Last week, Evan Spiridellis and I spoke at the 2006 Flashforward Conference, an event produced by Lynda.com. The title of our session was JibJab’s Animation Process and How a Small Studio Can Reach a Big Audience, and we spoke for just over an hour. Evan walked the audience through the JibJab animation process – from animatic to animation to finished product. I presented several animators and small teams that are reaching big audiences, first which was JibJab, who had over 80 million people watch ‘This Land‘ and ‘Good to be in DC!‘ during the 2004 election. Here’s the slides from my presentation detailing JibJab’s recent successes.

Back then, it was really 2 guys doing it all, and this is the story I repeated many times over during the night.

Next I spoke about Jennifer Shiman and her ’30 Second Bunnies Theatre,’ the Flash-animated series currently airing on Starz! on Demand. As many of you know from reading the CHF interview with Jennifer, she pretty much a one-woman band, writing, animating, and directing alone, and she gets over 1.8 million unique views a month at her angryalien.com site.

Amanita Design was the next studio featured. This 2-man shop out of Brno, Czech Republic is creating viral click-along games like Samorost 2 and linear music videos with a very small team. Jakub Dvorsky, the founder, gets over 500,000 unique views a month at his site.

Weebls-stuff.com is the playground for Weebl, the British animator. He and a small cadre of animators create ‘Weebl & Bob’ and other funny series like ‘Magical Trevor.’ They get a staggering number of cartoon views every month – over 5 million!

Bernard Derriman animated the music video for TISM’s ‘Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me,’ which went on to become a hugely viral video. He animates alone, and he gets over 50,000 unique visitors to his site, arjandpoopy.com, every month. I completely missed posting about Bernard’s holiday ‘Arj and Poopy’ episode, but you can still see it here.

Adam Phillips, who happens to be an old working buddy of Bernard’s, won his 3rd Flashforward festival trophy for his Flash-animated short ‘littleFoot.’ He too is a one-man Flash army, writing, directing and barely sleeping while crafting his Brackenwood series. In a good month, he gets over 300,000 unique visitors to his site.

James Farr, the creator of ‘Xombie,’ is currently in production on a direct-to-DVD feature version of his Flash-animated series. All by his lonesome, deep in the heart of Tulsa, Oklahoma, James has written, animated and produced 7 online ‘Xombie’ shorts, and now he’s teamed up with Wetsand animation to create the long-form version. He has over 1 million subscribers to his ‘Xombie’ mailing list.

Laith Bahrani’s ‘Low Morale’ series brought down the house during our presentation. We screened episode 9, and the crowd went nuts. Very funny stuff. Laith is the sole animator on his shorts, and he’s welcomed over 800,000 visitors to his site since 2004.

And last, but not least, we talked about ‘Queer Duck: The Movie’ which is due to wrap production sometime soon. It’s a Flash-animated feature project penned by Mike Reiss, a Simpsons writer, and Xeth Feinberg is heading up the animation effort. He’s working with a team that’s usually smaller than 10, and he’s been in production since last summer.

While it’s not always about the size of the audience, it’s still impressive to see so few reaching so many. Thanks to everyone for contributing to our presentation, and to Lynda Weinman (of Lynda.com) for hosting us up in Seattle.

Jakub Dvorsky has done it again. The follow-up to Samorost, the wildly successful Flash-animated game, has launched. Samorost 2 is a continuation of the original, which takes place in space, on a mossy-log planet. If you haven’t played it yet, I recommend this game to just about anyone, as you navigate through the game with only your mouse and your mind. It’s engaging, haunting and highly-addictive. The design and character animation is by Vaclav Blin and the ethereal music is by Tomas Dvorak.

This time around, Jakub and his team at Amanita Design have arranged a business plan, hoping to entice the audience to pay for the second half of the experience. The price is currently set at $9.90, and Jakub has also built in a store for t-shirt sales.

Cold, Hard Flash interviewed Jakub earlier this year about his experiences, and you can read about how he achieves the unique look in his projects.

One of the hottest interactive experiences of the last few years is undoubtedly ‘Samorost.’ This 2004 Webby Award nominee starts off innocently enough, with haunting music and eye-catching graphics. But then, before you know it, you’re hooked, and you’ve fallen into Jakub’s world.

It’s a land of enchanting, mossy log houses, hookah-smoking ski lift operators, and phonograph loving squirrels, all wrapped into a challenging yet remarkably simple Flash game. You end up saving a planet from imminent doom, but along the way, you’ve seen Jakub Dvorsky graduate from art school. ‘Samorost,’ a Czech word which loosely translates to ‘anthropomorphic wood,’ was his senior thesis from VSUP, and it also helped Jakub graduate to the upper echelons of the interactive business world.

Not long after Samorost crashed his friend’s server,

Nike came calling, followed by The Polyphonic Spree, the 24-member band heard in last year’s ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’ Jakub created extensions of his Samorost world for these two marketing efforts, both filled with more aged logs, budding fruit and one rather famous jet-shoed hoops player. And more recently, Jakub has been dabbling in the linear world of animation. He has again teamed up with a band, Under Byen, a Danish group that seems overdue to hit it big in the States. Jakub’s new music video project (or video clip, as he calls it) is a Flash production filled with his stunning photography and photoshop work, and it plays against a hauntingly beautiful track that draws inevitable comparisons to Bjork and Sigur Ros (click for MP3).

Jakub lives in Brno, Czech Republic, which is not far from where my wife, Daniela, grew up. We are so excited to see a Czech native burning so bright in the Flash world, and we wish he and his new company Amanita Design the best of luck.

AARON SIMPSON: When did you first start using Macromedia’s Flash software?
JAKUB DVORSKY: It was in 2001.

AS: At what point did you realize that ‘Samorost’ had become a worldwide internet hit?

JD: Initially ‘Samorost’ was hosted on a server which was paid for by my friends for their music club website for a couple of weeks, but soon the server collapsed from the huge overload, so I realized the game is far more popular then I expected.

AS: How does your character design process work? Do you first design on paper?
JD: Yes, first I make simple sketches on paper and then I re-draw it in Flash (characters) or Photoshop (backgrounds).

AS: Your recent animation for the Danish band Under Byen was produced as a linear, non-interactive project. Does this type of work interest you as much as your interactive projects?
JD: I’m mainly interested in interactive projects, but to make a video clip for Under Byen was a challenge for me because I love their music and I always wanted to make video clips.

AS: What functionality would you like to see in the next version of Flash?
JD: Better work with bitmaps and a faster player. I saw a presentation of new Flash at the Macromedia Conference in Japan so I expect it will be very fast.

AS: What was the most exciting part of your experience at the Max Conference in Japan?
JD: I was there only 5 days, but I experienced the end of a very strong typhoon and an earthquake, otherwise I met a lot of very fine people.

AS: The photos in your Flash projects are beautiful. Did you have extensive photography training?
JD: No I’m self-taught.

AS: What personal projects are next for you?

JD: Now I’m working on sequel to Samorost, but it’s too early for publishing screenshots from it because it’ll take at least 6 more months to finish it (it will be much longer then Samorost).

AS: You’ve said before that the nature photographs in your work were taken near your cottage. Where is this cottage?
JD: It’s near Moravska Trebova, about 70km from Brno where I live.

AS: When you were attending VSUP (The Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design, Prague), was Flash a major part of your curriculum?
JD: No, I studied classical animation – hand drawn and puppet. Computer training was on my own initiative.

AS: I’m slowly learning to speak Czech – do you have any words of advice?
JD: You should know how to order beer in pub:)

pivo – beer
jeste jedno – one more
zaplatim – can I pay?