Okay! I recently had the pleasure of interviewing "Toon," the mysterious creator and showrunner of Toonami Aftermath, through e-mail. He was super gracious and eager to answer all my questions, so if you need another reason to watch the hundreds of hours of free entertainment he provides, there you go. If you're as interested as I was about the origins and logistics of a project that obviously involves so much work, passion, and, let's face it, vulnerability to litigation, read on (My questions are bolded):
First of all, I suppose I should ask: who am I talking to in these e-mails?
Most know me by the nickname Toon, I am the creator of Toonami Aftermath.
Who's the team behind Toonami Aftermath, how did you come together, and what lead to the decision to create a Toonami "revival?"
The Toonami Aftermath team is smaller than most people imagine. I created the site and developed the tools needed to schedule the broadcast and monitor/update the schedule. Notable contributors are:
Mercurius - Contacted me and offered help in making promos. He made a handful of show intros for Toonami Aftermath, all of which are top notch.
Sonicstormer - Head moderator, he is in charge of pretty much all moderation which includes the chat and forum; he's the hardest working person on ToonamiAftermath.com. If I ever got banned from my own site for breaking our own rules, Sonic would be the one to do it.
TallestRed - Our server admin, he is the computer expert of the group. If we need help with the server, general coding, or we just need advice about what software to run or what coding method to use, Tallest is the guy to talk to. If you've ever used the little buttons that change the stream quality on the front page, that is only a taste of what Tallest can and has done *wink*.
ShepherdGrey - Another moderator, he is the guy that logs in every couple hours just to tell everyone to "GBTW!" (get back to work). Actually, Shepherd is our pretend lawyer who wrote the Terms of Service and basically owns your soul if you didn't read the fine print.
Hangingsquid - A moderator, top contributor in the forums, recently a server admin, and soon to be an affiliate with the launch of his own "InternetTV" website.
Last but not least is Xioustic - a mentor and the person responsible for the conception of the website. Toonami Aftermath used to just be a broadcast on ustream, but Xioustic offered to buy a domain and host a small site on his personal hosting plan. If it wasn't for Xioustic I don't think we would have ever launched our own server.
I couldn't possibly name all the people that make ToonamiAftermath.com awesome, there are so many inspiring and intelligent people here. The viewers are also top contributors, they are the voice of Toonami Aftermath. You guys all rock!
Once your goal was established, how did you go about turning Toonami Aftermath into a reality?
It was January 10th, 2010 when I solidified in my mind what I wanted to attempt. At the time I had just discovered a Dragon Ball Z marathon stream on the web. This brought me back to a place I had long since forgotten, and I remember talking to my grade school friends, asking if they ever watched Toonami. To my surprise it turned out I was the only one that did among my group of friends until I started chatting up with my buddy Nick, who was raving about how much Toonami meant to him. To Nick, Toonami wasn't just a cool animation block on TV, it was something more than that. We discovered that we were both uncompromising fans of the 1997-2002 Toonami and shared a lot of insight about the dub of DBZ we liked and other shows like ThunderCats and Gundam Wing.
Shortly after the 24/7 DBZ stream was discontinued it hit me like a ton of bricks. I started asking around, tapping into my friends' friends' animation collections to rebuild the archive of programs that made Toonami legendary. Within a couple of days, Nick and I were watching an original Toonami block lineup: ThunderCats, Ronin Warriors, DBZ, and Gundam Wing. And in just over a week, Toonami Aftermath was ready to broadcast... indefinitely.
A 24-hour broadcast necessitates more than a weekday afternoon's worth of content, and your extended schedule's featured everything from Cartoon Cartoons to Mystery Science Theater 3000. You've also aired redubbed promos, custom show intros, and even the odd retro commercial. How do you make decisions regarding what content to air, and when and how to do it?
I spent a few sleepless nights drawing up what I remembered of Toonami's scheduling, placing shows and promos in their original order, gathering promos, and encoding DVDs. It was a torrent of great feelings putting the schedule together. I might have thought, "Why stop at Toonami? Let's see Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Cartoon Planet and Cartoon Cartoons as well!" but in reality I didn't think about it at all, it's just something that naturally seemed like the right thing to do.
I have an obsession with how scheduling of content affects the viewer experience. If the broadcast was a marathon, viewers would get their fix of a show, watch nonstop for a couple weeks, and never return after that. I see that kind of behavior as not only unhealthy, but also not entertaining. The addition of the other weekday shows was a no-brainer: the more good shows that were in the schedule, the better they could be scheduled to avoid becoming a marathon.
I did decide to indulge in the Toonami block more than originally scheduled on television, but that is to be expected from a stream named after Toonami, of course. The original Toonami promos that are used are all there because, well, they are Toonami. After you've done everything that you possibly can with the original content, all there is left is to fill in the gaps in the schedule. Inevitably there were show and promo gaps in the schedule, so naturally I decided to find affiliated or similar shows of high caliber to fill in those timeslots. With the contributions of Mercurius and VSigma100 we have custom Toonami intros for shows that did not have any originally. Everything else is simply for fun, but I try to maintain the integrity of a broadcast that knows its content and won't break the experience with petty jokes or misplaced content as much as possible.
Are you worried at all about getting sued for broadcasting this material, or at least unceremoniously shut down? How seriously did you take possible legal ramifications into account when you started the project?
Of course getting shut down was always a possibility and something that I've never taken for granted. I have been contacted by copyright holders in the past and have taken actions to minimize the chances of problems in the future. But in any case, I decided after testing the waters for a few months that we'd be up long enough for it to be worth a shot and here we are today, a year and a half of broadcast and still working at it.
How closely does the Toonami Aftermath of today match up with your original intentions? What's next for the project?
The original goal was simple: I wanted to recreate a specific Toonami schedule using the show content and promos. The success of completing this goal was massively fulfilling. Things have changed over time, but I've made it one of my top priorities to only meet this goal even further as the scheduling has matured.
The second goal which immediately followed was that of practicality. Too many good ideas go wasted with the absence of practicality. I needed to somehow automate the daunting scheduling process so that I could stream Toonami 24/7, year-round. The process of scheduling a broadcast is no easy feat. My progress in completing this goal has been over a year in the making. For the first month and a half I used to take 1 to 2 hours PER DAY just to get all the content in order for the day's broadcast. I forget how, but I managed to bring that down to a 30 minute process after a couple months; I think I made templates.
Around the time that I launched the website I came up with a more advanced templating process that took around 10 minutes per day. The reason it takes so long is that subsequent episodes need to be loaded each day and they must be timed so that they broadcast at the correct time. The 10-minute template process is where I settled at for somewhere around 8 months but it still wasn't close to what I hoped for. I still had to remotely log in every day to put in my 10 minutes.
Finally, in early February this year, after consulting TallestRed on simple coding techniques, I was able to create a 99.9% automated scheduling process. Now I spend 15 minutes per week scheduling 110 hours worth of different content. That number is rising to 118 hours worth of content soon and the automated process is now progressing in the area of better timing and more dynamic scheduling. At this point it is impractical NOT to stream, I spent more time responding to your questions then I have this month scheduling Toonami Aftermath.
The weekday schedule was revamped for a third time in March, it is everything that Toonami is supposed to be all in one big package. The revised weekend schedule is coming out this June and it will be everything a weekend schedule is supposed to be: fun, dynamic, and adventurous. Even still, there are always unannounced progressions being made and some secret for now. Stay tuned where it's still fun.
Could you tell me more about these templating tools you use? Did they exist in some form before you began broadcasting, or were they built from scratch? What's the process that takes a collection of video files and turns them into an ordered, uploaded broadcast?
Well actually the "templating" I was doing at the beginning consisted solely of well-organized archiving and simple playlist templates. The episode numbers have to be changed to keep each series progressing day by day, so I created the playlist templates with all the intros and promos laid out in order so that only the episode numbers had to be manually entered. This gives the viewers the next episodes in all the series aired each day while maintaining the same promo and intro scheduling in order to keep the playlist timed for schedule. As simple as it is I don't know if I would call this “from scratch,” but the idea was certainly my own, and of course these playlist templates were all based on my own playlists that I constructed for Aftermath.
We now employ a script I wrote specifically to automate that entire process, and that is definitely from scratch. Its function is to automatically progress each show day by day until it reaches the end of the series, in which case it starts over. It does this at an interval of 1 week at a time, although I could make it run at any interval I want it to. The only manual entering of schedule content are the 2 feature films and 4 Rifftrax of various films that are aired each week. Besides saving me all that time scheduling, the script has allowed me to be a little more creative by having certain shows only appear on certain days and even rotate promos day by day to give the broadcast a more dynamic feel and use more of our available catalog of awesome shows and promos.
Is there any particular program or programs you use to schedule, broadcast, or otherwise run Toonami Aftermath? Do you use something entirely built from scratch, or, say, something like Windows Media Player in a modified capacity? I have no knowledge of the technical side of video production, scheduling, and streaming, so forgive me if this is a really basic question.
As you'd imagine, there are a lot of requirements to make a broadcast work: audio normalization, gapless playback, video size/aspect ratio compensation, compression, bandwidth and even crash handling, which Flash encoding is constantly prone to. I use Kmplayer for playback, SCFH to capture video, and Flash Media Encoder (by command line and batch script) to stream to justin.tv. All of these programs run inside a Virtual Machine in Virtual Box on our server and keep the quality of the broadcast as high as possible at all stages. There are too many other utilities that are used in the editing/encoding and schedule planning stages to name, but for example I occasionally will use winamp to help time a schedule. These programs are all great, but at the end of the day the secret sauce is in the batch scripting.
Wow, that's even more complex than I thought. Do you have any formal training in video production?
No, I don't have any training whatsoever. Some might call it dedication or obsession, but really it's just a long and fun game; the fulfillment is worth far more then the effort, and for that reason I would be mad not to do it. It would not be worth it if the Flash encoder crashed every hour or even every day, I can't be around to reset them all the time which can result in hours if not days of downtime. I couldn't put in the hours it would take to keep up the schedule, time is better spent researching batch script than entering hundreds of lines of playlist variables (episode numbers) manually every day.
So yeah, I guess you can say it is a complex setup in that it took a long time to figure out what and how to implement the ideal solutions. But hey, the way I see it I intend to broadcast Toonami Aftermath indefinitely, as long as possible, so it doesn't matter if I find the solution tomorrow, next week, or next month. Finding the right way is worth exponentially more fun days than days of frustration.
Thanks again to Toon, who, again, was super awesome. Now, get back to watching Outlaw Star.
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