No matter which TV studio you talk to these days, the new-media plan is fairly consistent: “we’re launching shows on our web platform in hopes of identifying which ones are ripe for TV development.” This model isn’t new, but it’s finally beginning to bear fruit. Some shows are tested by networks on the web first, while others find their own legs independently and then the networks come calling.

• Yam Roll – won the Maple Shorts online competition and went to TV series in 2006
• 30 Second Bunnies Theatre – started as popular web shorts and now air on Starz!
• Dr. Shroud – a web series that now airs on Fangoria TV
• Happy Tree Friends – probably the biggest success story in this category – now airs all over the world
• Low Morale – recently acquired by MTV
• Pucca – this South Korean series began on the web as quick internet shorts, and now airs on Jetix
• Queer Duck – spawned from Icebox.com in 2000, Queer Duck ended up on Showtime then as a Direct to Video feature

Now it’s Amy Winfrey’s turn. She’s been hard at work on her independent, Flash-animated series Making Fiends since 2003. The series centers on two characters who couldn’t be more opposite. Vendetta is sinister, and possessed with the power to create other evil beings – or fiends. Charlotte is as sweet as can be, and never sees Vendetta’s evil tactics as ill will, and typically considers her a friend. This dynamic between the two lead characters is what gives the show such creative range and humor. And now, with 20 episodes in the bank, Winfrey has some exciting news to crow about. Making Fiends is not only jumping to TV, but it’s going all the way to the top – Nickelodeon, the cable network with the top 10 shows for children 2 to 11, according to the New York Times.

Winfrey shared this with me in a recent exchange, “I think fans of the web series are going to be very pleased with the show. I’ll be the executive producer AND the voice of Charlotte!”

It’s a smart bet for Nick, who now know exactly how the audience responds to the characters and storylines. Winfrey even hosted a Making Fiends Art Contest last year, and she watched over 250 entries pour in from fans ages 4 to 28. Plus, the Nick brass surely riffled through the demographics of the site’s visitors, so there shouldn’t be any surprises. Then, of course, there’s Winfrey herself, who carries quite a nice, little pedigree. Versed in both 3D and 2D animation, she won a silver medal in the Student Academy Awards in 2000, and went on to animate for a little show called South Park. So with all of the typical new series question marks removed, you might wonder why all cable and network shows aren’t “brewed” this way. Well consider the fact that Amy’s been tirelessly working on her show for 4 years. Patience of that magnitude is hard to come by at almost any studio.

Amy recently shared some time with Cold Hard Flash to unravel exactly how this all came to be.

AARON SIMPSON: How did your relationship with Nickelodeon begin?
AMY WINFREY: A Nickelodeon employee had a daughter that was a fan of Making Fiends. He showed my site around at work and the Nickelodeon folks contacted me to see if I might be interested in bringing Making Fiends to television.

AARON: Can you tell us about the upcoming Nickelodeon series?
AMY: It will be super fiendy! I’ve expanded the Making Fiends universe to include some new characters (many of them fiends) and I’ve added a whole fiend filled town for Vendetta to terrorize. It has been a lot of fun coming up with new stories – especially since I know that I will not have to animate everything on my own.

AARON: Are you looking forward to having some help on the productions? That’s gotta be a ton of work!
AMY: Yes! Yes! Yes! I’ve greatly enjoyed making my own films, but having more people help will allow me to focus on the things I like best: writing good stories and songs, designing fiendier fiends and working on voices.

AARON: How did you learn animation?
AMY: I took an animation class on a whim while I was an undergraduate English major at UCLA. I made a fifteen second film. It was a lot of work but fun. I made two more films while getting my English degree, and then applied to the UCLA MFA film program. While attending my first year at grad school, I also worked as an animator for South Park. Both school and work taught me a lot about animation.

AARON: Your UCLA film The Bad Plant landed you a Silver Medal at the 2000 Student Academy Awards. Tell us about that night.
AMY: The Academy planned a whole week of activities for Student Academy Award winners so I had already met all of the other award winners before that night. It was fun to see everyone receive their awards. The films were amazing. One student’s film ended up also winning a (non-student) Academy Award. I tied for silver with a fellow student from UCLA, J.J. Martinez. Later, he returned to Spain and directed an animated television show and I ended up writing for the show. (note: Todd Polson, who won the Gold in 2000, is helping out with backgrounds for a new Flash-animated series coming to Nick next month – El Tigre – The Adventures of Manny Rivera)

AARON: Back at UCLA, you were working in 3D Studio Max, and to great results. Was it a conscious choice to switch over to 2D?
AMY: While making The Bad Plant I was also making a website for another class. My film might have won awards, but my silly little website had a much wider audience. I was getting e-mail from around the world. I decided to start making web cartoons. There was really no easy way to distribute 3D animation on the web at the time, so I returned to working in 2D.

AARON: What are the benefits of 2D over 3D?
AMY: 2D is faster, cheaper and much more fantastically flat.

AARON: How many South Park episodes did you work on?
AMY: I worked on the first fifteen episodes of South Park and South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut.

AARON: How would you compare animating for South Park and animating on your own projects?
AMY: I use some of the techniques of replacement animation that I learned at South Park on my own projects. However, animating for myself is of course more fun AND I don’t end up with delightful songs like Uncle F**KA stuck in my head for months before anybody has ever heard of them.

AARON: Do you have any projects lined up that might find you back to work in 3D?
AMY: It’s possible that I will return to 3D at some point soon.

AARON: Was Flash being taught at UCLA while you attended?
AMY: At the time I attended, only a tiny bit was taught in my interactive animation class. I think that might have been Flash 1 or 2… it was still in its infancy. Now, UCLA teaches a great deal more of it. I actually taught an interactive class at UCLA last Fall.

AARON: How did your panel go this year at Comic-Con?
AMY: It was fun to see one of my shorts with an audience. Everyone laughed. Yay!

AARON: Did you get to watch any other panels while you were at the ‘Con?
AMY: No. But I did manage to see about twenty Princess Leias.

AARON: You teamed up with Doug Liman’s Nibblebox back during the original dotcom upswing. Was it frustrating to watch the subsequent merger with Hypnotic.com and its eventual eventual collapse?
AMY: This was a surprising turn of events. I originally planned to make ten episodes of Big Bunny, but after the merger Hypnotic wanted to stop production after episode six. Hypnotic eventually agreed to allow me to make one final episode to wrap the series up. After this happened, I decided to make a new web series that I would try to keep independent for as long as possible.

AARON: How would say the current market for online animation compares to 2000?
AMY: The market has definitely changed. Now I get contacted by people wanting to put my shorts on cell phones and iPods instead of on entertainment websites.

AARON: How has your animation production method changed since 2000?
AMY: I try to think up new ideas to speed up production all the time. I am definitely a faster and more efficient Flash animator now.

AARON: How big is your production team?
AMY: When I first started making web cartoons I did all the drawing and animation on my own. Now, I occasionally have two or three people helping me with the animation. Most are former South Park animators and friends from UCLA. In addition, I often utilize the fine voice talents of Peter Merryman and Aglaia Mortcheva.

AARON: Do you create animatics for each episode in Flash?
AMY: No. I sometimes do some storyboards if I need to plan out a shot, but most of the time I just set things up and animate them without a full animatic.

AARON: How do you learn new Flash animation tricks?
AMY: I don’t really… I hope I’m not missing anything!

AARON: Are you more like Vendetta or Charlotte?
AMY: Hmmm. That’s hard. I’m a lot like both.

AARON: How long would it typically take to produce an online episode of Making Fiends?
AMY: An episode would take about three weeks.

AARON: Have you licensed any of your characters out to manufacturers?
AMY: No.

AARON: Do you have any plans to resurrect Big Bunny anytime soon?
AMY: Maybe! I recently re-acquired the rights to Big Bunny. It might take a while though – I’m pretty busy with Nickelodeon right now.

AARON: Will you be able to sell Making Fiends merchandise off your website when the show launches?
AMY: No. I will no longer be able to sell merchandise if a Making Fiends pilot goes in to production. However, I will continue to offer Big Bunny and MuffinFilms merchandise.

AARON: What’s the average amount of visitors you get each day to makingfiends.com?
AMY: For all three of my sites together, I get over 20,000 hits per day.

AARON: What was the inspiration behind the Making Fiends Art Contest?
AMY: Fiend fans often sent me drawings and I loved it! I wanted to see more of their fiendish creations. I received entries from around the world, and the results are now posted on the Making Fiends website.

AARON: What type of advice do you have for animators currently studying the craft at school?
AMY: Don’t over-think things. Some people spend so much time laboring over concepts, researching equipment and worrying about tiny details that they never actually end up completing their films. Start small and cheap. Audiences are forgiving – especially if you make them laugh!

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.

Remember the promise of the internet? Entertainment was going to get a hi-tech makeover. We were supposed to see new avenues of content delivery, creative twists on storytelling; power would shift from the many to the few, and the web was going to incubate projects and ready them for television and even the silver screen.

Well, lo and behold, 7 or 8 years later, the internet is finally delivering on it’s promise. Every studio and network either has a broadband network or one in the works, cell phone content is growing by leaps and bounds, small studios and individuals are making big money on their own web shows, and a few have even transitioned off the web and onto TV or film.

Take, for instance, ‘Queer Duck.’ Back in 2000, when the internet was going to cure cancer, Icebox.com had assembled an army of big names to help kickstart entertainment on the internet. Whether it was the lack of broadband access, lack of good jokes, or maybe just bad timing, it sputtered. Nothing to be ashamed about, really. It happened to just about everyone back then.

But Icebox.com refused to quit. They released a ‘Mr. Wong’ DVD, put together a deal with Showtime to broadcast ‘Queer Duck,’ and kept the dream alive. And now Paramount Home Video has just announced a feature-length ‘Queer Duck – The Movie’ project. On board is Mike Reiss, the creator of ‘Queer Duck’ and a writer on 15 seasons of ‘The Simpsons,’ and Xeth Feinberg, the director and animator of the ‘Queer Duck’ series.

Xeth recently took a few minutes to share his experiences so far on ‘Queer Duck: The Movie,’ and how he and a small team of artist are producing a Flash-animated feature film.

AARON: How did ‘Queer Duck’ get from the web to a feature film?
XETH FEINBERG: The original 5 shorts first aired in 2000 on Icebox.com. (Icebox is now producing the movie.) In 2002 Showtime commissioned 15 more shorts for online (sho.com) and for broadcast around their show QUEER AS FOLK.

Mike Reiss created the show and has written every line of every episode. He had a version of the the movie written back in 2002. It’s just taken years for all the pieces to come together.

AARON: How long have you been in production on the feature?
XETH: We started in mid-May 2004, with storyboarding.

AARON: When we hear the phrase ‘animated feature’ we think of a rather large crew working for 3-4 years. Sounds like it’s a bit different on the ‘Queer Duck: The Movie.’
XETH: It’s a very small crew, partly virtual, working for under a year. A tough deadline. But there’s a very solid script written by creator/writer Mike Reiss. It’s basically my job to visualize and draw it, which is an interesting and fun task. The scale of the production is maybe comparable to an indie feature, which is kind of refreshing. Lots of work, but lots of creative input and freedom too. There may be a last minute influx of staff to finish the movie, but all the design and preparation is being done by me and a handful of others.

AARON: How much re-use of pre-existing artwork have you managed for the movie?
XETH: The basic designs of the main characters (Queer Duck, Bi-Polar Bear, Openly Gator and Oscar Wildcat) are the same, and other characters make return appearances, but all of the old symbols and elements are being reworked. And there is an updated, upgraded look to the overall design of the movie. To the best of my ability, I don’t want to just make the world’s biggest circa-2002 webtoon.

AARON: What limitations did you have for the web shorts that you no longer deal with for the movie?
XETH: On the webtoons we always had to deal with file size and compensate for potential problems on the web. In 2000, I was designing for dial-up. In 2002 I could push it a little bit more. For the movie, that sort of stuff is irrelevant, thankfully.

AARON: Were the web shorts altered for the original Showtime broadcasts?
XETH: No. We just took of the preloader. It would have been nice to maybe tweak some things, but there was never time. I should mention I did each episode from storyboard to delivery in an average of 2 weeks with one assistant animator.

AARON: Are you planning a title sequence?
XETH: The goal is to give the movie a mind-blowing opening sequence. Time will tell how that plays out.

AARON: For the musical numbers – are you guys animating to completed musical tracks?
XETH: Yes, we have completed musical tracks already. Sam Elwitt, who did all the instrumentation for the original shorts, has done an amazing job putting Mike’s lyrics to music. We’re now working to get all the incidental music together.

AARON: Will you and your team be using any other software on the production besides Flash?
XETH: So far it is all Flash. But there are sequences that might get additional treatment.

AARON: Can we expect to meet some new characters in the movie?
XETH: There are a ton of new characters and situations. It’s a very funny script that really expands the world of ‘Queer Duck.’ I compare it to the way it worked on the ‘South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut’ feature, if you liked ‘South Park’ and the idea of ‘South Park,’ then you liked the movie and appreciated where they went with it. Anyone who liked ‘Queer Duck’ is going to really enjoy the movie. But I think it also takes it beyond any kind of ‘one joke’ idea. It’s not just a movie about gay cartoon characters, it’s a cartoon where some of the main characters are gay. It’s actually a pretty complicated story.

AARON: Some of your crew is working virtually. Tell us how this works.
XETH: Basically, I spend a lot of time using email!