Back in 2002, which was 14 years ago now,
I launched my first ever website, called Aron's
Skate Toons.
I updated it until about 2006, which is when
I shifted focus over to YouTube.
Now the hosting is long gone, but thanks for
archive.org, we can take a look at it.
There's nothing here that would ever imply
that I would ever have a career as a web designer.
But there's still some interesting stuff here,
like my Trick Tips page.
These all pre-date my YouTube trick tips,
and they pre-date me having a capture card.
Most of them were digital camera pictures
of my TV playing a VHS tape of me doing the
trick.
Looks like none of those were archived though.
Anyway, the main star of this site was my
skateboard GIF animations.
Check this out.
I used to draw these frame-by-frame in Microsoft
Paint.
I would have to draw a scene, save out a frame,
then erase the skater and redraw him over
and over again, then compile it all at the
end.
There was no way to preview it, there were
no animation tools, layers or a timeline.
This was pretty much the dark ages.
That made timing really difficult.
I would basically eyeball the distance the
skater moved each frame, then try a few different
frame rates at the end to see which one looked
best.
It really helped me out with skateboarding
though.
Drawing all these frames individually forced
me to think about the physics of how each
trick should work, and it forced me to think
more creatively so I didn't repeat tricks
too often.
The site actually had a pretty reasonable
following, which is weird.
I never posted links to it anywhere or marketed
it in any way, but back in 2002, the internet
was still pretty small.
If you searched for 'skateboard animation',
I would be at the top, because nobody else
was doing it.
Eventually I started getting submissions of
animations from around the world.
A couple of years later, I discovered Macromedia
Flash MX.
After some experimenting, I really stepped
it up, and eventually even made my own skateboarding
game.
This is actually the second skateboarding
game I was involved with, but I'll save all
that for another time.
That's all for now.
I'll post my Flash ones soon.
Thanks for watching.
