Mikdog

Hello. Hope everyone had a good end to 2022. And, Happy New Year for 2023.

I meant to do an end of 2022 post but time seems to be speeding up, felt a bit like I didn’t have the time last year to process even a single thought.

So, what’s been happening?

WORK

Nifty League

I spent most of 2022 focused on Nifty League, the company that I luckily fell into and of which I’m a co-founder. The type of work I’m doing has been pretty broad; mostly animation and illustration for social media and the website and games, some game dev, planning and strategy, plenty meetings, some sound stuff, and briefing and feedback for creatives. Also went to the US mid-year to meet some of the team and community, where our company was one of the sponsors of NFT.NYC. Nifty League and 2 other projects (Worldwide Webb 3 and Forgotten Realms/Wizards) hired a big yacht, had a yacht party on the Hudson with DJs, endless pizzas and an open bar, and did a round-trip to the Statue of Liberty. 😲

It’s been pretty wild tbh, things happened very quickly, we hit the ground running and Nifty League’s been my main work focus almost as soon as we publicly launched with our character sale in Sept 2021.

The 2 co-founders [who were both living in the US at the time we connected] are great; they’re both ex-Activision and were friends with one another, and then they found me through the power of The Internet.

Bru & Boegie

At the end of around 2020 or 2021 I applied for some funding to make a new Bru & Boegie short film, and lo and behold it was awarded. I wrote a new script with the help of writing collaborator and friend Sheldon Bengtson (who is now doing great work on on Twende produced by Braintrust and MindsEyeCreative, a show of which I’m a co-creator) and I’m in the process of storyboarding it. Planning to be finished with the animatic before the end of the month. I’m doing this as a passion project, the finished short should run about 15 minutes. I like it.

PERSONAL

Plett

Plettenberg Bay in South Africa continues to be my home and has been for the last 15 years. I’m enjoying my house that I’ve had for about 6 years, and didn’t rent out at the end of last year. As such, I went to the beach a lot, had friends stay, and enjoyed the end of year break. Missed staying at my folks though. The town’s filling up with new residents, stoked to have my bro and his family living nearby now.

Music

Been getting back into music a bit, played a couple gigs with my neighbour who also used to be in animation and is also originally from Joburg. Also did a drum & bass set using my Octopad SPD-30 to play percussion over, which was interesting – was a little too early in the evening to crank the volume to a satisfying level. Anyways, has been cool not losing the music connection.

The Kiffness

My bro continues to do super well with his music and talent, his message, and the manner in which he operates.

Tax

I might write a separate post about this if/once it’s wrapped, but I got taxed twice early last year – both in South Africa as well as in the US. It’s been hugely time-consuming, costly and a headache trying to sort it out, and with the volatility of crypto and traditional tax experts’ relative inexperience in dealing with crypto, it’s thrown another layer of complexity into the mix. I’m working with people on both the US and SA sides to help me try sort things out. For now, my 2c is: An LLC in the US of which a South African is a part of is apparently not great at all tax-wise for the South African. We’ve since thankfully restructured the company that avoids this issue going forward, but there’s a chance I may not be able to get around the double taxation issue I experienced. It’s no fault of anyone’s; I got expert advice after the fact and may have fared far better to seek out advice beforehand.

Other

I set my Instagram account to private some time ago, so the Instagram pics I embedded in past posts on this website are now not showing up. I got a bunch of new followers from (I assume) the crypto space, and though many seem to be great people (I met some of the community IRL in NY last year) I’m still a pretty private person.

I post quite a bit of my work stuff on my Twitter, mainly reposting Nifty League stuff. The crypto space seems to mainly use Twitter and Discord, though we’re now branching out to mobile gaming too.

Have also given my website a bit of an aesthetic once-over and added a contact form to my Contact page.

Anyways, hope it’s been a good start of the year for you and your loved ones, and here’s hoping it’s a good year for all of us, including Mother Earth. 🌍🌱

Hello again. Once again, your eyes are viewing the words that have been typed by digital means. Ok, enough of that.

It’s been a strange last 2 years. If you have lived in the world for the last year or two, you will know that it has been a strange time, so I’m not gonna riff off that for too long.

I’ve done some animation projects, a bit of this and a bit of that. But what I thought I’d focus on this time is mentioning people or companies that have helped me in some way over the years, taken a chance on me, thrown me a bone bro. So, a huge lot of gratitude is due.

Huge thanks to Dave & Dom from Goldfish, Cecil Barry from Red Pepper, Andy Wood and the late Gerhard Smith from Art Attack, John Vlismas and Justine Norval for an early break, all the people at Triggerfish Animation Studios; special thanks to Anthony Silverston, Mike Buckland and Stuart Forrest. Big thanks to Alexi Wheeler and Phil Rynda who were at Nickelodeon, and Nina Hahn from Nickelodeon. Big ups to Orion Ross from Disney. David ‘O Reilly for taking a punt with me for his [adult swim] shorts (big fan of David). My boet David Scott from The Kiffness for letting me try some stuff over the years for his music vids, live visuals, posters and such. Sam Bank and Hélène Sifre at Braintrust, and Charlie & Regan Maas for the whole Twende experience. Kayla Archer for all her amazing design skills, experience, input and support over the years. Kwame Nyong’o for essentially being my first animation teacher and also joining the Twende team. Nick Cloete, Jenna Gien, Ryan Van Eyk and Stephen Cloete at Mind’s Eye Creative for all their enthusiasm, hard work and creativity on our partnered projects. All the freelance clients who decided to reach out. Free Lives for letting me join them in Mauritius for their Game Jam Island which ended up segueing into the project I’m currently involved with; special thanks to Ruan Rothmann, Jason Sutherland and Evan Greenwood. Thanks to Rico & Steve from ‘Madam & Eve’. Big ups to Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew for featuring my work. Sheldon Bengtson and Greig Cameron for collaborating and teaching me some good things about writing. Thanks to my talented friends and colleagues who are doing such kiff things and pursuing their own paths. Thanks to my folks for their support and understanding.

I’m currently involved in a crypto-gaming project that has a fantastic team and community, so I’m gonna keep doing that. Here’s a roadmap from that project:

Got 2 more animation projects to try finish this year if that’s even possible, and doing little bits on my Bru & Boegie movie sequel.

Thanks for reading, and take care.

Bonus: my bro has an online store. I don’t even think he’s started marketing it yet, but it’s up and running – I ordered some rad ‘Alugalug Cat’ shirts (designed by Kayla Archer) which I dig, and I wear often.
It’s WWW.KIFFSTUFF.COM

Dear person reading this. How are you? Are you well? I certainly hope so. Remember: it is important to take care of your physical and mental health at present, do not neglect that.

Alright, onto more prosaic matters – what’s been happening? Well, a fair bit. I guess I can share some work:

Goldfish – Everything Is Virtual

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Goldfish and I launched this NFT on Momint. There were 3 editions, all 3 sold I think, and we didn’t make a fortune but it wasn’t too paltry either. *Momint apparently uses Daicoin which I believe is a lot friendlier to the environment than Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Did most of the drawing in Procreate on iPad, then comp’d it and added more frames of animation and fx in Toon Boom. I have a love/hate relationship with Toon Boom products, sometimes I really enjoy using Harmony and Storyboard Pro, sometimes it drives me up the wall. I really enjoy Procreate though, a friendly app. Toon Boom for me is *not* friendly. Another app I really like is Aseprite for 8bit pixel drawing and animation. That’s a ‘friendly’ app.

The Moths Ep01

The other day, I think it was a weekend day, I had the distinct feeling I had the energy to create something for fun, whether it be a song or a little animated short, but I would only spend an hour on it from start to finish. In the shower earlier in the day I had this idea for The Moths, as a result of thinking of if there was a Moth Mother, she’d probably just be called ‘Moth’. Anyways, this took about 1h15m from start to finish. Will I make more? My buddy and colleague Ryan Van Eyk has written a bunch more episode outlines almost as a joke but they’re great. Maybe I make a movie in 2 hours, I dunno, if the mood strikes maybe I DUNNO BRO.

Song About Angie

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Made this one weekend day.

Song about Mario Bros or something

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I uh, was testing out some recording stuff and made this.

PicoCad

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And I made this little Kiffness pixelart homage with a cool little app called ‘PicoCad‘. I drew the sprites in Pixaki on my iPad.

Twende took part in Annecy 2021! I was lucky enough to be invited to France and Annecy with free accommodation, but with the travel conditions, it seemed like a crazy time to travel from South Africa, I can’t get vaccinated yet and that’s one of the conditions, and I would have needed to quarantine for like a week or something on arrival in France, and possibly on the way out too, so one of our producers went luckily.

In other news, my friends Nic Smal and Lucy Heavens have got their show (previously called ‘Donk’) KIFF greenlit by Disney for a full season. This is *AMAZING*. I’ve seen the pilot animatic and it truly stands head and shoulders above anything I’ve seen come from South Africa, either 2D or 3D, in terms of the number of jokes, tightness of delivery, and readiness for an international market. And obviously, I’m super jazzed that they called it KIFF 😀 spreading the word, yo.

Also, most people reading this will already know my brother Dave aka ‘The Kiffness‘ is absolutely nailing it with pretty much everything he produces. I think he had something like 3k YouTube subscribers before lockdown and is now bearing down on 300k (!!!). Incredible. His video songs rack up millions of views online, he gets reposted by the likes of 9Gag and Ryan Gosling and ends up on news channels around the world, and seems to have the secret sauce of secret sauces 😀 Great job boet!! More links to his stuff on his Facebook and website.

Also, been working on some videogame stuff that I’m really jazzed about that’s under NDA.

Ok then, keep well, goodbye.

Nice! Some great news – the pilot we recently finished for Twende, about a relaxed pangolin boda boda driver and his best friend and business partner Nuru; a feisty lilac-breasted roller, has been chosen for the official competition of the 2021 Annecy International Animation Film Festival in the TV films category.

Truly awesome.

A brief history; Kayla Archer and I met Hélène Sifre, a producer at Braintrust (a UK/French production house), at Annecy in France in 2019. Hélène had with her the initial Twende show deck and Braintrust was (were?) looking for a good partner from Africa to develop the show together with them and the original rad husband-and-wife creators Regan and Charlie Maas from San Francisco. There was even a theme song recorded! Kiff.

Kayla and I signed on, and 3 years later and with the help of a lot of very talented and committed people, we have a completed 11-min show pilot. I’m proud to say, it rocks! It really is something special.

Here’s raising a glass of muddy water to Twende and his friends in Milima, and all who worked on this. *clink*