User:TBustah
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[edit] Thomas Buster
Thomas Buster (b. September 2, 1988) is a multi-talented artist from northwestern Nevada. He is best known as the creator of FamilyBound, a series of sprite-based animated films featuring graphics from EarthBound and audio clips from Family Guy. He also has a Pokemon sprite comic called Pokemon Silver State Version. He is better known as TBustah, the screenname he uses for nearly everything on the internet.
Buster was born in Yuma, Arizona to David and Gayle Buster. It's interesting to note that David's brother (and Thomas's uncle) Jim was the mayor of Yuma at this time (his term was 1986-1990). When he was a year old, Buster's father moved the family to Yerington, Nevada, for a job as a doctor at South Lyon Medical Center. Buster's brother, Daniel, was born about a year and a half later.
Buster grew up in Yerington, graduating Yerington High School with the class of 2006, and then moved to Carson City in August of 2007, where he now resides.
He is currently a student at Western Nevada College.
[edit] Sprite Comics
In January of 2006, Buster was a Senior student in a YHS tech class. He was moving some furniture around for a video he was working on, building up electricity with his dragging feet, and then accidentally brushed his foot against a plug that was plugged into an outlet in the floor. The static discharged on a prong that was exposed in the process, resulting in a large blue spark and the lights to dim in the room. It even left a scorch mark on the bottom of his shoes. Buster's classmates turned around from their computer monitors to see what was going on. Seeing that it was just Thomas and another one of his bizzare antics, they went back to what they were doing.
Inspired by their apathy, Thomas made a sprite comic based on the incident. It was a crude, 3 panel piece titled SpriteShock #1. He printed up copies, and passed them around to classmates.
It was an instant success. Buster decided to make the strips a weekly venture, and started passing them around school. Everyone seemed to like the series because each strip was based on an event that really happened at the school (including an incident where a student's cell phone went off in class, and another one about a recent assembly featuring a Michael Jackson impersonator, which Buster apparently felt was rather innapropriate as Jackson himself had only come out of court for his molestation case a few weeks prior). It ran for about 8 weeks, before Buster became overwhelmed with schoolwork and other things in anticipation of his graduation.
Most of the characters in the series were sprites from EarthBound and Harvest Moon (SNES). The sprite Buster used to represent himself was a custom RPG Maker sprite created by a spriter called Mr. Sparkle. This was not the first time Buster had worked with this character. In 2001, when Buster was a regular at his local Boys and Girls Club, the man running the computer lab was teaching the kids how to use RPG Maker 2000. Buster found the sprite, and liked it right away. He was making a game with the program that starred a character based on himself, and decided to use the sprite for that purpose because the character wore a flak vest similar to one that Buster himself often wore at the time.
Buster later posted the entire 8 strip series on Drunk Duck, hoping for similar success. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be. It was met with much criticism, mostly because the graphics were rather sloppy and Buster couldn't resize the strips to a size that could easily be viewed on the site, but also because the humor was mostly inside jokes that people that didn't go to Buster's school at the time he made them wouldn't get.
He removed the strips from Drunk Duck, and then decided that he needed to take a break to hone his skills before trying again. On the first anniversary of Spriteshock #1, January 13th, 2007, Buster released a refined version of the strip, with better graphics and more panels. He posted it on Drunk Duck, mostly just to prove that he had improved since he first joined the community. He did not continue with the series, and has no plans to.
A few months later, he began his Pokemon sprite comic, Pokemon Silver State Version. Using the lessons that he'd learned from his break, as well as observing other Pokemon comics (looking at the ones that did things right, and trying to emulate them, and looking at the rather abysmal ones, and trying to avoid what they did wrong), he set out to make the best sprite comic he possibly could. He encouraged criticism, in an effort to make it the best that it could possibly be. The series is a rather unusual Pokemon sprite comic, in that it uses a lot of custom sprites, and doesn't use many existing backgrounds. It is set in Buster's hometown of Yerington, stars a character named after himself, and is loosely based on his later childhood.
It is currently one of the more popular and better rated Pokemon sprite comics on Drunk Duck, usually falling in the top 10 or 15.
[edit] Films
As a child, Buster's father used to make simple home movies with his sons. They were mostly simple stop motion films using the boys' action figures. Many of them centered around Pink Nora, a character that David's brother Jim had created when they were children.
In the spring of 2003, when Thomas was 14, he dug up the family's old camera to make a new film for his freshman English project. It was a stop motion film made with Lego mini figures called Romeo and Juliet: Lego Style. It was much more involved that the ones he made as a child. He actually stopped the camera frame by frame to animate the film, whereas the action figures were basically just puppets in the ones he made with his father. It was the sword fight scene from Romeo and Juliet, and was a success with his classmates, despite the poor lighting and lack of sound (Buster was unable to add a sound track in post, since it was shot with an old 8MM camera and thus had no way to edit it. He instead read the lines from the class's book as the video played). Using special Lego pieces worn around the necks of the characters Tybalt and Mercutio with a stud on the back, and two-piece swords, Buster was able to create the illusion of the characters being impaled in the fight, much to the amusement of his male classmates.
Buster would go on to make a few more stop motion films with the old camera just for fun, which eventually prompted his father to buy a new digital video camera and a computer equipped with editing software. This computer, a Sony Vaio purchased in April of 2004, is the machine that Buster still uses today.
In the spring of 2006, after the success of his SpriteShock series, one of Buster's classmates commisioned him to make a cartoon short for the class's senior video. Rather than making a completely new story, Buster opted to make an animated version of SpriteShock #1, which he titled SpriteShock Episode #1: An Average Day in Tech Class. He developed his own technique for the film, by making individual frames in Photoshop and then arranging them in order and trimming the frames to a fraction of a second in Windows Movie Maker. (He still uses this same technique for FamilyBound, although he now uses MS Paint and Paint.net instead of Photoshop). Buster used a public domain sound effect for the scream that his character made in the short, which also provided the sound of the electrical shock. His classmates Wade Nolan and Jake Muller provided the voices of the other two characters. The short was well received, but the teacher of the tech class decided to cut it from the senior video at the last minute, because he felt that the line that Muller's character said about writing "cuss words" on Buster's character's unconcious body was innapropriate. He told Thomas that he would still put it in the video if he could change the line to something more suitable, but Buster felt he couldn't make it appropriate and still make it funny.
That summer, after returning from a family trip to Australia, Thomas created a Youtube account and uploaded the film. Not unlike when he posted the comics on Drunk Duck, it failed because the humor was not understood by people who didn't go to school with him. Buster tried again with another sprite movie called My Recurring Nightmare, but it was an even bigger failure.
Buster was becoming discouraged. There were things going on in his personal life (unfairly losing his job, missing his friends who had all moved away from Yerington, as well as various threats from his parents to put him in institutions), and he fell into an emotional slump in the later months of 2006, after his 18th birthday. It was during this time that he discovered Stephen Georg's /EarthBound series. He contacted Georg, and discovered a true kindred spirit. The two had very similar interests and backgrounds, even down to the fact that they were both Baptists. Buster joined Georg's message board, and made many friends who helped him during this time who shared his interest in EarthBound, many of which influenced his future success.
Finally, in January of 2007, Buster came out with a successful film, the original FamilyBound. Buster came up with the idea when he was playing through EarthBound for the first time. Splices involving comedy show audio and cutscenes from video games were beginning to become popular at the time. Seeing the dinosaur museum in Fourside (in the game), he thought that it would be funny to create a cartoon with graphics of the museum and the audio from a Family Guy clip that also featured a dinosaur museum. This led to Buster making several other similar correlations between the game and the television show, and that first idea became the first clip in FamilyBound. After he posted a link to the short on the Starmen.net forum, there soon wasn't an EarthBound fan in the country that hadn't seen or heard of it.
Buster, like every American kid in the 1990's, was into Power Rangers. He had long grown out of the fad, but in late 2006 and and early 2007, he had developed an interest in it's original Japanese counterpart, Super Sentai. This was largely to do with Youtube uploads of the series, like KamJ's Gosei Sentai Dairanger uploads. KamJ had only uploaded the first 40 episodes of the series. Buster, both wanting to see the series in it's entirety and seeing this as an opportunity to attract subscribers to his channel, found and uploaded the last 10 episodes of the series. In the spring of 2007, he decided to start uploading the series that came after Dairanger, Ninja Sentai Kakuranger. Unfortunately, the only downloads available were in a format that he couldn't edit and Youtube didn't support. To raise money to buy WinAvi (which he could use to convert the episode files into a editable format), he created an animated "telethon" with EarthBound sprites. Stephen Georg once again helped Buster out by referring him to a freeware alternative, but only after Buster went to the insane trouble of animating the short. After download this freeware application, Buster was finally able upload Kakuranger, and his number of subscribers grew to over 100 as a result. He uploaded the first 20 or so on his own, until hitting a snag with the download links. One of his subscribers gave him alternate links, and he continued. Unfortunately, it was not to last. In October of that year, the owner of the series, Toei, made a copyright claim, and as a result, Youtube deleted all of Buster's hard work.
After this heartbreak, Buster decided to concentrate on his original films, and released FamilyBound 2 later that month. It was released somewhat prematurely (it was about half as long as the original, Buster wasn't really finished with it, but fans of the original had been pressuring him to come out with a sequel), but it was met with similar reception to the original. In May of 2008, he received an honorable mention for his PK Tube'N entry, We're Not Gonna Take It (From Nintendo)!, which was also an EarthBound sprite film, this one a music video of sorts, with the Twister Sister song We're Not Gonna Take It! playing in the background while the heroes of EarthBound and a sprite version of Thomas attacked Nintendo of America's headquarters.
FamilyBound 3 is currently under production.
[edit] The Order of Chaos
Buster recently took up his old RPG Maker project again. Little has changed from the original idea he had back in 2001, although he has switched from RPG Maker 2000 to RPG Maker 2003, and the graphics are no longer based on pre-made chip and character sets created by other spriters. The characters and enemies will all be based on those from EarthBound, and the chipsets are based on those from Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen. Buster had planned to make chipsets using Mother 3 graphics, but he felt that they didn't provide him much to work with since the settings of Mother 3 and his own game were too different.
Many of the sounds and other elements were taken from EarthBound, but the game is NOT a Mother fangame. Buster had the idea of creating an RPG in a modern setting, much like Earthbound, but he began dabbling in RPG Maker a full four years before he even knew EarthBound existed.
The game should be finished sometime before the end of 2009.
