Symel

Banner logo

Symel

Type(s): Animation, motion comic

Medium(s): Internet series

Genre(s): Hacker comedy, parody

Starring: N/A

Tools: KolourPaint, Piga Animator

Writer(s): Graham L. Wilson

Director(s): Graham L. Wilson

Artist(s): Graham L. Wilson

Soundtrack: N/A

Theme: TBD

Episodes: 20 shorts

First: January 1, 2006

Last: February 10, 2007

License(s): GNU Free Documentation License, CC BY-SA

Website: http://icculus.org/mwm/symel

Symel is a free content Internet cartoon project founded by Graham L. Wilson and first created on January 1, 2006. The cartoons follow a flock of penguins (with a female named Symel being the star character) living in the Antarctic wastes. These penguins look like the Linux kernel mascot Tux, with inaccurate yellow beaks and feet, and are out spoken supporters of free software. Singularly, the government of the penguins is in the form of a "Quakeocracy" in which the leader (Quakemaster) is selected through a Quake III Arena tournament. There is a source of conflict between the penguins and a group of American soldiers stationed at a near by military and research base (called Little America in homage to a one-time real-life establishment). The penguins also meet trouble from a Killer Whale or attempts by the media industry against their free media values.

Sometimes the cartoons take the form of parodies of advertisements such as one where a Fido Solutions holiday commercial was changed to make Santa into a cruel and malicious slave driver with a violent temper (this Santa is now an official character; there was also a whole page dedicated to humourous advertisement modifications). There is also one cross-over into another fictional universe, where the Bug Fairy from Casey and Andy torments Symel (also appearing later when Symel is trying to work on a fire works launcher).

The uploaded cartoons are in the from of animated Graphics Interchange Formats, and feature slides showing the character's actions frame-by-frame as something of a motion comic as opposed to a proper animation. Speech was provided by it being written out in text with a line pointing towards the speaker. The original cartoons were drawn in KolourPaint and animated with a small freeware tool with a more abstract and wavy art style produced by the pencil tool. At the end of 2006, these character templates were replaced with more symmetrical and conventional art styles based more on the line tool. In 2007 and 2008, Wilson experimented with more advanced animations, oddly enough created with the Game Maker software creation tool. These included some remakes of the original GIFs and new adventures, none of which have been publicly released. In 2008, the website and created GIFs were taken down and the website was redone to "to remove antiquated or potentially misleading information." The new site was finished and uploaded in January 2009 but an account corruption lead to it coming down in the summer.

The cartoonist has since abandoned Game Maker and is building a custom made animation tool for himself to use in Gambas, initially due to resource intensiveness of Game Maker and his own tool running on the GNU/Linux operating system. The tool is called Piga Animator, being developed under the auspices of Piga Software as a general purpose tool for the creation of 2D machinima. This was intended to be used for a fully animated special called Symel: Please, Please, be Fair Use!, which would feature a grand parody of science fiction, old shareware computer games and various aspects of mass and cult media. This has since been reworked into a proposed reboot of ten minute serialized and one-shot shorts inspired by the format and deep lore of Adventure Time.

On June 1, 2011, the Symel website was re-launched as a sub-section of the new website for Malcolm Wilson Multimedia, bringing it formally under its auspices alongside Brogo and later Space Rover. The current cartoons are released under version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License, as is a Symel play script and the text of the website (also under GNU Verbatim). The site also features a small online exploration game written in HTML called Symel: Antarctic Explorer where players would take the role of the Symel and explore through various areas of the cartoon's setting (graphics made in ASCII text art).