Jonti Picking, the founder of weebls-stuff.com, knows exactly what it takes to make a viral short. The ingredients are simple: eggs, talking toast and badgers.

Over in TV land, development executives also have fairly specific parameters for what will make a hit series. Whether you agree with their methods or not, the system has turned out some of the funniest moments in comedy history. Executives look for unique shows with likable, empathetic characters, strong villains, a distinct point of view – or a handful of other elusive traits that lead to high ratings and big profits. This creative navel-gazing is not all hot air.

Some of these “rules” are worth considering while you create your ideas, but its a simple fact that you’ll never know what concepts work until the audience has their say.

With web series, this reality is even more obvious. Most “hit” series that originated on the internet don’t follow the majority of these TV conventions.

And if you tried pitching series like Homestar Runner or Red vs. Blue to TV executives 10 years ago, you’d find yourself flanked by security as you exit the studio.

Or take the shorts on weebls-stuff.com. The 32-year old Picking started the website back in 2003 and his knack for making netizens laugh has shot the portal into the upper echelons of online comedy. He’s since built a blossoming media company – complete a line of toys, posters, t-shirts and a DVD. And now with help from w00t!media, weebls-stuff.com even has big-time corporate partners like Cadbury and T-Mobile.

But regardless of the influx of corporate dollars, his site continues to roll out weird stuff that would have a tough time landing interest in TV land. Go watch the first episode of Weebl and Bob and imagine trying to pitch the concept to a development executive: “Well, you see, there’s this egg, Weebl, who sort of mumbles funny stuff, including his undying love of pie. And his friend Bob, who also likes pie, is deathly afraid of bees. They tend to discuss pie or dress up like anime characters, visit France and then in one episode they get a visit from Stephen Hawking.”

I laughed while I wrote that last paragraph, but I suspect the pitch room would be eerily quiet. Most development executives would be straining to understand where the “entry point” is or how the series can stretch to 50 episodes. Ironically, after a considerable amount of online success, Weebl and Bob ended up with a 30-episode order for MTV UK.

As far as web comedy goes, it appears we’ll need a new rule book. Audiences, who now vote with their mouse clicks, have nominated some of the most bizarre shows as the new kings of comedy. “Viral” series like Salad Fingers, Strongbad Emails and Weebl and Bob break the comedy mold we see every day on television. Funny is still funny, but this is a whole new chapter in comedy.

We’re now seeing the second rise of online comedy, led by Stage 9, Comedy.com, The Onion, Crackle, 60frames, SuperDeluxe, Atom (the only site in the first wave of online comedy) – and most are bankrolled by big, corporate parents. They’re all equipped with development pipelines intent on cracking the “viral” code which has all but eluded big media. Its an unenviable task. Cable’s 300+ channels has become synonymous with overkill, so what do we make of the web’s 10,000+ comedy options? Breaking through this level of clutter will take time, something I hope corporate parents are prepared to suffer.

Feeling lost? Perhaps Picking’s success will help illustrate a few symptoms that can lead to this “viral” disease:

Low Cost: Adobe’s Flash software has helped in that category – and Picking’s crew at weebls-stuff.com have produced handfuls of inexpensive Flash-animated shorts that have gone wildly viral. He uses small teams of animators, who work on a short for a week or so, and the result is a short that costs in the low-thousands. Producers looking to find that magic short will likely create handfuls of duds before one takes off, so keeping the costs low helps. I spoke with the Ask a Ninja team last year, and they were shooting their comedy shorts against a green screen painted in their living room.

Musically Driven: Music was the original thread through most of the original animated series. Series like Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, Happy Harmonies and Silly Symphonies not only featured music, but their titles suggest a musical imperitive. Jonti Picking began his entertainment career in sound engineering, and shorts like Magical Trevor, Badgers and Kenya all feature his infectious, wall-to-wall music. Other examples include JibJab’s This Land, Chronicles of Narnia (Lazy Sunday) and The Evolution of Dance.

Bizarre: Television has been home to some weird series and in the era of Adult Swim, this trend seems likely to continue. But if the web is good at anything, it’s for revealing our taste in the odd. Take or House of Cosby’s, JoeCartoon.com’s Frog in a Blender or Weebl’s On the Moon series, which features The Toast King, Insanity Prawn Boy and the Moon’s version of Keith Moon – Moon Keith Moon.

Time: This may be the tough one for studio-backed online efforts. Weebl and Bob started mumbling their first pie-rants in 2002, the year the internet died. Out of the ashes of portals like Icebox, Hypnotic and Pop.com, Weebl and his pal Bob slowly grew an audience that now tops 1.5 million uniques a month. Thisjustin.com, HBO and AOL’s portal, barely opened their doors before packing it in. The lesson here is that an online audience must be cultivated over time, and not every site can expect to hit the immediate jackpot like funnyordie.com.

But as you embark on your search for the next viral hit, you can’t forget the essential ingredients – eggs, talking toast and badgers.

Jonti Picking recently answered a few questions for an exclusive CHF interview. Below we learn how he got his start in online comedy, what his writing process is like and why timing is so damn important.

AARON SIMPSON: What’s the secret to making a viral online short?

JONTI PICKING: There is no secret since you just can’t go out and make a viral. It’s impossible. You can make something that you hope will become viral and that’s it. Viewers make things viral and I can’t say this enough. Anyone who says different should probably be ignored (certain US ad agencies, I’m looking at you). I’ve made things I’ve been really pleased with but they’ve just not clicked in the right way and I’ve made things I’ve thought “Meh. It’ll do” only to have them be wildly popular.

AARON: Your background is in sound engineering. How did you find yourself crossing into animation?

JONTI: I completed a creative music tech course after art college which had a section on new media (mainly Shockwave) and a bit of web design. Before all this, I was playing around with animation packages on the C64 and Amiga too so Flash really just melded all my interests into one handy package. After college, I eventually started as a Flash developer for a big, London new media company. Then one day MTV called asking to show Weebl and Bob, which I was making in my free time. After that I just concentrated on the animation.

AARON: Had you been making films since you were young?

JONTI: Not really. I was was mainly into drawing comics and making up silly little tunes about sausages called Fred or a penguin balancing things on it’s nose. I guess not much has changed.

AARON: What was it about the website b3ta.com that inspired your original animations?

JONTI: It was the general sense of humour that they had going on. It really got me thinking about using the tools I knew to make things I enjoyed rather than just making things for work.

AARON: At what point did you realize that your Flash-animated short film Badgers had gone viral?

JONTI: I was actually away the weekend I released Badgers so had no idea what was going off until Monday. Once I’d checked my email and looked at the site hits I had a fair idea it was pretty popular. Oddly enough I’d said in jest to some guys I was working with weeks before that it was going to be massively popular.

AARON: How did you arrive on the idea of a looping music animation?

JONTI: When I’m writing the music I’ll have the tunes looping for hours as I work out what I’m doing with them. I basically want everyone to suffer as much as I do.

AARON: How long does it take to produce a typical Weebl and Bob episode?

JONTI: About 3 days if we’re feeling inspired on the writing front. The actual animation is usually fairly quick these days as I’ve built up quite a library of actions for them both which is expanding all the time. I do like to have something specifically animated for each episode though.

AARON: How many people are involved in the production?

JONTI: We just use one guy at a time on each animation but two or three writers on the animations with plots. Including me, we’ve got three animators now who all work on different things at the same time. Peabo is currently doing commercial work and Wonchop (our new boy) is doing a loop about arse melons.

AARON: At what point did you start adding production help?

JONTI: When I started Sumo Dojo (my old production company) we got Peabo involved, as I liked his work. I’d not really thought about it before but now I see the benefits of production support as I actually get a day off now and then. Since we started Weebl’s Stuff ltd. we’ve been really busy with commercial jobs outside of the website so hopefully I’ll be getting a few more animators if it carries on.

AARON: What commercial jobs have you been working on lately?

JONTI: There’s a couple of pieces for TV we’re working on along with some animations for a TV channel website. On top of that, there are some games and animations for a brand of fizzy drink.

AARON: What effect did the series of 30 MTV shorts have on Weebl and Bob?

JONTI: It made me hate the sight of them for a while since I was making an episode a day in order to meet the deadline. But now I like them again.

AARON: Would Weebl and Bob work as a regular TV series?

JONTI: Possibly, with some actual backgrounds they could work. I think something like Cat Face or On the Moon would work better though.

AARON: Have you been offered TV series since the MTV effort?

JONTI: We’ve had a bit of interest but nothing has ever come of it. The problem seems to be that the chaps we speak to all move to different companies shortly after we’ve spoken to them. I think is the lesson to be learned here is – if you like your job, then don’t bring us in for a meeting.

AARON: Do you have a particular favorite animation on weebls-stuff.com?

JONTI: I’m undecided. I think the one I’m working on at the moment could be my favourite so far though. I’m actually trying to push myself a bit with it.

AARON: You’ve begun featuring animations that were created outside of the Weebl world – like Daim’s Death Kitty and the Fat Man. Are you actively looking for new series and shorts for the site?

JONTI: Kind of. If we really like something then we’d absolutely want to have it for the site. I figure we can help promote artists whose work we like and it’s a nice feeling to be able to do that.

AARON: How did you come to establish a relationship with Cadbury?

JONTI: The chaps who sort out our advertising sales (w00t!media) arranged it all. They’re total dancers and seem to know what they’re doing so we let ‘em. They act like an agency for us really, which is nice.

AARON: How did you wind up partnering with the w00t!media gang?

JONTI: We needed a way to pay for the server costs as it was getting stupidly expensive to run (I think we run on 3 different boxes these days). Cheechy, the chap who makes sure our forums work and other behind the scenes techno gubbins, suggested speaking to one of his chums about ads. That chap was Austen who started w00t as a result. He’s doing pretty well these days and looks after loads of people. What I like about them is that they try to get advertisers who fit a site’s audience (at least in the UK. Not sure what US guys see).

AARON: Explain how you and your co-writer Chris Vick (Skoo) work together. What’s your process for writing a new script?

JONTI: Generally we’ll both be on our secret little IRC channel talking crap when an idea for a script will start to form. If we’re on fire we suggest lines right there and can have a script sorted in about an hour. If it’s not going so well then we’ll go off and write around the ideas, then email our scripts to each other, offering tweaks and suggestions for improvements until we’re both happy.

AARON: I’ve read that your and your team rely on action script to animate – as opposed to keyframing. Any truth to that?

JONTI: No truth at all.

AARON: How much of the physical animation and design are you involved with now?

JONTI: I’m still involved quite heavily in most of them though I let Peabo do his own thing as he’s better than me anyway. If I’m not animating something myself then I’ll generally just offer suggestions on scenes and motion. I think most of it’s about timing to be honest.

AARON: And what’s the key to timing?

JONTI: Mixing up the rhythm and not being afraid of pauses and a fair bit of trial and error. I spent a good 2 hours tweaking the motion of something the other day because I didn’t feel it was right. In the end, I bought one of the plugins from Trick or Script and then it was spot on.

AARON: Do you see sponsorships and product placement as a better solution than preroll ads?

JONTI: Yes and no. If the client fits then sure, why not? Something like Creme Eggs ties in nicely to Weebl and Bob. However there are obviously constraints on what you can write in those cases. I prefer to do completely bespoke cartoons where possible for commercial work. For the Prawn To Be Wild games series there was no way it could have been done without sponsorship by T-Mobile as it took a lot of time to make – and by a lot of people. But it effected the same old issue – deadlines. I would have liked our schedule on that one to be a bit longer in order to make things more polished. Swings and round-a-bouts really.

The major bonus of sponsored animations and games is the fact we can afford to make other things with no advertising in them.

AARON: Do you see gaming as an important part of the future at weebls-stuff.com?

JONTI: I love games and Flash has really matured as a tool for making something decent. I’ve got a whole bunch of ideas I’d love to get made simply because I’d like to be able to play them myself. The games on the site aren’t as popular as the toons, but at the end of the day as long as I enjoy it and a few other people do then I’m happy.

AARON: How do you see our entertainment consumption habits evolving over the next 5-10 years?

JONTI: Everything we watch will have a small picture of Brian Blessed in the corner who shouts at you if you start touching yourself. Porn will die out overnight.

AARON: You’ve been credited with visual effects work, like your additions to Resident Evil. Is this something you continue to work on?

JONTI: I wish. That was through the new media company I worked for. I basically designed the map of the Hive but other people made it look good.

AARON: Are there any online animated series that you check in on regularly?

JONTI: I’ll check out David Firth’s stuff and Adam Philips’ work. I should probably pay more attention to Homestar Runner too but I’ve kinda slipped on that front.

AARON: What animated TV shows do you watch?

JONTI: The Clone Wars series was really good. While I don’t watch them regularly, I love Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Frisky Dingo and Robot Chicken. I’ve given Modern Toss a try but it’s just not funny. Dexter’s Lab is also quite wonderful, as is Powerpuff Girls. Most of the serious stuff that get’s made for kids though is so generic it hurts though. What happened to Godzilla and Godzuki? And The Centurions? Power EXTREEEEEEEMEEEE!!!!!!

A couple days back, we kicked of the Brothers Chaps interview with Mike, one half of the duo behind ‘Homestar Runner.’ His younger brother, Matt, now joins us for the second half, discussing DVDs, asset libraries, puppeteering and fanimation.

AARON SIMPSON: Do you think most people find the Easter eggs on your DVDs?
MATT CHAPMAN: We’ve met people who’ve seen 60 or 70 Strong Bad Emails and we’ll mention the Easter eggs and they’re like “wait, you guys hide stuff in them?” For years now, we’ve been checking the fan forums to make sure people were finding them. But the Message Board fans are the super Homestar nerds, and we sort of took it for granted that everyone knew there were hidden things.

AARON: You just released a new DVD.
MATT: We’re calling it ‘Everything Else: Volume 1.’ It’s all the shorter cartoons. Volume 2 will feature the Big Toons and other stuff like the Halloween shorts.

AARON: What made you want to put out DVDs in the first place?
MATT: Several fans had said we should put our stuff on DVD so they could watch the animations on their TV and not have to get on the web all the time. Plus, we were realizing that things aren’t going to last forever, so just for our own archival portfolio, it’s a nice way to preserve all that stuff.

AARON: Do you have plans to release your work in any of the new disc formats?
MATT: Well, with Flash because it’s all vector, you can export to whatever size you want. Our process works like this – first we make an uncompressed AVI that just looks gorgeous. But, for instance, a Strong Bad Email will be about 10 gigs. To get it onto a DVD you have to use so much compression, and we end up with some loss and artifacting. To test these things we have this really old shitty DVD player, and then we have a DV-out into an HDTV – it’s the low end and the high end. And when we started looking at our stuff on this really nice set-up we quickly saw some artifacting. It was discouraging, but then we’d watch it on a regular TV and it would look really good. So I popped in one of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ DVDs and watched it on the same HD setup, and even there we could see some artifacting. I guess its just a necessary evil of DVD compression. So maybe we could put out perfect versions of each Strong Bad Email as a 100 DVD set.

AARON: Is there a character you find most fun to animate?
MATT: I’d say Homestar. For one, he’s got no arms, which is great. And his head is simple – a closed mouth, an open mouth and an ‘Oh’ circle mouth. So it’s really easy to make him talk. Mike will tell you that if you see a scene and Homestar just sits there and talks – he animated that. If Homestar is talking and waggling all around and talking – that’s me. It’s fun to force yourself to get emotion from such a simple character. Homestar is essentially a glorified stick figure.

AARON: What kind of animation tricks are you using now that you weren’t doing 6 or 7 years ago.
MATT: Early on, we relied on motion tweens, where you’d set point A and B, and the software would fill in the blanks. Now we’re much closer to doing frame by frame animation. Beyond that, we’re always trying new graphic styles – bringing in a blurred JPG background and then we’ll do a rack-focus. We’ve been doing that for years, but if you look back at the earlier ones, we weren’t animating quite as much. And now the quality has gone up a little bit more, but the time we’ve put into it has tripled.

AARON: There must be thousands of symbols and assets in the Homestar Flash library.
MATT: We’re actually pretty bad at archiving all the artwork. We actually do have a couple master libraries filled with all the parts of each character. During the production of a cartoon, we’ll make a new Strong Bad glove that looks a little better, or animates easier, but we’ll forget that we did that. So when we go to make a new cartoon, we’ll forget that me made that new asset. So we have to start searching.

There’s a symbol of The Cheat – a reverse view – that’s the same one we’ve been using for 4 or 5 years – and it’s terrible! His proportions are off – he’s way skinnier than the Cheat should be – and the line is real chunky. I think Mike drew it and scanned it in and then traced the bitmap – which we don’t do anymore. We draw everything right into Flash. So it’s really kinda gross looking. Over the summer, we made a new one – but we keep forgetting where that new one is saved. We need to organize them better. We should get an intern or something.

AARON: How do you currently go about finding props or backgrounds from old episodes?
MATT: It’s funny – we ended up using a really exhaustive fan site – the Homestar Runner Wiki. We’ll be asking ourselves, “when did we make the orange spoon?” The Wiki is a searchable database, so we’ll just search for ‘orange spoon,’ and it pops right up – “it’s in Strong Bad Email #63.” And then we noticed the Wiki was having a pledge drive so we donated to it. We probably use it more than the fans do so we figured we should try to keep it alive.

AARON: You still use Flash 5. Why is this the best version for your production process?
MATT: It’s the way you can select colors and frames. And Flash 5 is the best for lip-syncing. When you click on a frame in Flash 5, you hear that exact frame of sound, which makes it real easy to animate. We tinkered around with Flash 8 and couldn’t get it do work the way it does in 5, so we stopped messing around with it. We’ve had people tell us they could get Flash 8 to work exactly like Flash 5, but who knows.

We got to talking to the Flash developers, the guys who actually make the software – and it was awesome. Sort of like meeting your makers. But it was funny, they put it us a beta test team for Flash 8 along with developers and information architects, and we didn’t understand a thing they were talking about. We’d just email them asking “can you make it more like Flash 5?”

AARON: People seem fascinated that you don’t have advertising on your site. What’s your reaction to that?
MATT: I’m surprised that they’re surprised. When we started, we knew we were taking a risk, as it seemed like every site needed advertising to get by. But at that point, we weren’t trying to make Homestar into a business. Looking at the industry, I wish our no-banner ad stance had caught on more, especially now that ads are sneakier than ever.

AARON: Had you done any puppetry before the Homestar puppet shorts?
MATT: No, we’d never really done any puppetry – at least no more than a kid does growing up. We just have a friend who is a puppeteer and makes puppets. We’ve always thought all along that there were these different Homestar universes. Like there’s an old 1930s version (click the reels) of the cartoon, and there’s the Stinkoman Japanese version of it. So we chose the Pee-wee’s Playhouse-style variety show to mess with. We keep the length of these around a minute, because of bandwidth issues. A 6-minute Flash cartoon can be 1.5 mbs, but with video, a minute ends up being about 1mb.

But we think we’ve only scratched the surface of what we’d really like to do with the puppets. We could make some hilarious set, and have a human host and group of kids – I don’t know.

AARON: Tell us about Homestar’s day hanging out with They Might Be Giants.
MATT: I don’t even remember that day. Because I was mostly interacting with the band through a puppet. I think of that whole experience through Homestar’s eyes and when I watch that stuff, I feel like I wasn’t even there.

We occasionally email back and forth with John and John. Hopefully we’ll find a way to collaborate again in the future.

AARON: Do you ever get fan animated stuff that appeals for you?
MATT: We’ve gotten a couple things over the years. As they say “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” but some of these submissions were from really young kids – like 12 year olds. So they’re just learning Flash, and it’s awesome. And if making your own Homestar fan cartoons is the way you want to learn Flash, then do it. But Mike gets cringy and embarrassed watching some of them.

We’re not trying to sound spoiled, or “people like our stuff so much that they’re making these things for us.” I guess it’s dealing with the geek factor. There’s people that like your stuff so much and it’s just kind of overwhelming and hard to deal with. But on the other hand, there’s plenty of fan pieces like The Cheat Theme Song. It was a song made by fans from Alabama who call themselves The Skate Party. It was hilarious. It sounded exactly like something we would do. For the longest time people thought it was us, which was great.

There’s also an acappella group called DaVinci’s Notebook that did an old-timey barbershop song called ‘The Ballad of The Sneak‘. So there’s both ends of the spectrum – some of the stuff is exactly what we would have done or better, and we actually want to use it or collaborate, and then there’s the other stuff.

But for the most part, we kind of stay away from the fan stuff – it’s a combination of being afraid that it will be bad and we’ll feel bad about not liking it. And then what if it’s even better and funnier than what we’re doing?

AARON: Would you see yourselves doing this 20 years later?
MATT: Definitely. If not exactly this, then something like it. Our work is mainly short form, and when we feel Strong Bad Emails are getting old, we can quickly jump into something else. Anytime we talk about wanting to do some other projects, we figure we’ll do it the same kind of way – put a few years into it, put it on the web, and if it’s good then people will start coming.

But this is as good as it gets, you know, the fact that we make a Flash cartoon for a living. Look at ‘Happy Tree Friends‘ – you can buy their DVDs in Best Buy. Those guys have distribution deals. We just don’t want to deal with agents and managers. The fact that we’re supporting ourselves and we get to hire friends and family is amazing.

Mike and Matt Chapman, hailing from Decatur, Georgia, have built themselves the equivalent of animation dream jobs. They write, voice and animate for a living – and distribute exactly what they want, when they want, to millions of people. It’s an incredible achievement, and one that defies entertainment convention.

Early on in their web-careers, the Brothers Chaps, as Mike and Matt have come to be known, opted to go without advertising on their site. But don’t worry – homestarrunner.com has given them complete financial independence, solely through merchandise and DVD sales. It’s allowed the brothers an unusual amount of creative control for a hit series. But instead of using this freedom to break all the rules, they went against the grain. Since the mid-90′s, shock-value has driven millions of eyeballs to dozens of gross-out web shows and too-nuts-for-TV clips. Shirking convention, Homestar Runner and his pals are more G than some shows on Nick Jr., but it surely hasn’t halted their success one bit.

Perhaps it’s because Mike, 33, and Matt, 29, the creators of such characters as Homestar Runner and Strong Bad, are family-oriented. At the Flashforward Conference this past February, they concede that their “sister, dad and mom, and uh, inlaws” all get into the act; working in the Homestar Runner store and helping out around the office. Growing up, Mike and Matt’s parents, Don and Harriet Chapman, were reportedly always quite supportive of their creative endeavors, and ever since 1999, the brother’s family-friendly tastes have attracted a feverishly loyal following.

Now, let’s get to that following for a minute or two. Their website, homestarrunner.com, is visited by hundreds of thousands of people a day. But the brothers supposedly don’t know if it’s 100,000 a day or 200,000, nor do they really care. You see, while other web companies and animators comb through the number of ‘uniques’ they get a day, The Brothers Chaps are busy being unique.

However, that won’t stop the CHF research team (me), who spent tens of minutes scouring the web to come up with rough, unverified statistics. Drumroll, please….according to web-stats giant Alexa.com, Homestarrunner.com gets more traffic than starwars.com, pixar.com, southparkstudios.com, thesimpsons.com and handful of other high-profile animation websites.

WEBSITE

ALEXA RANK (on 08/06/06)

In fact, the Homestar Runner Wiki, the collaboratively-run, online encyclopedia of everything Homestar, gets almost as much traffic at thesimpsons.com (more on the HRWiki in a moment).

But for how many fans they have (the same fans that send in over 3,000 emails a day), The Brothers Chaps have somehow avoided being heralded with awards and honors. Mike and Matt would probably say that they could care less (and that’s probably true), but it’s symbolic of how independent they’ve remained. They don’t have agents, managers or press buffers. They turn down TV execs holding deals as if they were pan-handlers. The Brothers Chaps are Hollywood 2.0 – blessed with a huge audience, creative freedom, popular merchandise, and an address far from Hollywood.

Speaking of merchandise – the entire Homestar Runner empire is operated entirely off of DVD and merchandise moolah, and with hysterical products like The Cheat Commando Figurines, it’s easy to see why. In fact, one of the more popular threads at the HRWiki Homestar Runner message board is titled ‘merchandise wishes.’ And if you’re wondering what all of thee rabid fans are buying, The Brothers Chaps have shared that the Trogdor t-shirt is their best selling item, but their many DVD releases (see the CHF review) can’t be far behind.

So what’s their secret? Well, it’s not the software. While Mike and Matt have always used Flash to make their many shorts, they famously don’t keep up with the latest versions, and their proud of it. Perhaps the secret lies in their ability to loose themselves in the work. With no sprawling production teams to hire, no Hollywood hobnobbing to suffer through and no agents to please, The Brothers Chaps can just focus on the funny. There’s a moment in the interview below, where Matt, the puppeteer in the family, explains his mental state during one of his live puppet recordings. He felt he “wasn’t even there.” This zen-like creative groove is just the thing Hollywood distractions so easily destroy.

Onward to the interview. Before we get this rolling, I’d like to thank the gang over at the Homestar Runner Wiki, whose carefully assembled database helped me immensely in researching this article.

So without further adieu, here’s the phone interview I conducted back in the Winter of 2005 (Hey – I got busy!). It’s a two-parter, starting with Mike.

AARON SIMPSON: How do you guys decide who does what on the short.
MIKE CHAPMAN: As far as writing goes, we’ll talk about what ideas we have. Usually the project timeline is very short, and we’ll quickly get the broad strokes down. At that point we usually go take a stab at writing it separately. We both know the main points of the story, and then we take a look at those, and decide that his part works here and my part here. Then Matt goes and records all the voices and when he’s doing that, I’m generally blocking the scenes. If I know there’s going to be a scene when Strong Bad is in space, I’ll go and get those background graphics together. And then once the audio is done, we basically split up the scenes. Matt is the better animator, so if there’s scenes that actually have some action going on, he’ll usually do those. And if a scene just has characters talking, I’ll do those – like Strong Bad at his computer. I mean I can animate okay, but Matt generally will spend more time on each shot, and his little flourishes will look a little better. I’m more likely to have the characters just say their lines.

So after we finish ours scenes, we combine them, look at it, and make changes. For instance, we’ll cut the line in half, add sound effects, or move a punch around. The last few hours are making changes like that.

AARON: Were you guys creatively collaborating earlier in your lives, before Homestar?
MIKE: Definitely. We grew up drawing, making comic books, making Super 8 movies in the mid-80s, and then we worked with a video camera. So, yes, we’ve collaborated pretty much all of our lives.

AARON: I know how brothers can get competitive. Does that ever get in the way of your creative process?
MIKE: When we were growing up, I definitely used to beat the shit out of Matt. But from a creative standpoint, we don’t really ever get carried away. And if there is a part where Matt or I don’t like the direction it’s going, we just say it – “no I think that sucks, that’s not funny. Let’s do it this way.” And we usually agree on everything, which makes it easy.

AARON: Have you ever considered passing some of the animation duties on to others?
MIKE: No, I think if we were gonna do that, we would have done it by now. Years ago, we’d always said that that animation would be the first thing to pass off. For me, that’s the part I’m not as excited about. Writing is great, I love illustrating – but animation is especially boring. But since we’ve been doing it this way, at this point it would be a few steps backwards to get someone else in here. If we were going to do some other project, and start from scratch, we might look at that, but at this point probably not.

AARON: Is there an certain aspect of your work that’s currently getting the most attention?
MIKE: For me, it’s stuff with a unique visual style. Some people in the audience may notice that recently we’ve been paying more attention to the visual style.

AARON: Between your games, puppet shorts and the DVDs – which takes the most time to make?
MIKE: The DVD stuff definitely takes a lot of time. Especially the first time – we hired a friend (Ryan Sterritt) of ours to help make it. We basically had to learn from start to finish. It worked out great, and now we have a really great DVD author on our team of only 3 people.

AARON: What was the process like getting the shorts to DVD?
MIKE: It was around 6 months into the process, and we were watching some test DVDs and they just weren’t cutting it. They were pixely and the colors weren’t right, and at that point, we essentially started over. There’s a program called SWF2Video that really helped us finish, and then we color corrected in
After Effects.

AARON: And those DVDs are packed with Easter eggs…
MIKE: Ya, it would have been impossible to hire a company to do all that. There are just so many little nuances and hidden Easter eggs in the DVD. I’m sure Ryan (Sterritt – the DVD author) hates it but sometimes he’ll author the DVD in some way, and in the last week, we’ll say “you know what, this interface is going to change.” And if he wasn’t sitting right next to us, that would have been a pain in the ass.

AARON: How did you guys first team up with the band They Might Be Giants?
MIKE: Actually John Linnell emailed us. Before that, a fan sent us a picture of them with John Flansburgh, and he was wearing a Homestar shirt. And six months after that, John Linnell emailed and said he was a big fan and suggested we could maybe collaborate. It didn’t hurt that I’d been a huge TMBG fan ever since college.

AARON: Of the 2 of you, who is the puppeteer?
MIKE: Matt, mostly. Primarily, because he does the voices, and most of it is ad-libbed.

AARON: You’ve been lauded on the internet, radio and TV for having an internet show that’s relatively family-friendly. Have you ever gotten phone calls or emails complaining about the subject manner in your cartoons?
MIKE: Ya, there’s always people. We’ll get someone who misinterprets a short and emails us “what’s up with the gay bashing?” So we’d send back an email, and it ends up being a 13 year old girl, and we explain the issue. And then she’ll email back saying “you know, you’re right.” We’ve done that a few times, where people have sent us really angry emails. We’ll email back: “No wait – calm down. This is what we’re talking about.”

AARON: I’m sure you get approached by a fair amount of people wanting to partner up. Is there one offer that was more outrageous than the rest?
MIKE: We get tons of cell phone offers – for ringtones and mobile-episodes. These people just don’t get it. We’re scratching our heads – have you even looked at our site? We’d never do that. It’s the grossest thing I could think of – selling one minute Strong Bad Emails for cell phones. These people say “you’d be surprised, people would do it.” And we’re thinking that’s not the point – we know people will do it. We don’t want them to do it.

Oh, and there was one caller who wanted to give us $10,000 a month for banner ads or something. And you know someone had just tipped them off – “Hey, you should check out this Homestar site.” And they look at it for 5 minutes and call us, “We like your Strongman character.”

AARON: Have you ever had fans try to locate your office and try to swing by?
MIKE: There have been a few people peek through the blinds. We’re right next to a bowling alley and one day someone saw all the Homestar stuff in our office and knocked on the door. They asked us if we were big Homestar fans.

AARON: How was your experience at Dragon*Con?
MIKE: We’ve never been to a ‘Con before. We’d always shied away from those because of the fanboy aspect of them. But it was alot of fun. Far less creepy and far more fun that we’d imagined.

AARON: Do you think any of your projects will move onto another platform? Maybe a broadband show or perhaps a video game.
MIKE: I don’t think it’s gonna happen. The way we do things is very immediate – we make cartoons and put them up three days later. There’s very few projects we do that are long term, but I’d say doing a video game, or something for Gameboy – that would be something that we’d be interested in doing. But we’ve never licensed our stuff out, and we’d have to do it in-house, and the timeline would have to be quick. But I really don’t think that’s gonna happen.

That’s the end of the Brothers Chaps interview, Part 1. Check back in a few days for part 2, featuring Mike’s brother Matt.