Adam Phillips’ Flash-animated Brackenwood series was distinguished at this year’s Webby Awards as an Official Honoree. The awards is given to “sites and teams that demonstrated a standard of excellence.” The Webby’s are hailed as the “Oscars of the Internet,” and Phillips responded by saying that “this recognition validates the past 8 years in the dark, slumped and staring into the monitor.” He created this trailer for the Webby judges.

Several other Flash-animated series were bestowed this honor at the 2008 Webby Awards, including Dan Meth’s Internet People, Laith Bahrani’s Creep music video, Conan O’Brien & Jim Gaffigan’s Pale Force series, Kyle Boyd’s W’s World series and Devin Flynn’s Y’all So Stupid.

In the animation category, Nominees for the Webby Award include Jennifer Shiman’s 30-Second Bunnies Theatre and the Heavenly Sword shorts, both of which were animated in Flash.

The 2007 Flashforward Film Festival winners were announced last Wednesday night, and a couple familiar faces took home rubber arrows. Bernard Derriman’s Arj & Poopy episode Congo Windfall took home the top prize in the Cartoon category, while Laith Bahrani snagged the trophy in the Art category for his Flash-animated music video Creep. The final award given that night was the audience choice, which went to Adam Phillips, for his innovative 30 Shorts in 30 Days project. Phillips is no stranger to Flashforward rubber arrows, having won in 2003, 2005 and twice in 2006. Below are some clips from the event:

Thanks to Lynda, Toby and Christoph for the invite. I had a blast. And congrats to all the nominees.All three of these artists above have been interviewed here at CHF:

Bernard Derriman
Adam Phillips
Laith Bahrani

Laith Bahrani, the UK Flash-animator behind MTV’s Low Morale, has released a teaser for his new project Everloving. The music video features music by Moby, and Bahrani’s plan is to eventually get his full support for the project, which will end around 4 minutes in length.

The teaser hints at a love story between a prisoner and a firefly, and more development artwork can be seen at Bahrani’s torchlight gallery, his entertaining approach to displaying development artwork.

For more on Laith and his work, check out his Cold Hard Flash interview from March of 2005.

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.

Earlier this week, I posted the first half of my interview with Laith Bahrani, the UK animator behind the Flash-animated series ‘Low Morale.’ So grab your legal pad and pen; the conference room is now filling up. Everybody in – the second half is about to begin.

AARON SIMPSON: How did the idea of the ‘Creep‘ video first hit you?
LAITH BAHRANI: It had always been a major ambition of mine to animate something to a Radiohead track so the idea basically started as an experiment to see how the Low Morale character would look lip syncing a song. 12 billion keyframes later, and the bastard was singing the whole thing before jumping out a window.

AARON: How long did the ‘Creep’ project take you to produce?
LAITH: About 4 months, or 350 hours. It was done every night after my day job – I’d get home at about 6pm, and work on it till 1/2am every night for 4 months. Looking back on it, I think Macromedia might have implanted a ‘keyframe chip’ in my brain, and were actually controlling me in an experiment to see how many keyframes it would take to kill a man. Unlucky!! I’m still alive! Bwhahaha… etc.

AARON: Is this video a web-only project, or has it been converted to other mediums like TV or DVD?
LAITH: I’ve got a DVD version, and I’ve got a few mails from people asking if they can buy it, but without Radiohead’s say-so, I’m not doing anything.

AARON: How did you produce the blur effects in the window jump sequence?
LAITH: Photoshop and PNG’s. Wall was created in flash, exported out, blurred in Photoshop and then brought back in and tweened till it hurt.

AARON: How has your ‘Low Morale’ series been received at your office?
LAITH: Pretty well I think – apparently it was the most viewed site in the office for a while. I’m fairly confident a few sales people around the place were trying desperately to work out if they were part of the parody. Not that any of them will read this, but for the record, you all were.

AARON: Have you ever personally seen someone have a workplace meltdown?
LAITH: I’ve seen it a few times. It ain’t pleasant.

AARON: Do you know if the members of ‘Radiohead’ have seen your video?
LAITH: I know the marketing agency that handle Radiohead’s merchandise and tickets have seen it and they all loved it. Unfortunately nothing further has come from it other than some praise – which does make me feel warm and fuzzy – but doesn’t put bread or jam on the table.

AARON: Do you plan on creating any more music video ‘Low Morale’ projects?
LAITH: Already got one on the go – a music video for a new up and coming band in the UK. Low Morale isn’t the direct character, but he will feature in the opening of the vid, a preview of which will be featured on a microsite monkeehub have developed for the piece.

Oh, and I’ll be revamping the whole Low Morale site/series in the coming year, with lots of updates and changes. What I actually mean by that is, I’ll be adding a Cafepress T-shirt page.

AARON: If you could create an animated video for another band, who would it be?
LAITH: Tough one. There’s a lot of bands I’d love to work with. Ultimately I would love more than anything to be commissioned to do a new Radiohead music vid. Others at the top of the bunch at the mo would have to be: Elbow, Snow Patrol, Travis, PJ Harvey, Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, Prodigy.

AARON: Did you study animation?
LAITH: Only in the sense I’ve been drawing since before I could walk, and I grew up on old style Warner Bros. cartoons. I’ve had no formal education/training in animation.

AARON: What graphic artists inspire you?
LAITH: Without meaning to sound conceited or anything, I don’t find I get a lot inspiration directly from other work. It comes more from my own experiences, and just stuff around me. That said, a couple of peeps who I rate and respect: Adam Phillips – of ‘Prowlies‘ fame, and the ‘Weebl & Bob’ creator (although that’s more jealousy than admiration).

AARON: What animation DVDs have you watched lately?
LAITH: ‘Spirited Away,’ Family Guy,’ ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘The Incredibles’ and ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’.

AARON: Do you watch animated television?
LAITH: Only ‘The Simpsons’ when it’s on. To be honest, I watch an appallingly small amount of TV – which is ironic as I just bought myself a bigger TV.

AARON: What project is next?
LAITH: Setting up monkeehub as an animation company – if anyone is interested in animating for monkeehub, and can work for peanuts, drop me a mail at LB@monkeehub.com.

AARON: Thanks for the informative meeting, Laith. Now back to work.