At the risk of sounding old, when I was a lad we used to join pop groups Or not; more likely we’d talk about forming a band and then
not do it, in case we were rubbish. Those who took the plunge got the odd gig, took a bit of applause and a few brickbats and are now happy air-guitar playing accountants in Surbiton. Or something.
Times have changed. Teenagers no longer have to leave their angst-ridden bedrooms to make an impression, and they are using simple web design and animation tools and the internet to do it. Welcome to the “cyberspace cowboys”, a clan of mainly spare-time cartoonists with instant access to an audience previous generations could only dream about. What’s more, their productions can look slick and be animated — using a technology called Flash, which will install itself on your system and play all the animations and daft stuff you could wish for. The home-made ethos of punk rock is alive and well, and living in cyberspace.
Big business is already catching on to the trend. If you have seen the recent Switch advertisements on TV, with the penguins singing Chanson d’Amour, or the Anchor Butter adverts with the odd singing cows, then you know what we are talking about.
This is cutting-edge animation, and part of its charm, like the pioneering TV series South Park, is that it looks so amateurish. It’s fun, it’s subversive, it’s appealing, it offers big business the chance to grab some street-cred by association, and provides cash and recognition for its creators. Case in point: B3ta.com, a UK site, made the news last year when a leading business consultancy decided to launch a new arm called “Monday” with a site called “introducingmonday.com” but foolishly forgot to register “introducingmonday.co.uk”. B3ta spent £9.99 to register the name and publicly humiliated the company with a site consisting of a silly song, a two-fingered salute and some jerky dancing donkeys.
Rob Manuel co-founded B3ta when he was working for a large publishing house, but it soon took off in its own right. “There’s a generation of people trained up in web techniques,” he says. “We want these people to use it for humour instead of building healthcare websites for dull corporate clients.” He and his colleagues offer the site as a platform for just about anyone to submit any animation, as long as it’s silly enough.
B3ta’s recently released best selection of 2003 (www.b3ta.com/features/bestofb3ta2003) is a great place for the uninitiated to start, and features everything from animated squirrels jamming to the Old Grey Whistle Test theme tune to an obscene version of the classic memory game Simon.
“We’ve saved people from web development hell,” says Manuel, “and given them a platform to launch themselves as comedy writers, ad directors and TV stars.”
One of the people who has benefited from B3ta’s approach is 29-year-old Joel Veitch. His online animations have caught the eye of both advertising agencies and TV executives. As well as providing the singing penguins for the Switch TV campaign, he has made a series for Channel 4, provided a station ident for VH-1 in America and has been head-hunted to provide the graphics for an American sandwich chain. His own website, at www.rathergood.com, includes such contributions as punk Northern kittens and a bear singing Hippo Girl to his hippo girlfriend.
“I started out doing this in my spare time back in 1999,” says Veitch, “when I was a web monkey at Reuters doing corporate intranet work. I started my website as a place to keep all these ideas and jokes that were buzzing round my mind. Then I did an MA in electronic media, and by the time that had finished I had so much stuff on the site that people were starting to contact me and I was able to become a full-time animator.” Veitch is too modest to admit it, but of the new generation of animators, he is the most likely to achieve wider fame. In the next few years, his work may become as lodged in the collective consciousness as Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols artwork did nearly 30 years ago. “A lot of people still haven’t grasped how powerful this medium is,” says Veitch. “One kid in a bedroom can grab the attention of the world in a matter of hours.”
And if dancing penguins or musical squirrels aren’t your bag, there is a host of home-made games sites, where you can do everything from shooting David Blaine in his Perspex box above the Thames, to playing baseball using dumb animals as the ball.
Flash, the software that is powering all this innovation, isn’t difficult to learn. A copy of Macromedia Flash costs around £450, and once loaded into your computer opens up with ten lessons in the help section to get you started. Nick Hall, a graphic designer at the web company Simply.com, says: “You could learn the basics in a weekend if you’re reasonably familiar with computers. The more complicated database stuff takes longer, but the basics are incredibly easy.
” The thing to watch is the design: “The problem most people find is over-designing so they lose whatever message they were trying to put in.” Once you’re into it, it’s worth looking at online resources for your page — flashkit.com has more tutorials as well as royalty-free sounds and images to which you can help yourself.
While Flash sites are, so to speak, the guerrilla wing of the web’s social commentators, more traditional satire is also flourishing on the internet. The closest Britain gets to America’s mighty satirical site The Onion is the Framley Examiner. “We admired The Onion, but didn’t see the point in trying to do a British version of that,” says Alex Morris, the editor of the Framley Examiner. “We liked the idea of a local paper that would have to fill the pages whether there was anything going on or not.” He e-mailed the first issue to a few friends for a laugh three years ago: the front-page splash was about a tin of peaches going missing at the local grocer. Another local paper skit is the Portadown News, set up by Newton Emerson while waiting to be made redundant. “We were all doing 12-hour nights, so after we’d done the usual looking at porn and dirty jokes we started doing something creative with our computers.”
The list of people joining in is getting longer all the time, and taking part is easy. You need a computer, web space, a little time and web skill. Oh, and the ability to be funny. As Douglas Adams once said, you do this by staring at a blank computer screen and concentrating until your head bleeds.
Flashy sites
Warning: the content of these sites may offend
www.b3ta.com DIY Flash central www.rathergood.com Joel Veitch’s online collection www.theonion.com America’s funniest “news” source
www.thebrainstrust.co.uk Satire for thinking people www.framleyexaminer.co.uk Local news for local people
www.portadownnews.com Humour Northern Irish-style
www.flashkit.com More help to design your own site www.theflashgames.com Games for your amusement
www.flasharcade.com More twisted games and humour
