They showed some cartoons from RingTales.com, pretty funny.
Mike does a cartoon called Over the Hedge. It was the first he had seen that had an email address. He sent him an email and said “Can we make a movie?” The movie came out last year from Dreamworks, 10 years later. There must be an easier way to make animations out of cartoons, and bring it to the internet.
Comics have been mass-media for the past 100 years, but where they’re distributed is slowly dying. They want to take this art form to the new medium. They’re not trying to make movies or TV shows, just trying to animate the strip itself, 15-30 seconds. Print cartoons are always a casual part of reading, a “Zen slap in the face” that wakes up the other part of your brain. They want to have these little cartoons everywhere that people are reading things digitally.
They started with the New Yorker archives, they have over 100,000 comics. They have an open editorial session every TUesday, anyone can walk through the door and try to get published. They get 10,000-15,000 a week, and print 20. They try very hard to honor the art of the original cartoonists.
Computers don’t like all the imperfections that cartoonists put into things. They do most of their animation hand-drawn, it’s old-fashioned, but it captures the look and feel of the art. They had a license for the New Yorker stuff, and just finished a deal with United Media to their comics, doing Dilbert. They’re hoping it will become ubiquitous, while you’re reading, you’ll get a little gift of humor.
The site is RingTales.com.
The Entertainment Gathering 