2-9-08 The Final Task
Posted by gavortnik on February 10, 2008
Ok, I’m going to try something a little different today.
In 2000, a friend of mine named RJ Stewart introduced me to a site called Newgrounds. If you’ve been on the Web for any time at all, you know what Newgrounds is: a depository of Flash animation. Anyone with Flash can post their creations here, no matter how bad, politcally incorrect or weird. If you started now and visited the site non-stop for 200 years, you’d smell very bad. And you probably wouldn’t play every game and see every movie that’s up there.
RJ’s left for Seattle, an arrow that shot into the air and landed I know not where. But I’ve still got Newgrounds to remind me of him, and of those late nights when both of us should have been sleeping so we could go to our horrible call center jobs at UPS but instead were laughing and gasping at what the Internet, in all its weirdness, could provide.
I messed around with Flash for a bit once and let me tell you, it’s not the easiest program to deal with. Everyone on that site has managed to wrestle with it and come up with something that’s at least viable, if not exactly playable or watchable. Remember that when you’re watching some piece of drek on Newgrounds and you’re wondering, “Why would someone make something like this?” Someone worked very very hard to make that piece of drek.
That makes your neat thing for today all that more impressive.
This is one of the very first movies that I saw when RJ first showed me Newgrounds. It’s only three minutes long and is strongly influenced by Japanese animation. It’s also one of the best movies on the site; people are still giving it 10 out of 10 eight years later. I’ll admit it looks a little dated, but the animation is as fluid as Flash animation gets, and the author, Randolf Dilamanta, took a less-is-more approach to the animation that pays off big.
Dilamanta is a bit hard to track down. He only made this one movie, The Final Task, under the screen name ChefboyRD, and as far as I know hasn’t made anything since. A very quick search on Yahoo! also didn’t turn up anything on him. Let’s hope this brings Mr. Dilamana out from the shadows.
The Final Task
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/7549
