Megadude struts his stuff "Just Stayin’ Alive." © Protozoa, Inc.

Staying Alive!
Located in an old mayonnaise factory, DotComix has three motion-capture stages, a blue screen set-up, plus a portable performance animation stage for producing certain live events out-of-house. They are in the process now of retrofitting their space to accommodate the brisk expansion of programming and requisite creative personnel. Hayes is keen on ramping up to an even greater series output, confident in relying on the fast turnaround of DotComix' production style.

"The advantage to the speed within which we work is that if a show is not working, we can acknowledge that and go on to something else that does work or we can craft it to the point where we’re happy with it," he explains. "I think our model is we can do a whole series in the amount of time and effort it takes most people to do a pilot." From an audience’s point of view, however, he believes strongly that it’s important to "not put technology in the forefront and just make entertaining cartoons -- however they get made." He goes on, "The important thing for us is that we get the chemistry going, get the writing to gel, get everything to work because that’s what it’s all about, entertaining and good writing and character designs. It’s not about pixels and digibytes."

What makes their Alive! system shine in the industry, Hayes advocates, is the fact that they can adapt their programming so readily to achieve simultaneous life-forms on the Web, television, cable and live events. "We're trying to do shows that filter out into all those areas but bring people back to the Web where they can catch up on the episodes they missed. Plus, they can find out more information about the shows and all that kind of stuff rather than try and force the Internet to somehow be a television station." He's also stimulated by the high-speed capabilities of producing with Alive!, "in terms of how we can make stories that are very reactive to what's going on in the news and in the world…and the flip side of that is that the fan base let’s us know right away whether they like it. So it's a very nice feedback loop."

"Honey, let’s stay home tonight and get Dotcomixed…" © Protozoa, Inc.

Capturing Transmedia Appeal
Danielson is enthusiastic about converting more of their original properties into transmedia action and strategizing their performance into solid and repeatable business models. He also refers to the Duke campaign as a powerful example of getting their shows "in multiple mediums that help to drive traffic back to the site and create a broader interest on a national level that you can’t do as a micro-site on the Web." Adding to that, deGraf states, "The biggest challenge is spreading out -- producing more but without diluting it and actually, the other part that I am really excited about is going up a level in our production quality. Up until now its been fast-and-furious just to get as much up there as we can and now we feel like we have a large enough volume that we can be more selective. We can take longer writing our stuff and we can filter out shows that don't work as well so that the overall density of really funny stuff is much higher."