposite. It seems like they tried to white wash all of her flaws and kind of make her uh, well, you know a-
Petirep: A Mary Sue.
Greg: Yeah, well a Princess. What they would market as a princess.
Petirep: Yeah! Boring!
You can't see it here, but that old guy is kicking some orphans.
HN: Greg talked about this a bit in one of his Personal Times, but Pet...what can you tell me about Equestria Primates?
Petirep: What can I tell you? I mean, we were putting big plans into it, but it was just more than I could handle. A little overly ambitious
Norman: Incredibly ambitious for a solo project
HN: What we saw looked amazing.
Petirep: Yeah, now that I do work for other companies and contract work. It's just, realistically something I can't do by myself.
HN: Was it always your goal to be working artist or did all this just sorta fall into your lap?
Petirep: It kinda fell into my lap a little bit. I've always been good at art and liked doing it, but I was discouraged from doing it. Eventually I just got an audience and realized it was something I could actually do, and so...
HN: You ran with it.
Petirep: I ran with it. It's great.
HN: Can you tell us about any upcoming projects?
Petirep: I'm always working on stuff for Monster Cat and some of my mainstream clients. For DawnSomewhere I'm helping out with the new RBDP. I'm doing a little animation.
HN: Lemme get to you Norman, you've been so patient there.
Norman: Hi.
HN: While I was researching for this interview-
Norman: Yeah
HN: -there was actually very little information on your past works or anything like that. So could you give us a bit of a bio and let everyone know who you are and what you're working on right now.
Norman: With Greg's stuff I work a little bit on RBDP and with the Banana Republic stuff. I've done other stuff in the past, but under different names, nothing super interesting.
Greg: Gym. Gym as well
Norman: Oh yeah, I work on Gym of the Romantic Journey
HN: what could you tell me about Gym?
Norman: Gym of The Romantic Journey started out as kind of a one off skit. Like, a premise that Greg had. A Gym that had it's element rather than being Earth or Rock or Fire had the element of surprise. So every episode is just going to end with a terrible horrific surprise. And we kinda ran with that and came up with rather interesting things. Yeah, Gym, was like another personal project I was working on for awhile, Project 99, which will never see the light of day. It was designed to be efficient to animate and it was that if nothing else. It worked very fast.
Gym of the Romantic Journey follows the disciples of Master Breakfist and their journey to be Grand fighting Masters.
HN: What were some of the newer challenges with Gym? We know it's an obvious parody on common anime troupes, but under the surface it has it's own story bubbling. Do you already have a solid beginning, middle and end?
Greg: When we went into it we did character building ahead of time and we knew about what were doing with the gym and did our world building as went. Which in retrospect might have been a mistake. We should have sat down and had an arc planned out knowing where we were starting and where we were ending.
Norman: We did end up with 8 or 9 episodes without the world progressing much. A lot of interesting little character moments but not a ton of stuff that really moved anywhere.
HN: When you woke up and found all the original MAS episodes had been removed, what was the initial feeling?
Greg: Really, anger. I wasn't really familiar with copyright law in the slightest, and at that point I had to start doing a ton of research to understand why it had happened in the first place. That was mulled even further by the fact that youtube doesn't really follow copyright law, I mean, it randomly punishes people. It's not really preventing copyright infringement, it's just attacking whoever's vulnerable to the system; and super unforgiving about it. So I had to look up a bunch of information and even got some people with legal background telling me I was probably fine, but couldn't do anything about it anyway.
HN: So you decided you needed to start drawing stuff yourself
Greg: Yeah, eventually.
HN: So when you put up MAS Episode 0 where did the initial reaction leave you?
Greg: Heh, well, people were uh...they thought the art was terrible! But the art was terrible. I expect people to think it was terrible. There was a lot of support though, there were telling me to keep at it and I'd get better, and I have gotten better but you know, can't help but look back and hate everything I've done, [laughter] but be excited about what I'm going to do.
Petirep: But such is the life of an artist.
I was told I could meet this dog if I used this picture. I have yet to hear or see any more of this supposed canine.
HN: Did you see a point where the future of the channel looked really grim?
Greg: Actually, no, because, it was not like my life ever hinged on MAS. I work off the youtube channel now, and that's how I make my living, but back then I was working as a land surveyor and CVS, and doing the channel. Then later I was doing CVS and the channel. So, I was never going to be in danger at those points in losing the channel. So I just kept at it I mean it was just like “Oh that was a set back” but I just kept on rolling with it.
HN: You rolled with the punches, did what you had to do.
Greg: Yeah!
HN: Who or what do you contribute the improvement you saw in your art and animation in such a short time?
Greg: Oh, Norman has helped me out quite a lot
Norman: Well, he does a daily livestream and random people will jump in there and let him know he's doing something wrong, and he picks up on it very quickly. Aisu, Pencils...
Greg: Aisu berates me haha; but she has helped me a lot. She started me out on a lot of the fundamentals.
Norman: Faust jumps in there from time to time
Greg: Yeah, and Pencils. Pencils who does the Marble Pie comic. He's in our group now, and so sometimes he'll do red lines of my stuff so I can figure out what I'm doing wrong. Just being friends with artist.
HN: Surrounding yourself with the right people.
Greg: Yes, people far more talented than myself.
HN: Last thing, what does the future hold for you and DawnSomeWhere?
Greg: What we're doing now is thinking about putting together a series that's going to be better developed. I had a thing called “Banana Republic” which were these shorts. It was going to be based off the monkey setting we did for “My Little Dashie”. We've done concept work on these monkeys and I'm going to sit down and put out six scripts for this thing and we're going to have kind of an arc like a season. Then we'll work on this, and hopefully if we get all six put together and everything is produced it'll be very cohesive we'll have a lot of progression and hopefully it will be exciting and will pull people in. Although we need to figure out what to do with advertising and how to get people hooked and looking for us. That's what we're going for next.
One of the lead characters of Banana Republic, Rae, at her job manning a gas station
HN: In the last couple of weeks, you were saying Gym wasn't really getting the views you wanted is it seeing improvement does it look like it's going to fall under?
Greg: We might come back to it with the same strategy we're going at Banana Republic with. We're going to sit down, and plan out how we want to progress with it then do a season worth of writing, and release episodes as they get completed.
HN: Last last thing. What's the best to keep track of your works and get the latest updates?
Greg: Subscribing to our
youtubechannel is one of the biggest ways. Another thing to do is come to our nightly work streams, we always talk about what we're doing. We post on
tumblr,
twitter, all that stuff. Otherwise we have
Dawnsomewhere.comwhere all the regulars keep up and talk about our stuff or otherwise post spam.
Norman: Yeah,
Dawnsomewhere.comis where you're going to find all the stuff I'm doing with Greg.
Petirep: You can follow my
tumblrwhich is Petirep, and my
twitterwhich is also Petirep. Basically all the
social medias that have Petirep behind them. Anything I am allowed to post publicly I will post them.
The following question was asked Sunday morning, I asked another question at the Mental Advance Series panel.
HN: When Equestria Primates was still an active project, you mentioned it would be the transition from the pony universe, to the monkey universe we saw in “My Little Dashie”. Since that is no longer happening, is that transition still planned?
Greg: Equestria Primates was planned to be roughly six or seven parts. An opening, episodes for each character, though AJ was likely to stick with Rarity as a two-man act, and a closer. It was going to be about 90 minutes of content, so each part was going to be about 15 minutes long.
We were going to have the girls deal with super cliché high school stuff. Sunset Shimmer was going be replaced by “Sue Du” the mightest girl in school. She was going to ride around to class on a stallion and carried a halbred which she used to outright murder other contenders for prom queen. That reign of fear secured her position for four years, she's been a senior in high school for four years. She was going to have an adoptive mother “Donna Zuo” and two really dumb sidekicks; two kids from school named Clyde and Claudia. They were basically going to be regular real-world chimps in diapers. I figured the legacy of Sue Bu was equal to if not more plausible than what they really did with Sunset.
Pinkie's bit was going to involve sabotaging Sue Bu by establishing a love triangle between Sue Bue, Donna Zuo, and a boy at school named Dan Chan. Eventually Clyde and Claudia would get elected prom king and queen because everyone knew them from the school band.
Twilight's section was going to be entirely about Twilight using every method she could think of to get the crown aside from actually competing for prom queen. Rarity was going to try and win prom queen. They'd finally get the crown at the end when AJ politely asked Claudia is she could borrow it.
Dash was going to meet her alter-ego, and that alter-ago would be a spider monkey named Rae who works at a gas station, who lives with Pinkie's alter-ego and who is barely making ends meet. All the ponies were going to be adults pretending to be kids so they could get the crown back.
Fluttershy was going to save Christmas. Which was a cliché story we felt was appropriate given the cliché high school setting. But this was going to be after she got stuck on a bus that drove her out to the middle of nowhere, where Santa's sleigh had crashed. It was likely we were going to cut it and just have Fluttershy ride in at the finale in Santa's sled.
We're still planning some ambitious projects with the monkey characters, but without any of the transitions since the whole idea for the multi-part spoof of EqG was abit too much. The plans that now are unrelated to MLP in any form and will be a series of bizarre stories about three or four characters. Imagine something of a cross between the Twilight Zone and Hey Arnold, but with a bunch of spider monkeys and a gorilla as protagonists. A city where every shop, street, and laundromat has a completely true urban legend and the city government can't find tax revenue to plug up the leaky alternate dimensions.
So to answer your question, yes, but not through EqP.
You can watch the preview of Equestria Primates
here. RIP.
So, there you go. A small glimpse into the history and future of the fandom's most beloved and respectable channels. Stick around kiddies, this horse is still bucking.
My reward for an interview well done. Still never got to meet that damn dog though.
Convention Photos By: Rag
