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What is Noakes?
An adult cartoon series for YouTube following the strange lives of eight flatmates from the Noakes accommodation block of a university campus.
WARNING - BEFORE WATCHING NOAKES:
I consider Noakes my riskiest work: a cartoon trapped in a completely immoral setting, where fun is chased at any cost, however pathetic.
The very NSFW Noakes pilot episode, made in 2013 but not uploaded until now in 2019, ISN'T SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN OR CHILDISH GROWN ADULTS.
If you can't watch depictions of immoral behaviour without feeling justified in emulating or advocating it, DO NOT WATCH NOAKES AND GROW UP ALREADY.
If you've done said growing up, by all means watch but please bear in mind: the pilot's language, behaviour and uncensored-stark-depictions-of-pornography-and-sexual-situations ARE part of a bigger picture, which will be laid out in this blog post.
If you're concerned by what you see, fear not. I don't plan to resurrect Noakes exactly in THIS way if I bring it back. I trust readers of this blog to be civil in their viewing of content like this.
UPDATE - NOVEMBER 2019: Noakes WAS on YouTube, but due to the recent YouTube/COPPA situation, I've moved Noakes to Dailymotion along with all my other videos. Please don't be confused when I discuss YouTube on this page whilst using a video embed from Dailymotion!
What do you need to know about Noakes?
As I went through the ordeal that Empyrean was based on, I lived on campus and wanted to open up to others about said ordeal. The response was always "stop whining and get wasted." My distress at my unethical workplace fell on deaf ears among campus colleagues. On campus, you either had fun getting drunk and partying or you were left alone to feel lost. I kept remembering this as I wrote Empyrean.
In moving Empyrean online, I researched YouTube's biggest channels, wanting to learn how to boost my viewing figures. Reading those channel's comment-sections, I could tell my web audience would react to Empyrean as campus did to my living-it-out: STOP WHINING, GET WASTED. YouTube's biggest viewer-base was, it seemed to me, a giant frat-party. For my first YouTube-intended project, no setting felt more appropriate than campus.
The Noakes cast was very much trapped living where morals were meaningless. I wanted the viewer stuck in this trap, but couldn't legitimize such a trap by including voice-of-reason characters in the cast. Once I made all of Noakes' characters morally oblivious, the trap at last felt genuine. You were stuck watching a riot of the socially-unhinged and you couldn't do a thing about it.
As a show, Noakes itself couldn't express anguish or outrage at the deeds on campus. Fatally stupid levels of drinking would be heartily showcased and revered. Bloody vomit would be spewed and wretched alcohol poisoning shown matter-of-factly. Andrew would shame drinking only to be dismissed as a snide snob who is clearly missing out on fun, as sound as his reasoning may be. Gethin masturbating over Pokémon pornography? Normal and pedestrian, just like Ronnie keeping his shaved pubic hair glued to his face for a week. Noakes episodes would be nothing but snapshots of a crazed, perverted place created by the broken system that is higher education, existing for no-one's benefit, a sick joke at the expense of the young.
The true danger of the Noakes trap was in how fun it felt. Viewers could be ensnared by Noakes' warped festivities at any moment. The show's presentation encapsulated this deadly fun: the environments built from video-game pixel visuals, the animation crude, choppy and cynically silly, the music shamelessly stolen (consequence-free on YouTube at the time) and the tone of the dialogue jovial and witty (in-between brutally real and peppered with unapologetic harmful terms).
Noakes reflected my maddened efforts to find fun in a culture that rejected ethics. By no means did I want to risk evoking insensitive or discriminatory attitudes in viewers, but since people on campuses DID violate boundaries and use terms like "dyke" and "retard" liberally without ever telling each other not to, it was something I, unfortunately, couldn't fail to acknowledge.
Did this mean Noakes was destined to be YouTube garbage? I didn't think so at the time, as long as I wrote and produced the show with skill and quality. Deliver tight dialogue, layered narratives, well-paced plots and engaging characters and viewers will see the trashy aspects of Noakes as part of a bigger picture: a manic portrait of young adults lost in the wastes of societal failure.
After making the pilot episode though, I decided to scrap it's release and re-purpose Noakes for it's official launch. I learned from the pilot how to structure a Noakes episode and what the writing needed to be, but felt I could convey the chaos-junkie mood and bleak heart of Noakes without the show, to be frank, adding to YouTube's already-toxic landscape. The Simpsons in it's peak years was ultimately safe viewing and managed to deconstruct western culture for it's every failing so incisively AND so amusingly. There was no excuse for Noakes not to do likewise.
The Noakes pilot is online today as an example of the show's sensory tone. The Noakes I aimed to build from this pilot (and may YET build) would have unloaded a more measured, considered scorn. And dropped those distracting speech bubbles!
Also, I would have improved on the flatmates, adding more women (and hiring an actress to voice them. Alex was the only girl in the pilot because I could only do one non-male voice), scrapping duplicate characters (Gethin and Lewis ended up being the same person) and making room for an actual eighth character (As a gag, Laurence was only supposed to cameo in each episode and never talk, but the show would still treat him like a main character). Look out for the re-worked cast below in my Demon Toy Deathmatch cartoons.
Want me to build on Noakes? Please go to patreon.com/lenaray - That's...
...and support... well... the flat's destructive habits!
Any questions, confusion or compliments about Noakes? Leave a comment below!
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