Team AARU is a YouTube community that creates parodies just for-the-heck of it! Our mission is to make fan-made YouTube videos that are, "funny as hell!" (Sandersdapimp - Leader/editor/voice actor of the group). In 2008 Kendall916 stumbled upon Sandersdapimp's earlier works; seeing Sanders talent, she messaged him asking if he was working on creating an abridge group. Sanders messaged her back saying he has a name for the group. The history behind the name was inspired by his best friend. Then he appointed her as public relations gal, and thus Team AARU was born. Q: What is abridging? Abridging is a pop culture phenomenon where a group of individuals collaborate together and create funny parodies/skits of popular animated series. Then they find a selected video clip online, mute and paste their audio over the video, and post the video via YouTube for the masses to see. The range in quality varies depending on the quality of the video and microphones. Some popular abridge series include Dragonball Z Abridge (TeamFourStar), Yugioh the Abridge Series (LittleKuriboh), and Yu Yu Hakusho Abridge (Lanipator), to name a few. Since 2008, the community has been expanding with almost thirty voice actors and partnering with YouTube abridging affiliates. AARU's mission is to try and help promote abridging groups and voice actors that do show potential in their editing and script writing skills, to become professionals. They have expanded past the traditional YouTube and utilize the capabilities of pod-casting and networking through Blip, Facebook, Skype, and the free web domain service provider webs.com. As for editing skills and programs used to create their various levels of work, the group uses a wide range of programs with Sony Vegas; being a highlighted program for editing. Q: Why does it take AARU forever to post an episode? The answer to this question is by summarizing the team’s mantra, 'method to our madness'. When creating an episode, the majority of scripting, editing, and mouth flapping is done by one man (Sandersdapimp). Once the episode is near completion he messages his fellow voice actors asking if they would be interested in doing a role. If the voice actors is interested, he shows the voice actor a picture of the character they will be voicing using the online anime/manga database My Anime List. Once the cast has been set, he creates the lines in a short video and posts them on a special YouTube page where the VA's can see the actual clip that their line would be said and they would email him back the lines. It is a tedious project that takes Sanders a while to get all of the lines because the VA pool tends to be busy with other projects, but the job does get done! And voila! The final product is posted on his main YouTube page where Kendall steps in and networks the episode to podcast and Blip. AARU is continuing to expand as the community is working on promoting the group, as well as informing the masses of the abridging world. In August 2012 Kendall916 attended Nagu Con (http://nagucon.homestead.com/), Montana's first anime convention, to promote AARU. The trip was a very huge success and she plans to attend Nagu Con 2013 in Helena Montana. Team AARU is a YouTube community group done by one man who has many hats. With each episode we post on YouTube, we hope our audiences enjoy watching the videos and support your favorite abridging groups with critiques. If you have any more questions about abridging or would like to bookmark us, check us out on the web at http://teamaaru2.webs.com, http://www.mefeedia.com/TeamAARU, or go to our various youtube pages by searching keyword "TeamAARU".
