HomeAboutArchivesElsewhere Send tips, links, and feedback to gbeato­at­soundbitten.com. June 18, 2003 FLASH DANCE (This article originally appeared in SPIN a few years ago ­ can't remember the exact issue date.) The excited Italian tourists think they've stumbled onto some chance fabulousness. The Academy Awards are just three days away, and this particular stretch of Sunset Boulevard between The Standard and the Chateau Marmont, two hotels catering to the hip and/or famous, is swarming with expensively accessorized Hollywood foot soldiers. "This is for the Oscars?" one of the tourists inquires. "There are stars here?" A year ago, or even six months ago, the tourist would have never made such a mistake, because the event that is actually taking place here now, the Yahoo Internet Life Online Film Festival, would not have drawn such a scrupulously elite crowd. But thanks to a few technological advances, AOL's purchase of Time Warner, and some big deals between Web entertainment site Shockwave.com and a handful of industry vanguards, online entertainment has replaced Kaballah as Hollywood's latest exotic religion ­ and while its new adherents may not be completely sure about what all the funny words mean yet, or how this stuff's really going to change their lives, it has to mean something, right, because why else would Dreamworks potentate Jeffrey Katzenberg be here, or South Park's Matt Stone, or Swingers director Doug Liman, or noted new media theorist James Belushi? Look, even Invisible Mom II co­star Micky Dolenz is here, slipping into Shockwave.com's bungalow at the Marmont, helping himself to some complimentary apples and bananas, then politely asking if he can rinse them off in the kitchen. Like a lot of people, he's still a little skeptical about the goods, perhaps, but that's not going to stop him from taking his chances on the Great Internet Fruit Basket too. *** It's one of those sentimental Hollywood tales that seems manufactured by Hollywood itself ­ toiling away for many years in the privileged, overpaid world of big­budget movies and TV, directors and writers like David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Larry David are finally get a shot at pursuing their true artistic dream: creating brief, herky­jerky cartoons for an audience looking for free entertainment that's a bit more workplace­appropriate than amateurgynecologist.com. Or maybe it's not quite like that, but still, in the world of online entertainment right now, the hottest sector is animation. Why? Three reasons. One, while we wait for broadband future, where super­fast networks will deliver TV­quality video to desktop computers, Palm Pilots, and enhanced TVs, 10 to 15­frames­per­second cartoons created in Macromedia's Flash and other similar formats can be distributed over today's low­bandwidth Internet more efficiently than live­action video. Two, over 200 million people have downloaded the Flash player, so there's already big audience out there. And three, online animation is relatively cheap and easy to produce. With even the lowest budget movie, you generally need some actors, a cameraman, and a couple of production assistants to belittle. But with animation, one or two people can literally do everything. Because of all these factors, a whole new entertainment genre has developed on the Web over the last few months: the short, episodic animated series. A couple miles down the road from the glamour at Chateau Marmont and the Standard, on a block of La Cienega Boulevard that features a strip club, a membership­only underpants store called Trashy Lingerie, and several discount Persian rug emporiums, Peter Gilstrap and Mark Brooks are busy recording the dialogue for the latest episode of their series, Creamburg. The main room of their two­room office is small, poorly ventilated, window­free, and furnished with an orange faux­ velour couch and matching armchair, a well­worn zebra­print rug, two large metal desks (for them) and one tiny metal desk (for their assistant animator). The other room, which serves as their recording studio, is even smaller. Still, this modest set­up represents progress of sorts: just a few weeks ago, Brooks' apartment bedroom served as the headquarters of the duo's company, Gifted Men Productions, which is now working on three web­based animation series. "Here's how we do it," says Gilstrap, whose shaven head and trim goatee give him the appearance of an evil Las Vegas magician. He steps into a makeshift recording booth ­ two mattresses stood on end in the corner of the studio room ­ and assumes the halting, deadpan baritone of Jerry Creamburg, a jaded Hollywood spokesfigure who looks like the improbable offspring of Harry Dean Stanton and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Brooks has slipped on a pair of thick­framed indie­geek glasses and now sits hunched in front of an old PC, listening to a previously recorded clip of Gilstrap­as­Creamburg to make sure Gilstrap is getting the voice right. "Here, get a dose of him," Brooks says, playing back a clip through the headphones Gilstrap has donned. "He's a little more subdued." As Gilstrip listens to the clip, his dog Bingo wanders around the room. "Come on, Bingo, sit, be quiet," he says, then begins to read his dialogue. Occasionally, he flubs a line and does it again. A couple other times, someone walks loudly down the hallway outside, prompting another take. At one point, they have to stop for a minute as an airplane flies overheard. But since these shows are only a couple of minutes long, at most, the recording session goes pretty quickly. In the time it would have taken to get a drink at the overcrowded poolside bar at the Marmont, Gilstrap and Brooks complete the dialogue for one episode of Creamburg and one episode of another series they've started producing, Adventuremen. *** "I was always too lazy to get into traditional animation. All that paper and painting and cels and cameras and pencil tests," says Xeth Feinberg, creator of the online shows Bulbo and Astro Chimp. "With the computer, you just keep tweaking on your own little screen til you get it right. It's much more hands­on." Feinberg started his cartooning career as a Xeroxed mini­comic artist handing out his books to 20 or 30 of his friends in Boston. A few years later, he discovered Macromedia Director and Flash and starting making short animations for MTV. When the Web started to emerge as a distribution medium itself, he agreed to create a 13­episode series for the SciFi Channel's website. That's when he came up with Astro Chimp, a show about a monkey who gets shot into space during the 1950s space­race. "Frankly, their budget was so low, I think I got the job because other more established companies wouldn't touch it," Feinberg says. "But I said, 'Sure, I can make something.' They didn't really have any time or energy to exert any editorial control at all, so it worked out pretty well." In other words, online animation offers the sort of control over a project that creators love. You don't need hundreds of low­cost overseas animators to complete a project. You don't need a slot on Fox's Sunday night line­up to distribute it. Jokes don't get neutered and airbrushed and refined into focus­group­friendly punch lines. "With two guys, you just don't encounter that too­many­cooks thing," says Peter Gilstrap. "There's not that third person, saying, 'I don't think this thing is funny.'" So online animation is, or at least has the potential to be, more personal than the humor­by­ committee fare of the sitcom world, quirkier and more experimental, and more open to newcomers and outsiders who lack entree into the chronically overcrowded world of TV and the movies. At the same time, Hollywood's biggest names are embracing the medium too, because instead of trying to convince the networks and the studios that their more offbeat ideas are worth producing, they can simply put them online and see if there really is an audience for them. At Icebox.com, for example, veteran TV writer Mike Reiss, an executive producer on The Simpsons and the creator of the animated cult hit, The Critic, has created Hard Drinkin' Lincoln, a series that casts President Abraham Lincoln as an alcoholic loudmouth. According to Reiss, "It's a concept I first had like 20 years ago. I was going through my old high school notebooks, and I found this idea ­ what if Lincoln had been acting really obnoxious at Ford's Theater, and that's why John Wilkes Booth killed him?" Having worked on five series, including two that he created, he's been through all the usual TV experiences ­ arbitrary schedule changes, capricious programming executives, focus group hell. Thanks to the success of The Simpsons, he has no great need to work, but when the invitation came from Icebox.com to create his own show for the site, he saw no downside. Instead of a paycheck, Reiss is getting equity in a dot­com whose founders are ostensibly on fast­track to an IPO (Icebox.com is funded by A­list Internet incubator, eCompanies.com), but he says that's not really the attraction. "The scripts don't take that long to write, I get to do whatever I want," he explains. "Why not try it and see how people respond?" Last fall, online animated series were still relatively rare, but now there's dozens, if not hundreds of them, and by next fall, there very well maybe be over a thousand regular weekly shows.