by Maud Kersnowski
In a demo-heavy panel at Digital Coast 2000, five online animation leaders commented on their creative process and revenue models. Speakers ranged from Internet newcomer and television/music performer Claude Brooks, CEO of C To The B Productions to Thrave CEO Reid Gershbein, who spent five years as a technical director/artist at Pixar Animation Studio working on projects like Toy Story 2 and A Bug's Life.
Only two or three people work on each Thrave series, according to Gershbein. "At Pixar, I saw that there were 100 to 150 people working on projects for years… It was stifling creativity," Gershbein said. "It's time right now for small groups of people to create… the industry [of animation] will be revitalized this way."
Staff isn't the only thing these sites are keeping thin. They're designing 56k modem-compatible files instead of waiting around for broadband. "We used to do epic length things, for the Web--five minutes. Now we're doing more digestible stuff," said Bob Cesca, founder of Camp Chaos , a site best known for the Metallica/Napster satire, Napster Bad .
"We're a satirical pit bull," Cesca explained. "We don't let go until what we're hooked into is a quivering mass of Jell-O. That's basically what we've don't to Metallica."
While Cesca rips apart Lars Ulrich, Brad deGraf, founder of DotComix , is running Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury comic character Duke for president. The Duke 2000 campaign can be found on and off the Web. Recently, the animated puppet appeared on Larry King Live for an hour. Warner Bros . is now sponsoring the Duke 2000 campaign, which uses the slogan "Compassionate Fascism." As far as the bottom line goes, deGraf said, "whether we're in the black, we'll know in three months--when we finish taking campaign contributions."
Most of these sites pay a portion of their bills with cross-media marketing, either through syndication or sponsorship. Honkworm CEO, Johan Liedgren , who is best known for Fish Bar, related, "we make broadcast quality and then dumb it down for a 56k modem." Honkworm is not a destination site; instead it syndicates its material to places like Yahoo and Excite .
StickyFlicks 's Co-Founder and President David Burke's goal is library building, as well as producing games like Rock'em Sock'em Rabbis and shorts of Jarmak, the foul mouthed-but-informative alien. "What we're doing is accumulating as much cartoon properties as we can," Burke explained.
Brooks, creator of 40+Shorty, has a deal in place with Paramount . In addition, AtomFilms put in an order for 26 shorts, for which there's talk of a television spin-off. "I'm not sure how this is going to translate to TV but, if they're payin', I'm takin'," Brooks commented.