The website you're currently viewing is now one year old, and to celebrate this momentous occasion I'm going to take you on a journey of all the highs - and lows - the site has had from February 2007 to February 2008. Enjoy!

February 2007

I'd already decided in January that I really needed a place to put all my cartoons and movies, so on February 2nd (after purchasing the domain and some webspace) I started Questionable Films and, as you can see from above, it looked like complete balls. Furthermore, almost as soon as the site had started I got reports that it wasn't loading properly on certain screen resolutions, so I quickly re-designed the site and got things looking much nicer.

Anyway, ignoring the site's questionable look (see what I did there?) there was actually some pretty decent content added in February, including Kung Spoon 1 and 2, the (at the time) brand-new Ballistic Assault, Steve 1 and 2, and basically all the old movies and cartoons I'd made. I also managed to finish and release the second episode of the Incredible Mr Ahmed series, which was all about rats, doors, and robbery.

It was also in February that I made this now-infamous update:

Yes, that's right - I started making Steve 3 an entire YEAR ago. I made various ridiculously optimistic posts in February 2007 along the lines of 'work on Steve 3 is going great!' and, well, it's now 12 months later and the release date is still 'when it's done'. Whoops!

March 2007

Three significant things happened in March 2007 - the Ballistic Assault commentary, Army of One, and me switching from Windows video files to Flash video files. The latter allowed a lot more people to actually watch any of my movies, as Windows video files are a little temperamental and anyone using a Mac is basically screwed.

As for the first two, the BA commentary was a lot of fun to record and, amazingly, we actually managed to come out with some fairly decent stuff on the first take. I honestly expected us to just start laughing and have to redo it about 5 times, so good job us! Army of One also went surprisingly well, even if it did decide to rain, snow and hail on the one day we had for filming in an otherwise hot Easter holiday. Bah! We of course captured our feelings about the lame weather in the obligatory out-takes video.

April 2007

April doesn't get a fancy picture at the start like the other months, because it was the start of a running theme for the site - no content updates for absolutely ages! Yay!! Seriously though, I was really stuck-in to university work and, unfortunately, I only really had time to tell everyone that awesome stuff was coming at another date. I apologise!

May 2007

After the unbelievably tedious nature of updates in April, I realised that I really needed to make a new cartoon or film. The problem was that I had no time, and being at uni meant I couldn't see any of the people I usually put in my movies. The solution came in the form of my housemate Ollie's recent history presentation about death in Victorian Southampton. I don't know if it was Rich's section that just smacked of pseudo-investigative journalism or the fact the camera work was hilariously shoddy, but I just found the whole thing brilliant and I knew I had to make a parody of it. I realised that if I just spoofed Ollie and his history mates, no-one outside of the uni would really get it, so I instead decided to take the mild-mannered footage and make it into something entirely different. That's right, Ollie's harmless report on Victorian Southampton became the trailer for a violent revenge movie featuring gun fights and gangsters. Brilliant!

May was also the month that I realised I had the ability to see what people were searching for on Google and Yahoo to find my site. The best of the month? 'Questionable lesbian films'.

June 2007

I made a pitiful three updates to the site in June, but one of them was to announce Biscuit, so I guess I can be slightly forgiven. Anyway, Biscuit was a lot of fun to make - we basically just filmed us fighting and firing guns at each other for three hours and tied it all together with the weakest plot imaginable. To be fair, while I still love Biscuit it's obviously the cheapest film we've ever made - we specifically didn't want to make 'just another gun movie' (particuarly after nailing the formula in Army of One) but I guess boys will boys and we ended up beating each other up and shooting one another to get the last Oreo.

July 2007

July saw two pretty significant developments - the start of my surprisingly popular trilogy of retro console articles (including both the failed and successful attempts at fixing my old-school NES), and the first part of The Making of Kung Spoon 3. The latter began on July 15th, and it was a really interesting experience for both Adam and myself. While the 'work' we did on KS3 was obviously nothing like pre-production on a real film, it was still really cool to come up with ideas and give ourselves enough time to refine how it was going to work and to decide what would look good and what wouldn't.

As for the retro console articles, it was really cool to show everyone how extensive my geeky collection of old games had become. I was particularly pleased with the reaction these articles got - everyone was like 'this looks awesome' and 'I want to come to your house and play games', rather than 'YOU ARE A MASSIVE LOSER'.

August and September 2007

August and September have been bunched together because I made one - yes, one - update in August and it basically just said 'sorry for not updating!'. Bah! Anyway, at the start of September I met up with Adam again to do more work on KS3, which led to the inevitable trailer for the Making of Kung Spoon 3, which managed to get about half of the people who saw it to get totally pumped-up for KS3. The other half saw it and basically said 'all you've done is go to KFC and play Wii Sports!', which is admittedly rather accurate.

September also saw the release of perhaps the weirdest film we've ever made (yes, even weirder than Death in Southampton) - How to Pitch a Tent. While I'd love to argue that we'd planned to make a subversive and amusing parody of a public service announcement, let's be honest - we came up with the idea for the film after a sleep-over at Adam's where we played Unreal Tournament all night and got no sleep. The next morning we started putting up tents (Adam was actually having another sleep-over that night that I wasn't able to attend) and got out the camera and, well, How to Pitch a Tent was born.

Towards the end of September I went to Bristol to do work-experience with some proper television and movie companies including Big Squid, a company that primarily does special effects using AfterEffects, and Films@59, a company that does a huge amount of pre and post-production on all sorts of programmes and films. I had an awesome time and ended up writing a billion-word update about my adventures in Bristol - it was pretty long-winded and I must have got a little side-tracked as I ended up talking about Goldeneye on the N64.

October 2007

Despite not updating the site for the first 26 days of October (thanks to starting my final year at uni and having internet problems), I still managed to get some properly bad-ass content onto the site before the month ended. I started by releasing the first cartoon I'd made since way back in February - it was, of course, the long-awaited Incredible Mr Ahmed Finale. I remember how I started the Ahmed series specifically because I wasn't ready to start doing Steve 3, so it seems a little odd that both Steve 3 and Ahmed 3 were being made at the same time. It's also remarkable how much better Ahmed 3 looks than the first episode - I know I set out to make a series with deliberately crude animation (so it wouldn't take me long to animate), but by the final episode I'd started adding shadows and making sure the characters looked a lot better, so I guess that's just natural progression for you.

I also wrote two new articles in October - the first was the final part of the retro console trilogy, and the second was my review of Dark Castle. The latter is one of my absolute favourite articles, especially as it gave me the opportunity to rip apart one of the worst games I'd ever played. I sincerely hope that I successfully managed to convey just how bad Dark Castle is, as even 17 years after it was made the developers still deserve to be ridiculed over their shoddy excuse for entertainment. Sure, I only paid 50p for the game at a car-boot sale, but some poor kid must have spent about £40 on it at the time.

The final update in October was all about the first Mumblerhood comic which I'd started way back in July 2006 and didn't end up finished until September 2007, during my stay in Bristol. Part of me kinda regrets making a comic as opposed to making a fifth Mumblerhood episode, especially as the story I'd come up with seemed to flow really well and actually had the four guys doing something together throughout, rather than having Rich and myself doing something and Andy and Dave doing something as was the norm in the cartoon series. Still, people said they found the comic 'laugh-out-loud' funny, so I suppose that's something. Cheers!

November 2007

November was basically one long month of articles, which included me discussing the current generation of games consoles, the cameos in Ahmed 3, and two very special articles about the cartoons I've made but not put on the site, and about the history of my animations. The last article in particular was really awesome to write, as I basically got a chance to reflect on the last 15 years I've been animating and share my slightly bizarre story with everyone. I apologise again for all the stick-men cartoons.

I also finally got round to making a section on the site for all my random old cartoons, which meant that people could see gems like Trip to Paris and the Lost spoof. It just goes to show you that for every episode of Steve I make, I also manage to make a billion awful cartoons.

December 2007

December was a poor month for updates, with the only new content being a picture I'd drawn of Steve and Jimmy. I think I was just so excited about things to come like the Christmas holidays and going to Westbrook (which of course meant Kung Spoon 3) that I didn't really spend much time making anything.

With the above mentioned, two extremely important things happened in December - I got a proper video camera and a graphics tablet. The ability to record movies properly and to draw and animate cartoons without having to use a mouse is obviously going to have a massive effect on work to come, so look out for new stuff in 2008!

January 2008

January was dominated by Kung Spoon 3, including the out-takes, the finished Making Of video, and of course the film itself. The popularity of the series and the ridiculous amount of hype Adam and myself had generated over the last six months meant that January was easily the most popular month for the site, getting more visits than it had during any other month over the last year.

February 2008

It looks like we've managed to catch up to the present, so I guess that just leaves me to say an ENORMOUS thank-you to everyone who's visited the site over the last year and especially to those who have favourited it and keep coming back to check for new stuff. It's been really awesome for me to be able to check how many people are visiting my site and to know that when I put something up, lots of people are viewing it - compared to the tiny audience I had on LiveJournal, it just feels amazing. I'm really going to strive to make a lot of awesome new content for the site this year (even with my scary finals approaching and the inevitability of having to find a job after uni), so make sure to check back for new stuff whenever you can.

Oh, and one final thing - Steve 3 WILL be finished this year. Woo!