Say you’re searching for the right animation house to produce a commercial. You can do things the old fashioned way, calling reps, requesting 3/4" reels, or you can surf through dozens of corporate Web sites, reviewing their rosters and recent credits via QuickTime and Flash software. In the process, you may find yourself-like the human characters in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-lost in Toon Town, a virtual paradise for fans of animated films and commercials.
Animation companies, which often use their sites to promote work, are expanding their Internet presence even further, in some cases offering original programming. Wild Brain, San Francisco, recently launched wildbrain. com, a Web channel that showcases original animated series, and Renegade Animation, Burbank, Calif. is on the verge of launching Renegade Cartoons, featuring a character called Elmo Aardvark.
The flow between commercial work to pure entertainment goes both ways. Spumco, the Glendale, Calif.-based animation studio owned by John Kricfalusi, who is president of the company and the creator of Ren and Stimpy, produces an online animated series called The Goddamn George Liquor Program, which is sponsored by Tower Records. Kricfalusi, who is also creating advertisements specifically for the Web, oversees a kind of animated studio system-a whole lineup of cartoon characters available for series work, or for spokesperson deals.
Meanwhile, already gaining acceptance are corporate sites with password-protected areas set aside for agency creatives and clients, facilitating immediate feedback on animation tests, character drawings and other works in progress.
Below is a look at some of the Web site offerings from animation houses that work extensively on spots.
WILD BRAIN
Wild Brain, which can be found on the Web at www.wildbrain.com, launched itsWeb channel late last year in conjunction with Yahoo!, the global Internet company. Wildbrain.com features on-demand video streaming available through a broadcast services agreement with Yahoo!. Under the terms of the deal, Yahoo! is providing Internet broadcasting solutions for Wild Brain’s video animation programming, which is also available on Yahoo! Broadcast (broadcast.yahoo.com.)
Active in commercials, films, TV series and new media productions, Wild Brain will debut an original animated series, Glue, on wildbrain.com. Glue is an Internet-exclusive program that features colorful "unhuman" characters in their quirky 2-D town.
Plans also call for wildbrain.com to feature four prime attractions: "Digital Drive-In," which consists of original animation produced exclusively for the site; "Festivals," which contains content, interviews and live broadcasts from fests throughout the world; "Showcase," which features animated projects from around the globe; and a games section.
The talent behind the new site includes Wild Brain creative director John Hays (who is also the company’s president/co-founder), general manager John Kirtland (former director of international for Go Network, the Disney/Infoseek portal), and wildbrain.com producer Amy Capen. A veteran animation producer, Capen worked in the early ’90s on MTV’s Liquid Television.
Glue is the brainchild of David Fremont, a Bay Area animator. "David’s work lends itself well to the Web," says Capen. "It’s bold, graphic, somewhat minimal, with great voices and sound design."
"We’re believers in the Internet, and we have been looking for the right situation for Wild Brain to program Web content that complements the balance of our business," says Jeffery C. Ulin, CEO of Wild Brain. "As a leader in streaming on the Web, Yahoo! has a global brand, audience, and the multimedia distribution network to help us extend the reach of our animation programming."
Meanwhile, Wild Brain’s commercial division is working with Oxygen Media on another animated series called Reality Chick, which will be shown online as well as on the new Oxygen cable channel.
RENEGADE
Renegade Animation, founded in ’92 by executive producer Ashley Postlewaite, and animation director Darrell Van Citters, can be found at www.renegadeanimation.com, and beginning in February, at www.renegadecartoons.com. Some of the company’s recent broadcast credits include the Frito-Lay spots "Ice Sculptor" and "Stunt Double," via BBDO, New York, with animation direction by Van Citters and live-action helmed by Jon Francis of Jon Francis Films, San Francisco.
"We can’t trace any jobs specifically back to the Web site," says Van Citters. "But we are getting a lot of traffic there. [Our site is] a sales tool in that people can look at some of our work in QuickTime, and if they want to know more, we’ll send them a reel."
Will the site someday obviate the need to send reels? "Right now the challenge is bandwidth," says Postlewaite. "Some clients are set up to do it, where others prefer to get set up in a conference room to review reels. Clients with very tight schedules tend to get hip to [the Web] quickly, since you can gain a day at every point in the production schedule if you’re willing to look at work in progress this way."
The Renegade Cartoons site will feature Elmo Aardvark, Outer Space Detective!, an animated weekly serial. Will Ryan, who created the ukulele-playing, crime fighting Elmo, maintains that the character was created by his grandfather Terwilliger Ryan, a pioneering 19th century animator.
SPUMCO
Amid the links for its comedy series, Spumco, whose Internet location is at www.spumco.com, offers a look at what may be the future of advertising: a sample spot, created specifically for the Web, promoting a fictional cereal called "Rice Patooties." The spokesman, a green creature named Wally Whimsy, emerges from the box of cereal, banters with a couple of kids, and offers them prizes and coupons for trying the product. Wally, unlike a TV pitchman, can engage viewers while they wait to be linked to the sponsor’s site, or while waiting for a new episode of an entertainment series (starring Wally or another animated character) to load on their personal computers.
The idea, says Kricfalusi, was to show how commercial sponsors can do more with their Internet ad dollars than they ever could with simple banner ads. "It’s a reminder of how much control a sponsor has over where the spot is placed online," says Kricfalusi. "That’s something sponsors don’t have on television anymore. [On the Web] You can lead people right from the content of the ad, to the store, the company Web site."
Kricfalusi, who in the past has directed animated ads for Old Navy, is currently in talks with a cereal company that was impressed by the Rice Patooties demo.
PITCH TV
Pitch, a New York-based entertainment studio, does live action as well as animated spots. The comp-any is presently using two Web sites. There’s a corporate site, soon to be folded into its more comprehensive, graphics-intensive site, www. pitchtv.com. "The whole reason Pitch came about," says partner/co-founder S.D. Katz, "was to be a content-creation studio involved in TV and film production as well as the Internet. Pitch TV is a channel for distribution of short films, as well being a home for our arts and entertainment magazine."
Pitch’s directors use the newer Web site to speed the client-approval process. Recent credits from Pitch include spots for Nature Made, Tropicana, 3M and FOX Kids. A future avenue for Pitch’s work, Katz says, may be so called "viral campaigns"-which are not computer viruses, but rather online-only ads and promotional clips, like the Dancing Baby or animated greeting cards. Viral campaigns are created specifically for Web sites, such as search engines that accept free content.
WILL VINTON
STUDIOS
The word claymation was trademarked by Will Vinton Studios, Portland Ore., and has been synonymous with the shop for 25 years. However, says president/CEO Tom Turpin, the company Web site-www.vinton.com-will continue to demonstrate that with 28 directors and numerous animation techniques, there is no house style. Last year, the studio worked on more than 50 spots, including the long-running series of ads featuring talking M&M candies. Vinton is also producing two TV series for FOX, The PJs and the upcoming Gary & Mike. Additionally in the works is a fantasy-themed miniseries for Christmas 2001.
Turpin says the studio is expanding its Web site to promote the extracurricular creative of its spot directors, and is developing an Intranet to facilitate work at its four-building campus of offices. "We’re looking at a kind of videoconferencing that will allow people to see each other at the same time they are seeing works in progress," says Turpin. "If it works internally, the next step would be to open it to clients. Most people don’t have the bandwidth to do that right now, but maybe three years down the road, it could happen.
"The Web is not the best vehicle for having people get to know us," he continues. "It’s better to be in the same room, but once you’ve established relationships, the Web is good for maintaining them." For now, that means using the Internet to send works-in-progress, and inviting clients and agency people to attend the company’s summer animation camp, an intensive workshop with Vinton’s staffers.
DUCK SOUP Studios
Duck Soup Studios, the Los Angeles-based animation company, launched its Web site, www.ducksoupla.com, four years ago. It’s used primarily as a means to speed production time-for instance, posting animation tests and color models for agency contacts. "We’ve also been using it to represent our commercial work," says Mark Medernach, the company’s executive producer. "We are working on a short film of our own, and we’ll probably post excerpts on our site as we are submitting it to festivals." The computer-generated film, now called Snow Man, is currently in production, with Lane Nakamura directing. His recent credits include Wal-Mart’s "Rolling, Rolling, Rolling," via Bernstein-Rein, Kansas City, Mo., and "Come to Life," for Nestle and Toy Story 2, out of Dailey & Associates, West Hollywood.
CELLULOID studios
This Denver-based production company launched its Web site, www.celluloidstudios.com, a little over a year ago. "Because we are doing so much business with international clients, in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Mexico, to name a few," explains executive producer Jan Johnson, "we literally do all of the approval process via the Internet."
One link gives information on its sister company, Celluloid Entertainment, which is developing an animated television series called Space Cat. The site, currently undergoing a redesign, will eventually include a "kind of creative notebook or sketchpad section," says Johnson. "We’d like to make a creative forum available to agency creatives, if they’d like to have the page for a month, and to some of the really talented students we work with, as well as our own directors."
CURIOUS
Bicoastal Curious Pictures can be found at www.curiouspictures.com. The site mainly covers personnel, company history, and credits. In addition to its recent spot work, including "EKG" and "Heart Feeling," directed by Jason Kedgley of the animation and design collective Tomato, via Oglivy & Mather, New York, Curious Pictures produced a pilot called Avenue Amy, for Oxygen. In addition to the series, Curious is producing a series of short films for the new network. The pilot was conceived and directed by designer/director Joan Raspo, whose most recent spot work was a series of ads for Time Warner Cable.
"Our Web site is mostly about supplementing and amplifying information about us and our directors," says Richard Winkler, VP/executive producer. "But it is becoming a more important part of marketing and production. Right now, it’s very handy in the production process."
Winkler believes online reels and director archives will eventually replace 3/4" reels. "Think about it," he says. "You can put every spot a director ever did into one place. When you get calls from agencies looking for a particular kind of spot, you could search, send them to a special area of your company site, give [the agency] a password so they can download it and pass it around the agency. If they want to find out more, they can scan all of the director’s work."
