With primaries in both Texas and Ohio, today is a pivotal day in the American presidential election process, and this Flash-animated short by Xeth Feinberg helps set the tone. A Political Quickie: How To Be a Media Pundit, which bowed yesterday at 236.com, details the step-by-step process of how to be more like Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly. You may know Xeth’s previous work which includes Queer Duck: The Movie, Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln and his recently revamped original series Papu Smash.

Xeth Feinberg, the director of Queer Duck: The Movie, created a series of Flash-animated shorts back during the dot-bomb era that put a tidy, little bow on the crumbling web world. It was titled Papu, and the big, blue monster only knew how to smash stuff.

Well, for this holiday season, Xeth has created a new Papu episode titled A Smashing Holiday. Music is by Sam Elwitt and Rose Bevans provides the voice of Mrs. Claus.

Xeth was interviewed here at CHF back in 2005.

‘Queer Duck - The Movie’ is due on DVD on July 18th, as reported here back in April. The DVD is currently available for pre-sell over at Amazon, and it’s listing at $13.99 for 75 minutes of Flash-animated wackiness.

Variety, the entertainment industry news magazine, recently gave a strong review of the DVD, and said it “registers surprisingly vividly on the bigscreen, deserved a theatrical shot before its July 18 DVD release.” Take that, Paramount! ‘Golden Blaze’ shouldn’t be the only Flash-film to get a stab at the silver screen.

Alright, I’m off my high horse now, and I should probably give kudos to Paramount Home Entertainment for funding a feature-length LGBT cartoon. Either way, I would’ve loved to have seen this get a wide theatrical release.

Here’s an excerpt from the Variety review that give praise to Xeth Feinberg, the director, and his crew.

Tech credits are intelligently primitive. Feinberg and Richard Codor’s unshaded, blocked-out character design unabashedly delights in pure two-dimensionality, while background artist Jon Ehrenberg’s large monochromatic blocks of color (Salmonella’s Restaurant awash in a coral hue) recall UPA abstraction or Maurice Noble’s Frenchified backdrops for late Pepe LePew cartoons.

Xeth was inteviewed here at CHF back in November of 2005.

Ryan Ball from Animation Magazine recently posted an article announcing the release date of ‘Queer Duck: The Movie.’ July 18th is the date Paramount Home Entertainment has decided to re-introduce the world to Queer Duck and his friends Openly Gator, Bi-Polar Bear and Oscar Wildcat. Ryan also point out that this will indeed be the first Flash-animated feature film from a major studio. There’s been other feature-length projects like ‘Lil’ Pimp’ and ‘Golden Blaze,’ but none from a big studio like Paramount.

What the article missed was naming the actual director - Xeth Feinberg, whose recently discussed the movie here at CHF.

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!

Hotwired’s Animation Express, which launched in October 1998, was one of the first (if not the first) web animation portals. The site, sadly, is no more.

Animation Express jumped on the Flash animation bandwagon early and offered a place for artists from around the world to display their work. It wasn’t a Flash-only site, but it often looked that way. Artists like Joe Corrao, Kirk Millett, Xeth Feinberg, Steve Whitehouse, Craig McCracken and Naoki Mitsuse showcased their shorts on the site, and it’s sad to see it go. The editors of the site were obviously seeking unique material, often hosting work that could even be labeled ‘arty,’ but that’s not to say they didn’t highlight work that was just plain good. One of my shorts, ‘Snail Detective,’ (which wasn’t particularly ‘arty’ nor that ‘good’) was amongst the first posted on the site way back in 1998, and it was one of the milestones in my career that gave me the confidence to keep pushing.

Thanks to Cartoon Monkey for spotting this story. If you haven’t checked out the Cartoon Monkey website yet, make haste. They’re posting pencil tests from the upcoming Cartoon Network show ‘Camp Lazlo.’

****UPDATE****

It’s not dead! It’s just hibernating. Reader ‘pcdoctor01′ spotted a new link to the Animation Express archive.