✿ Pilot Bonus page ✿
Okay so let's pretend that Manon and Cybermare are not real people and are characters and I'm also the creator of LOVEWEB lol.
The initial spark that made me wanna make LOVEWEB was after watching "Over the Garden Wall" in fall of 2019, which might be really surprising...
Over the garden wall is a dark fantasy adventure about two brothers exploring the Unknown, inspired by children's books of the 1800s.
And LOVEWEB is... well.. very different from that.
The inspiration comes from the fact that the creator made a cartoon with the aesthetics of something specific they enjoy, which is children's books of the 1800s.
And I was like "I wanna make a cartoon about something specific I enjoy too", and internet is like, my big obsession, so I was like "hell yeah I wanna make a cartoon about the internet".
At the time I also remember being very shy about showcasing myself to a public. So I decided to talk about internet through characters instead of myself, which made LOVEWEB a lot more unique compared to just having some real person talking about memes.
The character's voices were first supposed to be voiced by Vocaloids, but the rise of the Pony Preservation Project and 15.AI shifted my interests towards it.
LOVEWEB is also inspired a looot by the french youtube scene of the 2010s, with notable examples being the host/cameraman dynamic found in "les analyses de pubs" by misterjday and the shot composition of having a host next to a screen found in "salut les geeks".
Les analyses de pubs by MisterJDay and Julien C.
Salut les geeks by Mathieu Sommet
Another french youtuber I HAVE to shoutout is Jeannot Nymouce who makes excellent videos on old memes. He even made made videos covering the rules of the internet! This would inspire me to also make an episode covering them.
Let's talk character design.
In august 2019, I drew this just random OC concept that's just a 2channel cat wearing Tumblr anon glasses and 4chan anon suit. This OC is basically an amalgamation of symbols of anonymity online over the years.
Mona from 2channel - Tumblr anon icon - Anon from 4chan
I remember immediatly thinking I wanted a plush of this OC when finishing the drawing. You could technically say I'm making LOVEWEB in part to make this desire a reality lol, maybe one day...
Manon's name took a while to figure out and "Manon is perfect". It's both a real french name and also the mix of Mona (2channel cat) and anon.
Also it's been sadly pointed to me that MAN is part of Manon's name which started this short trend of drawing buff Manon which is very silly.
By aPOWERFULgamerVEGAN - KnuxUltimate - Gabiru
Fun fact: Do you know why you never ever see manon's tie move around or be animated ever? It's because it's not actually a tie, it's a shirt with a suit drawn on top. It's also... Less work... I guess I could have let the tie tucked in as a better excuse to not animate it but seeing the whole tie really gives Manon's design more "color" and appeal. It helps with clarity of the pose, showing where the center of the chest is.
Same deal with the glasses, the reflection is just printed on the glasses. You never ever see it move or change shape or color throughout the entire show no matter the lighting in the room. They also got rounder for the pilot compared to the orignal OC drawing.
Also in august 2019, i drew this.
I wouldn't even call this alpha Cybermare because back then, this was just a random OC inspired an album cover with a bunch of unicorns wearing caps on it.
Sadly, I can't find that album again so uh... Please let me know if you know what I'm talking about.
Another potential name for Cybermare was "Digimare" but Cybermare sounds better and is a play on words with "Cyberware" so it's fun.
I redid the colors later when I knew I wanted her to be a LOVEWEB character. This color palette is inspired by Vapowave. I gotta say, I still really like this look for her with the long snout and "horsier" body.
I also thought It'd make sense for a show about the internet to be presented by what I feel like are the two most "internet-core" animals (cat and unicorn).
In september 2019 I drew these two concept arts. I remember also doing a poll between the name LOVEWEB or NETCHUNKS and LOVEWEB won by a lot.
You can see a mysterious lil third character that never appeared in the show. I never found a name for it, but it was supposed to be Manon's computer and it would have spoken in sentence mixing like in YTPs. It's been removed in order to make the cast simpler, at least for the start of the show.
You can also see Cybermare has a cutie mark. I decided against later on because I wanted to distance her from MLP:FIM (which is ironic because she looks a lot more like a MLP:FIM character now and is even strongly associated with the show itself if you know the lore).
Also I wanted the cutie mark to mean something but couldn't find anything so I just removed it. The dark moon you see was just a meaningless place-holder.
Here's some more concept art back when I was looking for a style to draw the characters in. This was when the idea was to make the show in flash and use lineless puppets since it's a lot easier to work with lineless puppets.
You can also see that cybermare's long snout has been removed while keeping the tiny eyes.
Some explorations for the logo, they're all pretty simple because making logos isn't my thing at all. Maybe in the future I'll commission someone who knows how to make one.
Couple drawings here, top left you can see an idea of what Manon's place would look like from the outside alongside the spaceweb. Top right is Manon sitting on a cool chair, which I thought would be cool for shots where Manon talks with the PC to the side that is showing pics. On the left you can see this bunny looking character shaped like Manon's PC in the current show. Well, this is leftover from an abandonned idea. Manon would have furniture that's basically merch of a show they would watch featuring those bunnies. And that show was supposed to be findable on Newgrounds or Youtube.
The idea got dropped because it was REALLY COMPLICATING THINGS especially when my mindset at the time was to keep things as simple as possible.
Here's the first character sheet of Manon on the left and on the right is when i decided to have more visible tie and rounded shades because it looks a lot better.
Here's me throwing some ideas of how the "Manon shot" should look like. You can see the endless war tower here because weeeell. Welcome to LOVEWEB isn't the first episode to be worked on.
RFCK was supposed to be the first episode of LOVEWEB actually. But since that episode was a massive amount of work and didn't properly introduce the LOVEWEB characters and concept. I decided to make "LOVEWEB: Boot up" (which was the orignal name of "Welcome to LOVEWEB"). The name was changed to make it really clear this is an introduction video to the show to any newcomers.
Bottom left, you can find lil drawings of how manon's place should look like, I wanted the room to be similar to a UB Funkeys crib. Bottom right is an idea of how they'd travel the web and bottom center is another redesign of cybermare with bigger eyes and a smaller body.
In march 2020, I made the first "real" animation test. This looks a lot closer to what's in the show now. I've always been a fan of thick lines. The only real difference between here and the pilot is manon's coat color being pure white instead of a lil off-white. This'll end up on Manon's Youtube channel several months later.
Here's the showcase of Cybermare's evolution along side drawings trying to pin down her new hair and proportions. When she was smaller I thought about giving her a deer tail and making her like, a deer unicorn but eeh, I like the rat tail more, even if rat tails don't have floof at the end, idk why I call it a rat tail.
In this drawing, you can see Cybermare looking closer to her final design in the show, but with a different phone. Skeumorphism enjoyer wasn't an aspect of her character yet.
Here's me trying to pin down her exact size. The biggest one makes a lot more sense since her personality doesn't fit making her look like she'd be a foal, she's a grown mare.
I also tried a different leg shape but thought they made her too "toy-like".
Next up is more style tests and as you can see, we're getting very close to the current show's look. Cybermare has her iphone but she's recording vertically for some unexplicable reasons that's obviously just an error. Behind her is an old version of how the spaceweb/cyberspace thingy would have looked like.
Manon's place was supposed to be smaller but also completly open to space outside just like you can see in this drawing
Here we have the final version of Manon's character sheet before the pilot. You can also see on the fourth face that Manon's mouth was at first like, a real mouth? Right now Manon's face is like a flat texture drawn on their head.
And here's Cybermare, she gotten a lot of tweeks to her design over time to make her cooler.
You can catch the differences a lot better in that gif above. I gotta be honest, her hair is a mess to figure out from different angles.
When I drew this, it was april 2020 and you can see I was pinning down more and more what LOVEWEB's vibe and quirks would be like.... Surfing on download bars and using windows-looking portal to go around. I always been a huge nostalgic fan for Sonic Adventure 2 and the concept of surfing on rails is clearly inspired by the stage Final Rush
You can also see a very rough drawing of what Manon's place looks like. The idea at the time was to have Manon's side of the room feel like "old internet memes" and Cybermare's side of the room feel like "vaporwave".
Here's the entiiiire background for the manon shot. On the sides you can see stuff that's very rarely seen in the show like a rage comic, Manon's clicker thingy for surfing or nyan cat.
Cybermare's background also has meme posters like business cat, duck roll, gondola and mudkip.
Also due to managing my files poorly, I couldn't find the background from the pilot so....That's why you can see cybermare's hat from the rfck episode here. But that's the only thing different from the first version of this background.
Also you'd think Cybermare would have noticed the gondola poster before the gondola episode if her first reaction to seeing him was thinking it's pedobear. Thankfully it's always been out of frame until the gondola episode itself lol. We can all just pretend it was never there!!
OK so, this drawing. When manon at the end of the pilot says "see ya on teh internet" with their fingers like this, I thought about making it a recuring gimmick at the end of every episode. This is also a nod to the fact you can "see Manon on the internet" through their social media accounts.
Since most LOVEWEB episodes don't end "normally" though, I didn't get the chance to implement that. Manon's fingers would be Ls and the mouth would make a O, but its like, impossible to catch that unless you have someone telling you about it like I literally just did lol.
Ok so let's finally get into commenting the episode itself.
In july 2020, I wanted a theme for LOVEWEB and I wanted it to be a remix of the intro to "The Kids' Guide to the Internet" because lol internet. So I comissioned a bunch of people to hear what they'd make.
My favorite one was made by Michael Guy Bowman which I still find hard to believe because he's a cool awesome musician who made a lot of cool awesome tunes. You might know him for Sburban Jungle aka one of the most epic song in all of Homestuck.
I remember he messaged me saying he'd do if I paid him a pizza and I was like hell yeaaah. It's a funny story to tell people about the intro of LOVEWEB.
I wanted to use the other themes I commissioned for the next episodes but forgot by the time I was working on the RFCK episode.
I also got things to say about the spacey stuff in the background. It's pretty clearly inspired by the space in the french cartoon from the 60s "Les Shadoks". It's not a coincidence my name is also Shadok by the way. When I was a kid, I was OBSESSED with this show SO MUCH that I named myself after it.
The rainbow behind Manon is also almost the exact same from the kirin song in My Little Pony. MLP was another thing I was obsessed with as a kid, major influence on my art alongside Homestuck.
I don't know if you noticed but I am literally nowhere to be seen in the intro's credits. LOVEWEB is indeed made by Manon and Cybermare but if we pretend that I made LOVEWEB, then why am I not here? This is kind of a remnant of an idea that was basically, posting LOVEWEB on its own channel have it be COMPLETLY anonymous. I still think this is a reeaaally cool idea and it fits with the overall vibe of the show... But I thought it would have suffered too much in visibility. It's later acknowledged through side content that LOVEWEB is something posted on my own channel and I'm the animator of the show and helping Manon and Cybermare.
Gondola is showcased here because I already knew I was going to make a Gondola episode at that point. That boi was already in my long list of topics I wanna cover in LOVEWEB. Looking back now, LOVEWEB isn't getting as much "meme history" episodes as I thought it would... But I enjoy that LOVEWEB establishes itself quickly as a show that's gonna talk about whatever it wants as long as it's internet related.
At some point in the show, the ultra meme text of the poster above Manon's computer just dissapears and I never bothered to put it back lol.
Also yes, I will point out every single errors. It is my burden when the show is praised for its attention to detail.
This is the first example of establishing LOVEWEB as "real". As in, Manon and Cybermare are real and they post things on OUR internet. And if you bother checking if this Twitter is real or not, you can find lil bonuses on there. I've always liked rewarding people who are willing to go the extra step for with kind of thing when engaging with media. I've always been left disatisfied when shows do this sort of thing because most of the time, they don't keep up with the bit. With LOVEWEB, I wanna make the show that pushes this concept to its FULL POTENTIAL.
Before and after the Cybermare shot, you can see manon like, put something behind their back. This was excecuted pooorly but it was supposed to answer the question "If Cybermare is filming Manon, then who's filming Cybermare?" And the answer to that question nobody asked is: Manon through their own phone. Except it doesn't matter at all in the end because who caaaaares. This is the kind of detail I used to really obsess over lol. I stopped caring about the camera being diegetic when the RFCK episode happened.
Newgrounds! Yeah, this was a way to poke the viewer to inform that the show is also available on Newgrounds with stuff that'd get the episode demonetised not censored. Starting with the Yume Nikki episodes, Episodes would get a custom lil intro with Cybermare riding the Newgrounds logo saying "The fucking uncensored version bitch" (unless that episode somehow contained no swearing from Cybermare). I feel like if I remade the pilot today, I would have tweeked the sequence where they talk about Youtube monetisation because from the perspective of the Newgroundss upload, this bit doesn't really make sense.
Aaand that's all I gotta say for the pilot and the creation of the show! Thanks a lot for reading all this, I'm pretty sure none of the other bonus pages will be as long since this covers the pilot and creation of the show.