A bottle of Jack Daniels, cigarettes and a pair of shades put Duke in the mood to rock-n-roll. © Protozoa, Inc.

DUKE 2000 — An Animated Quest for the White House
A major company effort (and source of great fun) surrounds DotComix' newest collaboration with Gary Trudeau on the production of the Duke2000 Presidential campaign. The company first worked with Trudeau on a 3D animated rock video, which was webcast during NetAid's live international event to fight hunger on October 9th of last year. The on-going Duke2000 campaign, unquestionably the first transmedia event of its kind, entails the fictional Ambassador Duke running for President in the real world. Animated and produced by DotComix, written by Trudeau and a team of writers working together with the dotcomix staff, Duke has been appearing in multiple media locales since his candidacy was announced earlier this year. Venues include: online (with new content going up each week at dotcomix and the Excite sponsored duke2000.com), on television (a one hour Larry King Live interview featured the animated Duke interacting in real-time with celebrities Al Franken and Bill Maher, with a number of other TV appearances coming up soon); on radio (a 30 city drive-time interview tour was just completed last month); and in print media (including Duke's regular visits to Trudeau's Doonesburystrip, and published interviews such as the one in the May issue of George magazine). As the company describes it: "With Duke's subversive campaign, the walls between the various media are crumbling."

It feels almost sacrilegious to describe the behind-the-scenes production of Duke in fear of busting his seemingly real persona. One technical footnote, though, is that this is the first DotComix production to use QuickTime as its Internet media player. It was vital to the reality of this series to integrate live action actors and backgrounds with the 3D created Duke, so the animation-only Pulse Entertainment Player -- the technology presently downloaded by the viewer to power all other DotComix shows -- wasn't suitable. Partnering with Apple has given DotComix the QuickTime technology necessary for those creative purposes, and additionally brings onboard Apple's infrastructure and servers to handle the huge amount of traffic amassing around the online campaign. The company will continue producing Duke2000's cross-platformed media all the way through inauguration and, only half-jokingly, they suggest that in the event Duke actually takes the Presidency, we'll have four more years with him!

A 3D duck and ant as featured in Floops. © Protozoa, Inc.

Alchemy in the Company's Mix
Brad deGraf (CEO and Chairman) co-founded DotComix in early 1999 along with long time colleagues Eric Gregory (Chief Technology Officer) and Marc Scaparro (Head of Production). Together, the trio has a substantial history in leading performance and computer animation in new directions. DeGraf's pre-computer life included designing sculptural furniture and studying architecture at Princeton, which he later combined with a degree in Mathematics from the University of California at San Diego. After stints designing programs for the US Army National Training Center and as Head of Technical Direction at Digital Productions, he founded deGraf/Wahrman. The beginnings of his collaboration with Scaparro and Gregory took place in deGraf's basement where they co-authored the architecture of the proprietary software they named Alive! Taking it with them to Colossal Pictures, they formed that studio's in-house Digital Media Group, using their nascent technology in the creation of Cartoon Network’s digital emcee "Moxy" (the first real-broadcast motion-capture character) and Peter Gabriel's Grammy Award-winning music video "Steam." In 1994, the three spun off to form Protozoa and jumped headlong into television production, software sales and the then-burgeoning market of 3D animated games. In late 1996, with the advent of the Internet's 3D player technology VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), the group began producing their first online characters, designing the well-known Spider and Alliskator properties -- work that deGraf feels was "the first really non-video animation on the Web." Next came a series for SGI entitled Floops which, deGraf believes, "can really claim to be the first episodic cartoon on the Web."