Creepy crawlers: the web is a ladder to fame for the maker and the unsavory cast of "yeah! the movie." (Web animation).

Web Films: Part 2

The second article in our three-part series about short films on the Web features "yeah! the movie." While the animation is still a work in progress, its creator is using the Internet for feedback and publicity prior to the property's release.

This Boss may be ugly and uncouth, but he surely is popular. The lantern-jawed, loin-clothed digital lout from Spellcraft Studio has been showing up at trade shows, on Web sites, and even on the cover of a CG industry magazine--pretty good exposure for a character in a film that hasn't even been made yet. Spellcrafi's animated short, "yeah! the movie," will probably be finished near the end of this year. What exists of it publicly is a Web site with an overview of the plot and several downloadable animations of the Boss and his minions, the Creeps.

The animations, posted as teasers for the project, have been so well received (thousands of downloads and counting) that they are actually impeding the progress of the movie. Not that its creator, Vadim Pietrzynski, minds, though he has had to post an FAQ area on the Web site to field all the inquiries about "yeah!," and he's occasionally had to suspend work on the project to create magazine covers and the like. On the plus side, "There are lots of short movies that get some attention for a few weeks and then are quickly forgotten," he says. "I think it helps to show a little more than just the movie itself--it's one way to create longer interest in a short movie project, and a longer life span means the chance to reach a broader audience."

In fact, aside from the usual digital content creation Web sites, Pietrzynski has found "yeah!" animations posted in forums for gamers, martial arts, and even in one for farmers. When asked why all the to-do over an unfinished project, he replies, "the Internet, a bit of luck, and a cool rendering engine." Of course, there's a bit more to it than that.

The Boss and his crew possess that mixture of cuteness and hideousness for which 3D animation is an ideal medium. They are humanoid, but not so much so that they are meant to look real. They are humorous, but also horrible. In the most popular of the animations, the pot-bellied Boss dances to a boogie-woogie version of "See You Later Alligator" while he artfully dispatches and swallows the Creeps in time to the music.

Like the Boss, the Creeps have attitudes. One of the animations, called "Boxing," features a Creep who tries to frighten us, the viewers, with his martial arts skills--kick boxing, flips, and right- and left hooks. When he realizes we are still there, he waves dismissively at us, gives us a raspberry, and leaves the scene.