If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from Jaime Levy's Cyberslacker.

Once known as the techie-inhabited corridors extending from TriBeCa through SoHo to the Flat Iron grid, Silicon Alley is today more mind-set than geographical. Forging new paths in this "virtual" Manhattan are digital media workplaces totally distinctive and different from what has gone before. Synonym: hot.

It's no surprise New York's vibrant edginess offers the fertile ground necessary for cultivating new media's ideas and techniques. Four prominent "Alley" companies are illuminating this evolution on the animation front and are now jazzing up the Internet with cartoon fare.

Funny Garbage
SoHo based Funny Garbage is an across-the-board graphic, motion, interactive, information and `identity' design company -- with a burgeoning animation studio division. Co-founded in 1996 by creative directors Peter Girardi, Chris Capuozzo and president John Carlin, the company designs and conceptualizes Web sites for clients including The Cartoon Network, Children's Television Workshop and Oxygen Media. They also produce CD-ROMs, traditional graphic and print campaigns, music and film for clients such as Nickelodeon, Compaq and Barnes & Noble. And as of this year, they've jumped into the production of interactive animated shows for delivery on the Web. As Girardi sums it up, Funny Garbage's work entails "a collision of all these different media" which is producing increasingly mixed-media demands.

Native New Yorkers Girardi and Capuozzo began their artistic lives as graffiti writers on subway cars and abandoned lots. They continued their experiments with textural elements at the city's School of Visual Arts. While students, they made the leap to creating visuals for computers at a time when the applications were still being written. Later, as creative director of the Voyager Company, Girardi launched the award winning Voyager Web site when "the only other thing up there was, like, Yahoo," he recalls. Together with Carlin, founder and director of the Red Hot Organization, he produced the Beat Experience CD-ROM, thereby building a strong background in motion and time-based design. "All that work with Voyager," he says, "was a really big experience for all of us."

B.Happy by Mark Newgarden. Courtesy of Mark Newgarden.

An invigorating relationship with Sam Register, vice president/creative director of The Cartoon Network's online division, matured during Funny Garbage's creation of the network's Web site (www.cartoonnetwork.com). That led to the company's production of Cartoon Network's first two Web Premiere Toons: Pink Donkey And The Fly, from Gary Panter, illustrator, comic-book artist, set designer extraordinaire, and B. Happy, from Mark Newgarden, renowned cartoonist, writer and conceptual artist. Both of these made-for-the-net series contain high levels of interactivity, necessitating what Girardi calls "a kind of weird hybrid team of traditional animators working alongside information architects and programmers." As always, the goal is entertaining storytelling, but Girardi adds: "One of the things we keep in our minds at all times is to never let the user feel they should take their hands off the mouse." Translation: Create wacky, fun, new 'toons while pressing the existing technologies to better fold interactivity into the narrative path of the cartoon.

Coot Country, created by Funny Business for Cartoon Network Online's Web Premiere Toon series. It will debut in September. Courtesy of Funny Business.

Girardi is excited by what the improvements in Flash 4 will mean for their third Web production entitled Coot Country, a Pink Donkey spin-off to premiere online this fall. Having worked closely with Macromedia's key developers, they know Flash 4's higher quality audio stream, with MP3 compression, will allow them to incorporate more music and effects. The tech-advancements will also allow them to create more "conditional events," i.e. offering the audience choices to affect completely different outcomes to each story. "Really knowing the idiosyncrasies of the medium and using it for what it's good for," Girardi says, is their mandate in creating fresh entertainment for the 'net.

The future for Funny Garbage's animation division, run by veteran producer Denise Rottina, will continue to require a unique blend of traditional animators with their tools (light boxes and Oxberry stands - Girardi says, "We have them all!") and the digital medium's tech-expert illustrators and designers. Currently in project development on such futuristic possibilities as multi-player 'toons and 2D `live' characters on the Web, Funny Garbage is primed to take advantage of what the Internet's new audiences will want to see.