TSS is bringing back community interviews (omg more exclusive content)! Aside from speaking with specific individuals, I’ll be talking to the heads of Sonic communities that you may not of heard of in “Know Your Sonic Sites.” Today’s featured community is Sonic Paradox, a Sonic site that specializes in Sonic flash animation. I’ll be interviewing one of its staff members, RGXSuperSonic. Yeah, he’s my flash man for Nexus. I’m playing it safe for the first one and, plus, I never heard of Paradox until he joined the team. Time to feed my curiosity!
RGXSuperSonic: We talk, like, every day, though.
RGX: Haha, ok.
RGX: Sonic Paradox is a online community which specializes in Flash animations starring SEGA’s mascot Sonic.
RGX: Paradox has been around since 2006, though our first collaboration was the “Tribute Collab 1” back in 2005.Our community wasn’t as organised as it is now. The forum was created by Lilmario and The Wax created the main site. The first project was started by Sweet_Kat22 from Newgrounds. She, however, has moved on from Sonic Paradox.
When Sweet_Kat22 dropped down from being leader, HyperactiveYouth (known for Sonic: Uncut 1, 2 and 3) stepped in, becoming the 2nd leader in charge of Sonic Tribute Collab 2. However, due to development hell, HyperactiveYouth stepped down as well and our longest in service member, Bit-Master, became the 3rd leader. Due to slow progress, he stepped down from being leader to co-leader with our current leader, The Wax (known for Full Metal Sonic, Sonic Halo, and Sonic: Dark Chaos, and a variety of shorts). The Wax is the creator of the Sonic Short Volumes and a great leader to the community.
RGX: Well, the tribute collabs are a special tribute to our favorite videogame character, Sonic. The collab itself has hand-picked animators to create a piece featuring their favorite moments from the series. Then, the pieces are then placed together to play alongside a song from the series. It’s essentially a music video. The next collab will feature “Live and Learn”. In these collabs, the animator is encouraged to their best to create a high quaility animation.
As for the Sonic Shorts Volumes, it’s more on the humorous side. We all come together and make humorous shorts of characters from the series and put them together in one volume. Originally, everyone was welcomed to participate with minor restrictions. Basically, it was for fun. After a while, however, we decided to raise the quality of our shorts after each volume so that we could still entertain our audience and to keep the series strong. This means better jokes, higher quality animation and avoiding overused memes and gags. We all have fun making it and we all enjoy the countless amount of people who love the series.
RGX: Well, it depends on how well this person knows flash. If this person has a decent amount of knowledge regarding the program, such as knowing how to use the timeline, using layers and symbols, then that’s good. However, knowledge of flash is not good enough. This person should also be able to draw well and we judge this person on the quaility of his/her short to determine if this person is good enough or not. Basically, if you can draw well and know a lot about flash, you’re good to go.
RGX: Sort of. We don’t neccesarily only want people who are on the professional level, as long as that person is decent enough, then he/she is welcomed to join.
RGX: We almost always need voice actors for our shorts or our other projects. There is many ways you can contribute to the community.
RGX: Well, two ways that I can think of is if you have much knowledge of Flash’s action script. This would be very helpful when it comes to creating more interactivity in our projects, especially if we ever decide to make a game. Another way to contribute is if you can make music. I’m pretty sure a lot of our animators wouldn’t mind having some original music or remixes of their favorite tunes in their projects.
RGX: Pretty fun, we have a bunch of friendly members with a lot of talent, especially our animators and voice actors. Not only are they skilled, they are really fun to talk to.
RGX: Currently, we have quite a few projects releasing soon. Besides, Sonic Shorts Volume 5 and Sonic Tribute Collab 2, we a have several solo projects from our community, including myself, such as Sonic Dark Chaos: part 2, Sonic X: Midnight Rush, Sonic Switch 1B, and my project Sonic X Comic Adaption: Sub Sonic.
RGX: Tell me about it…
RGX: No, I will not make more cutscenes for you, Brad.
If you ran into somebody who had never visited your site, what would be your one-sentence pitch to them?
RGX: If you like action and comedy, then you’ll like Sonic Paradox.
RGX: No problem.
RGX: Ugh. Did you not see how much work I have? Haha…
Stay tuned for another community interview from TSS in the near future! We’ll have an interview for another Sonic community, as well as a one-on-one with Christian Whitehead. He’s going to talk about the progress of the super-popular fangame, Sonic XG. Considering that there hasn’t been anything said about the project since SAGE 2007, this is an interview that you don’t want to miss!