The Developing Trend of Webisodes
Wade Konowalchuk speaks with the creators of College University to discuss their latest animation project starring Cynthia Rothrock, martial arts movie star.
Cartoon lovers can view yet another on-line flash animated series on the World Wide Web, and this one, ‘College University’ features some big-name voice talent this week.
‘College University’, one of the internet’s longer running on-line series’ is making it big in the world of on-line entertainment. Over the last year, the series has seen its fair share of hits on the “hit counter”, now reaching the one million mark on their web site. Most of their hits consist of “die-hard fans, who have originally come from another site, newgrounds.com, where our episodes have totalled over a couple million hits”, according to Mike Parker and Johnie Tidwell, two of the founders and main creative people of the project.
This week, College University features Cynthia Rothrock. For those of you who are not Kung-Fu movie gurus, Cynthia Rothrock is a big name female martial arts movie star. No, she has not been in any Tom Hanks or Kevin Bacon films, meaning she is not a household name, but for the webisode industry, she is big a star, and not the first one featured on ‘College University’ either. The World Wrestling Federation’s Macho Man, Randy Savage was featured in a past episode as well. How do they get this calibre of talent in a webisode that apparently has no budget?
“Getting Cynthia (and Macho Man Randy Savage) was all Johnie Tidwell”, Mike Parker claims. “We had been talking about trying to land some celebrity name for the show, to help bring added attention, and mix up the show a bit. Well Johnie simply put out the call to a few select people, people who we thought would fit into the show and crack us up as well. So when Cynthia said she wanted to do it, I think she got a kick out of the idea of seeing herself as a cartoon. And I know she had a fun time recording the voices”.
Now, we would assume that each episode, which currently is running at a time of 16 minutes, would cost a small fortune to produce. Not so, according to Mike Parker. “It costs next to nothing to make an episode of ‘College University’. Actually, there is no budget; it’s all ‘out-of-pocket’. Our team members all work full time jobs and a lot of the equipment and software I use has just been slowly accumulated over the past couple of years”. When asked where all the work is done, Mike replied, “Well the main offices are located in…my living room! All the work is done on my iMac in Stamford, CT. As for the “in-house” staff, I guess it’s just me and my girlfriend. I’m the only animator in CU, so until we’re making cartoons on TV, I don’t see the staff getting much bigger”.
The creative process of writing each episode of this crazy series comes from three of the team members, Mike Parker, Andy Parker, and Michael Williams. One of them comes up with the original idea, and the other team members build around the initial concept. On average, with this small team, each episode takes on average three to five months to produce from script to final output to web. The majority of this production time is taken up by animation itself as, as mentioned before, the team members all work full-time jobs in order to pay the bills. With each new episode, improvements are made, and more attention is paid to other parts which are felt lacking, in hope of some day, having the show on television.
“We’re really a small operation trying to do great things. We’ve been trying to improve all aspects of our show from episode to episode; better voice acting, animation, storylines, etc. We’re all so focused on our goal of getting College University to television, that we really see it as just a matter of time, and the right person seeing the show to realize how funny and stupid we are. Perfect prime time material. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with the majority of my free time than making a crazy cartoon trying to make people laugh, and we don’t even get paid for it! I think my head will explode when I get my first pay check for this stuff”.
Unfortunately, as most of us know, the internet is not a good way of making any money if you are in the animation business. The only way to make any sort of money on the net is apparently pornography or the selling of Viagra. However, the team of College University, while they would love to get paid for what they are doing, appears to be doing it for the love of the art. While they have hopes of it getting their exposure, and being seen by the right person and eventually, hopefully, making it to the television air waves, it is still for the love of the art. This is a nice thing to see someone doing in these days of late, as studios close their production facilities due to apparent “non-profitability”.
To screen the latest episode of ‘College University’, as well as all the other episodes which are archived on their site, visit www.collegeuniv.com