Shadowing Practice: I Turned MODERN SpongeBob Into SEASON 1… - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Spongebob is one of the best shows ever and it's been on the air for over 25 years.
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But in that time it's changed a lot from the way it looks to the style of the comedy.
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It's a giraffe!
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So as an animator I came up with an idea.
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What if I were to reimagine the most recent episode of Spongebob as if it were from season one?
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How close could I actually get to capturing that classic Spongebob feel?
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Let's give it a try.
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But first, what the fuck actually is the most recent episode of SpongeBob?
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Because I don't know about you, but I actually haven't watched SpongeBob in a while, so why don't we go see what they've been up to?
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Alright, I have here the most recent episode of SpongeBob Necro-Nam-Nam-Namicon.
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I just love breakfast!
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Oh my god.
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It's very, um, over-the-top right away.
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Mr. Krabs just got his ass kicked.
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You can tell it's digital now and they animate the characters way more crazy.
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They're like always exaggerating their movements and facial expressions.
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Looks right to me!
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The characters feel more over the top, especially these background kind of characters who would kind of be more blank slates in the original show.
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They're more weird and that's kind of the joke more often.
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To give a quick summary of the episode, Mr. Krabs wants to serve breakfast at the Krusty Krab, so Spongebob accidentally confuses a Necronomicon for a cookbook
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and creates evil breakfast items that cause magical shenanigans to the customers of the Krusty Krab.
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As I'm watching this episode, I'm trying to see if there's one scene I can reimagine as if it's from season one.
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I don't have the time or resources to animate an entire episode, so I'm just gonna pick one scene that I think I could remake in the season one style.
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Stacks of woe.
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That must mean pancakes.
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Mr. Krabs, do we have any zombie teeth?
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Dragon's breath?
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Eye of nudes?
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Glad we should be some in the back of the freezer.
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Found them!
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Okay, that was kind of a scene that I feel like could work in classic Spongebob.
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Mr. Krabs just for some reason has all these magical ingredients.
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The way it's executed here seems a little different than season one, but maybe this is the scene that I could actually work with to reimagine as a season one scene.
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So I got to writing and I'm trying to incorporate those classic character dynamics from the first season.
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I had some friends helping me write
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and eventually we got a minute of dialogue that I thought really could work well as a season one Spongebob scene.
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Okay, I need to confess something.
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The concept of this video is far from original.
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There's actually been a somewhat recent trend of online artists illustrating what modern cartoons would look like in older art styles.
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and the absolute master of this is Yingying Jio from Twitter who's just an incredible artist.
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Here you can see him drawing modern Simpsons as if it was an older episode, modern Spongebob as if it was an older episode, and he even does the other way around.
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Old Spongebob as if it was modern, fairly odd parents, smiling friends as if it was from the 90s.
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His work is so good that it blows me away.
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Now I'm a pretty decent artist
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so I could probably get kind of close to the look of classic Spongebob on my own.
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But I really want this thing to be as good as it can possibly be
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and so I decided to reach out to the master himself Yin-Yang Geo to commission some artwork for the animation
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I explained the idea to him
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and sent him some rough reference photos of what I had in mind
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and He took it all in he cooked he cooked a nice souffle
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and sure enough he knocked it out of the park These illustrations are perfect.
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They look exactly like classic Spongebob and these are going to be a huge help for the actual animation.
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I'm using these sort of as a going off point with the way he drew the characters
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and I'm going to straight up use the backgrounds he painted digitally which looks so spot on.
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I can't recommend this guy enough.
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If you have any projects you can help with or even if you just want to commission some awesome art for fun, he's yin yang geo 14 on Twitter.
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His prices are also incredibly cheap for the work he does.
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Really amazing artist.
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Go check out his Twitter.
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We're gonna get to the actual animation soon, but first we just gotta record the voices.
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Now, I could use AI, but f* no. So I scoured the internet looking for the perfect voice actors to play Spongebob,
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Squidward, and Mr. Krabs, the three characters who will be in my Now, I don't know about you,
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but I've never heard a good Spongebob impression in my life.
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I'm ugly and I'm proud!
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I'm ugly and I'm proud!
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Hello everyone, it's Spongebob!
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Mr. Krabs, what's a good place I can take Sandy out on a date?
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Besides the Krabby Patty, cause you know, I work here for a long time, you know.
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Hey Patrick!
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This is Spongebob Squarepants.
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Who's under the pineapple over the sea?
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Spongebob Squarepants!
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Yeah, for some reason the voice of Spongebob performed by Tom Kenny might be the hardest character voice to impersonate.
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And most impressions sound nothing like him! But...
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That is, except for one.
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Good morning USA!
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I've got a feeling that it's gonna be a wonderful day!
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DoubleTime32 does a pretty damn good Spongebob.
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He actually played Spongebob in the Spongebob movie Rehydrated and a bunch of other fan projects.
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He's basically the internet's go-to Spongebob.
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So I reached out to him with the art by Ying Yang Jio
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and he was so down to be part of the project.
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He's also friends with a whole bunch of voice impressionists who do the other Spongebob characters
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and they have a YouTube channel where they play video games together in character called Con Street Gaming.
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BrainGrab!
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Patrick!
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I'm so sorry, Spider-Man.
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AHHHHH!
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So Double Time got me in touch with his friends TheGonsFam and VeggieBoy to voice Squidward and Mr. Krabs, respectively, in the animation.
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All of their voices are so spot-on to the characters and I was thrilled to have them on board. And now comes...
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the animation.
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Now season one of Spongebob wasn't made on computers.
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It was made using the old traditional process known as cell animation, where animators first animate drawings on paper,
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like a flipbook, then trace over those drawings with ink and paint on celluloid sheets to create the final product.
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And I actually collect animation cells.
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As you can see here, I have two original cells from Spongebob season one.
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These are the actual originals.
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These ones are quite beautiful as you can see.
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So yes, the animators would actually hand paint every frame on celluloid sheets
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and place them on top of a painted background like this.
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This actually isn't an original background.
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Those are really expensive.
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And they would take a picture of every single frame.
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All those paintings put together, played back, it creates the illusion of movement known as animation.
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Now cell animation inherently looks pretty different from digital animation, where artists move pixels around on a screen to create their drawings, usually on a drawing tablet of some kind.
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Digital is way cheaper and easier than cell animation, which is why it's taken over entirely.
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But I want to clarify, the artist is still drawing these characters frame by frame for many shows, including Modern Spongebob, and this might surprise even animation fans.
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I was surprised when I first found this out, but a lot of shows even today, like Steven Universe, and yes modern spongebob are still animated
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and inked on paper they just clean up
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and color each frame digitally there's really not a lot of information about the overseas studios
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that do these shows
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but as far as i can tell a lot more shows than you think are still animated on paper
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and that's kind of crazy
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but as far as using actual animation cells the practice has been dead for like over 20 years.
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And the thing is, cell animation has a certain look to it, a certain analog charm that's hard to replicate digitally.
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That's part of why what Ying Yang Geo does is so impressive.
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His digital illustrations really capture that cell animated look.
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But in terms of actual animation, I'm not sure I've ever seen a digital animation really pull off the cell animated look.
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I'm not saying it can't be done, but the ones I've seen that try and replicate cell animation digitally never quite look real.
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But I want this animation to look exactly like season one, and since I don't mind torturing myself a little bit,
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I'm going to try to do it with actual cell animation.
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Yeah.
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But before actually getting involved with any ink and paint, I'm going to animate it digitally first as a sort of blueprint.
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These will kind of be my pencil drawings before printing out every frame and inking them physically.
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And I'm doing this because I'm much better at digital art than traditional.
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I do rely on that undo button a bit, and it's going to be much faster for me to animate it this way rather than actually starting all on paper.
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But I'm still drawing the characters frame by frame
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and trying my best to study the actual animation from season one of Spongebob, seeing where they use holds, when do they just have the mouth moving on a separate cell,
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how many frames a blink should be.
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I'm looking for little subtleties that I think will make it feel just that much more like a classic Spongebob episode.
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So this is the finalized line work right here, and now it's time to print out all these frames and and start making the actual cells.
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Even though cell animation has been dead for decades, some animation nerds like me have attempted to do it in modern day just for fun.
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And there's actually a handful of good resources online for anyone who wants to try it.
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Swift from Doig and Swift wrote a really helpful post about how to make an animation cell, including what kind of ink and paint works best,
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what tools to use, and different techniques to get the best result.
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I leaned heavily on her post, so huge shout out to her.
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Now when it comes to the cells themselves, the cells themselves themselves, you can still buy blank animation cells online, but they're way expensive.
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So I tried to get away with just using some transparency film sheets.
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Now I started with some tests and as you can kind of see, I was struggling to get smooth line work on the cells.
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I honestly don't have a lot of experience using dip pens like this.
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I was just very shaky and kind of bad at making lines.
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So I practiced a bunch on some scrap paper until I felt a little more comfortable
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and a little more confident to make some big bold lines on the cells.
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But I realized also that any mistakes or imperfections could be photoshopped out of the frames digitally.
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It'll be more work for later, but oh well.
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The colored line work known as color holds were done by mixing white ink with a little bit of acrylic paint.
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If I added too much paint, it wouldn't really come out of the pen.
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so some of the colors had to be a little lighter than I wanted, but that's something, again, I can fix and post with a little bit of Photoshop.
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And once those dried, it's time for the paint.
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To add paint to an animation cell, you want to flip it over to the backside and paint on the color.
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Kind of pull it up so it's nice and solid and fills in all the lines.
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You make me cry more than if my balls got dipped in fiery sauce.
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I don't know what I was yapping about there.
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I was on a call.
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Let the cell dry and then you have your finished animation cell.
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I got a lot of work ahead of me so let's get started.
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The whole process of inking and painting the cells took forever.
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There were 138 cells in total and most of them came out kinda horrible.
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Most of them actually had mistakes and shaky lines
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and a whole bunch of stuff I'm gonna have to clean up digitally
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if I want to look like a real SpongeBob episode.
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After hours and hours and days of my life wasted, the cells were finally finished.
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and it's time to photograph them for the final animation.
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And by some miracle, I actually have access to professional grade equipment to do that with.
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You see, I go to a school with a big film program, and they actually have a small room just for animation.
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Other people who have tried cell animation in recent years have struggled to get the lighting setup
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and everything just right because the cells are very reflective.
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So I was super lucky to have this professional perfect setup all ready to go to take the photos.
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Oh and this animation room also has an Acme hole punch.
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I neglected to mention this but I actually hole punched all my cells in advance.
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This is how you line up the cells perfectly and you put the holes into a peg bar like this.
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There's usually supposed to be three holes
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but the hole punch was actually kind of broken at the time
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so I was only able to punch two but they got the job done.
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The last step is just cleaning it up in Photoshop
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and I'm trying to make it look clean but not to the point where it looks digital, right?
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I want to preserve the cell animated look.
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That's the whole point of doing this for real.
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But this part actually ended up taking way longer than I thought.
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Some cells took as long as one to two hours to clean up, which is kind of awful.
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And with that, it was pretty much over.
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I just had to assemble it all in some editing software and then it was done.
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So without further ado, please enjoy the latest SpongeBob episode, Necronominominominominicon, or whatever it's called.
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As if it were from Season 1.
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Yeah, I'll have the, uh...
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Evil pancakes?
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Evil pancakes!
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Coming right up!
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Uh, Mr. Krabs, are you sure this is safe?
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Safe?
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Was the Titanic safe?
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No. Get back to work, boy.
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Evil pancakes!
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Ingredients include...
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The soul of Cthulhu?
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Where on earth are we gonna find that?
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Never leave home without it!
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So there it is, that's my homage to one of my absolute favorite shows.
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I'm pretty happy with how it came out.
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Obviously, you can tell it's fan-made.
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The dialogue is a little stupid.
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It's not nearly as clever as what they actually would have wrote.
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The animation isn't quite there either, but I hope that I captured some kind of feeling of season one of SpongeBob.
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But let me know what you think.
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Did I get kind of close?
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The Cthulhu mask was just some weird thing from eBay, by the way, if anyone was wondering.
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I thought it looked kind of like something that might be green-screened into an early SpongeBob episode.
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Again, huge shout out to Yin-Yan-Gio.
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This would not have nearly been as good without his contribution, so go follow him on Twitter.
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Really great stuff.
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Shout out to the voice actors too, and go check out Conch Street Gaming.
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It seems like they have a lot of fun over there.
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And if you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to my channel.
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If this video does well, I plan to do a lot more like it.
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And lastly, thank you for watching all the way to the end.
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Seriously, that's actually a great help for me.
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And you know what?
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I have a little treat for you.
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That's right.
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I have a little treat for watching all the way to the end because I know what you want to see.
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You want to see more SpongeBob voice actors cursing.
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Well, take it away boys.
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I'll cut off your nutsack and nail it to my door!
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Do you want me to sponge up all of the urine in America and then squeeze myself over Saddam Hussein's mouth?
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I masturbate a lot.
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Okay, I think...
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What?!
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It hurts!
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Oh, fuck it hurts!
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Wow!
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It hurt your fucking butt!
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My ass!
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Save my ass!
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Tennis balls!
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Testicles!
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I'm sorry to say you will not get swearing Spongebob tonight.
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Sorry.
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Oh, oh, oh, come on, shit, guys!
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Let's not go friggin' crazy here, okay?
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Goddammit, Jesus!
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Okay.
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Alright.
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I'm gonna stop while I still have a job!
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Thank you.
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Why This Video Is Perfect for English Speaking Practice
This video’s lively dialogue and distinct character voices make it ideal for english speaking practice. The mix of casual banter, exaggerated emotions, and playful insults creates a dynamic script that mirrors real-life conversation—with a fun twist. Whether you’re working on shadowing technique (repeating lines aloud to match tone and rhythm) or refining pronunciation, the varied speech patterns here offer endless practice. Plus, the humor keeps you engaged, making learning feel less like work and more like play.
Breaking Down Natural Speech: 3 Key Lines
- “Safe? Was the Titanic safe? No. Get back to work boy.” Mr. Krabs’ sharp, sarcastic delivery shows how short, punchy sentences convey attitude. Notice the rising intonation on “safe?” and the flat, dismissive “No”—these nuances make the line feel authentic.
- “Evil pancakes! Ingredients include… The soul of Cthulhu?” SpongeBob’s excited-to-shocked shift demonstrates how volume and pitch change with emotion. The pause after “include” builds anticipation, a common trick in casual speech.
- “I’ll cut off your nutsack and nail it to my door!” While crude, this line highlights natural shadowspeak—how native speakers stress certain words (“cut off,” “nail”) for emphasis. The rapid pace mimics how people speak when angry or playful.
A Simple Shadowing Routine to Try
Use the shadowing technique with this video for 10 minutes daily: 1. Watch a 10-second clip, focusing on mouth movements and tone. 2. Pause, then repeat the line aloud, matching speed and emotion. 3. Record yourself and compare to the original—note where your pronunciation or rhythm differs. 4. Repeat until you sound almost identical. This loop trains your brain to mimic natural speech, improving both pronunciation and fluency. Over time, you’ll notice your own speech feels more confident and native-like.
By practicing with this video, you’re not just learning lines—you’re mastering the art of shadow speak and unlocking the secrets of natural English communication. Dive in, and let SpongeBob and friends be your funniest language teachers!
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | it's been · haven't watched · There's actually been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | wasn't made · was made · are still animated |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | animation, which is · anyone who wants · people who have |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.