Seeds of Kindness

By nowego

Bronies for Good, My Little Remix, countless musicians, and many others have worked relentlessly for months to bring you Seeds of Kindness, a fundraiser and an eponymous music album. Today we celebrate the launch of the project with an EverFree Radio livestream at 16:00Z (noon ET). (More info here.)

Everyone who donates to the fundraiser can download the album as a thank you. (There’s also a preview.) Moreover, artists of all trades have contributed prizes for those who donate the most. More detailed instructions on what you need to consider especially when making bigger donations can be found on the instructions page. There is also the track listing of the Seeds of Kindness album and the list of prizes.

The reason why you are reading this on Ponyleaks is that all donations benefit two of our, Your Siblings’s, projects, the clinic in Uganda and the Green Village in Burundi. We forward the donations in full, and after this initial financial impetus, the projects will be completely self-sustainable and independent of outside aid.

Now go and give us your moneys; every bit counts!

Change in Format

By Gavalanche

What an epic, glorious finale!

However, I’ll use this caesura to make two off-topic observations: First, when something important and time-critical happens, I usually notify my Derpy Hooves News friends or post it there myself. Then, I post it here. That is not a problem in itself, but it is an indicator of unnecessary redundancy. Second, important stuff often happens when it’s around 2 or 3 a.m. in my neck of the Everfree, and I’m fast asleep.

Consequently, I’ll try to get back to the roots, as it were, and shift all my real-time reportage to Derpy Hooves News, so that Ponyleaks is again reserved to the longer articles of more permanent value that I used to write in the beginning.

I’ve embedded the Derpy Hooves News feed to the right, but if you aren’t yet following Derpy Hooves News, a.k.a. the oldest, most venerable, and generally best news outlet in the fandom, then better fix that now than in five minutes. Here is our Twitter account, our Atom feed, and an explanation how to use feeds. Do eet!

Sabrina “Sibsy” Alberghetti on EverFree Radio

By CTB-36

EverFree Radio strikes again—this time surprisingly surprising, as they didn’t post a teaser a few days prior to the interview release. Sibsy has been storyboarding for My Little Pony from early on, with her first episode being Dragonshy according to Raven’s list of storyboard artists per episode, for which Sibsy herself provided a great chunk of the data. Sibsy, as well as Raven and Dennis Hu, were interviewed before during Bronyville’s Happy New Season Celebration Mareathon 2011 (recordings here). You can follow her on DeviantArt and Twitter.

• She explained how her name “Sibsy” developed while she was in her teens and stuck afterwards. (0:34)
• Then she went on to describe her path into the storyboarding business, and in particular how, being from a town near Toronto, she applied for animation courses at Sheridan College and afterwards moved “out west to Vancouver.” (1:27)
• The storyboard artists are the second stage in the development of an episode. They “get a script from the writers” and “have to conceptualize everything visually that is written down on the paper in the best way that we possibly can to tell the story effectively.” (2:27)
• When she started working in animation professionally, “it almost felt like everything I learned at school I had to through out of the window,” “it was pretty harsh, but it was very educating at the same time. I learned a lot at the first studio I worked at, and I wouldn’t give up that for the world.” (3:18)
• This first studio was probably A.K.A. Cartoon, who appear to have a domain, but only for email, without a web server behind it. It also looks like Jim Miller (there is also an interview with him), Scott Underwood, and Joel Dickie worked there for a while.
• She had to delegate Lesson Zero to Raven to work on some Darkwing Duck for a few weeks. (6:32)
• In EverFree Radio’s episode review of MMMystery on the Friendship Express, Final Draft seemed very confident that the switching of the hats between Twilight and Pinkie Pie was not scripted. I wondered about that at the time, but maybe they had already recorded the interview at that point, because here Sibsy explained: “A lot of those little gags are put in by us storyboard artists.” (9:13) [Nope, they hadn’t; they just have the superior hunches.]
• There is a certain trademark Sibsy motion where a pony lifts one of their hooves up. (10:45) It’s a cute and slightly coy gesture that other storyboarder may also have picked up. [Thanks, EverFree Radio, for the clarification.]
• She’s the one who turned Berry Punch into an alcoholic during the cute-ceañera in Call of the Cutie. (10:54)
• She frequently uses our pony names, but many of her colleagues are not as fluent with them. (12:40)
• She likes The Mysterious Mare Do Well for its action scenes, which are challenging for her. The same goes for The Last Roundup, but her favorite episodes are the finale episodes (which haven’t aired yet): “Visually, musically, just all around, … we’ve set the bar so high with that episode” (or these episodes). “I’m so excited for it to air! I wish it was next week!” (14:12) Another indicator that the recording took place at least a week ago.
• She enjoys our feedback, preferably that of constructive nature. (16:22) Also, our “creative outpouring” (Final Draft) is overwhelming—in a positive way of course. (17:18)
• “There is so much more story left to tell. We finally have these characters figured out; there’s so many places to go with them, so many ways to develop them even further, and I really look forward to that.” (19:04)
• All those visual references to Star Wars, martial arts movies, or James Bond are also the work of the storyboard artists. (20:54)
• Flat hierarchies rock. “Jayson and Wootie, we’re friends first. It’s kind of stage having them as a boss, because … they’re my friends.” (22:20)
• She doesn’t think that it “always the case” that references are woven into the show for the fans, but if we love them, “that’ amazing!” (23:41)
• Storyboards usually remain black and white, but sometimes colors need to be specified or are used to let elements “[stand] out on the page.” (25:00)
• Here she inserted a shoutout to OtakuSquirrel, who made a custom of her OC for her as a gift, and is generally a great artist or craftsperson. (27:29)
• She hopes that in the future she’ll be able to post drawings online, e.g., of Raven’s OC, but she’s not allowed to at the moment. (31:24)
• More confirmation that Twilight Sparkle is best pony! (32:36)
• She’ll be “moving on to Pound Puppies for a little while, and then hopefully back to more ponies after that.” And there may also be more comic work from her, related to The Disney Afternoon. (34:20)
• Sonic CD, with the American soundtrack, is her favorite Sonic video game. (35:20)

Update 2012-04-14 17:08Z: Updated with a bit of inside scoop from EverFree Radio. Thanks!

Preview of MMMystery on the Friendship Express

Via The Round Stable and CrimsonAuthor, the preview clip of MMMystery on the Friendship Express from today’s episode. Thanks and enjoy!

Update 2012-03-31 18:05Z: Updated with a slightly-better-quality version. Also on Derpy Hooves News of course!

Update 2012-03-31 23:11Z: And an extended version thanks to Spazz of Derpy Hooves News.

Update 2012-04-02 21:25Z: The Hub has published a completely new preview! Watch it below or here. (Also on Derpy Hooves News.)

Update 2012-04-06 17:35Z: What is this madness! A third clip! Woohoo! (Also on Derpy Hooves News of course.)

William Anderson on EverFree Radio

By William Anderson

Lo, pony lovers! EverFree Radio recently published a new interview with our BGM god, William Anderson, and I’ve finally found the time to summarize it. Head over there and listen to it. I only summarize the bits that are interesting to me, after all. (By the way, the interview is co-hosted by Final Draft and MandoPony!) Also, I’ll try to use breaks more sparingly. Have fun.

• It all started when about five composers were invited to score an animation sample, and he won the pitch. (0:34)
• After 1:50 but more so 3:36, he reminisced about the indirect way by which he ended up as as composer for animation. Some of that is also covered in a journal entry entitled “Giving up” he since deleted. (There’s still a copy in the Google cache.)
• He’s using a particular guitar riff that has become emblematic of Rainbow Dash less now, but not because anyone told him to. Hasbro has just approved his scoring for the last fifteen to seventeen episodes without any notes, while the directors are often “more exacting.” (5:56)
• He agrees with Daniel Ingram that “weekly episodic animation scoring is the hardest gig in the business.” (7:55)
• That most of the time his work needs to be invisible to work its magic is actually something he enjoys. (8:44)
• At around 10:00, he describes his approach to character themes.
• Sometimes he first makes musical sketches of the scenes and then fills in the details, sometimes he gets struck by inspiration and composes the whole cue right away. The approach varies greatly from scene to scene. (12:40)
• He enjoys MondoPony’s music! Who doesn’t! /)^ε^(\ (16:09)
• Now 17:24. You really need to listen to this. It’s almost ten minutes of verbalized data sheets, which means it’s amazing! The parts where he describes his computer equipment made me nerdgasm all over the place. I can only imagine what it must be like for someone who also knows about audio equipment! You can get a small impression of what I’m talking about in this post and this photo of his.
• He, and everyone else in post production, only starts his work “in earnest” once they have the locked print, where every frame of the animation and all the voices are exactly where they’ll be in the broadcast version. (26:05)
• He only recently, during this season, noticed that we are “a really vibrant community,” when he made an DeviantArt account to thank an artist who had ponified him, and was overwhelmed by the response of the thousands of people who subsequently frequented his page. (29:57)
• Everfree NW (August 17–19, 2012) is “right in the middle of season three,” so he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to come, but he’d love to. (31:47)
• The famous CMC theme is actually a piece of his score that likes least. He went on to speculate about why the music one is most proud of and has put the most effort into is often scrapped or ignored, while little tunes one churns out in a few minutes are loved and get famous. (34:47)
• MandoPony especially loves a certain tune at the end of Lesson Zero. (37:26) I think he was referring to the one starting at around 19:36 in the episode.

In case of errors, please comment. Thanks.

Update 2012-03-31 19:02Z: Had to replace a link because of this. Thanks for letting me know, Johnny.