Chances are you've already been entertained by the hard work and creative excellence of Flinch Studio. But maybe you haven't met properly. So consider this your polite and privileged introduction to an animation house which is not only surviving the hesitations and half-starts of the new media revolution -- but is, in fact, helping to pioneer it.

It's a common, and fair, assumption that San Francisco and New York City are the two hubs of the Internet hubbub. But with clients like Warner Bros., Jim Henson Productions, 20th Century Fox, Disney Online, Adam Sandler and Tim Burton carved into their bedpost, it doesn't require a huge leap of faith or imagination to know that Flinch Studio is doing something right. Founded and functioning by the "sweat-equity" of traditional animation artists, the Santa Monica-based studio is a new media entertainment company located in the backyard of Hollywood.

Tony Grillo, Flinch Studio's CEO/creative director, Mike Viner, Flinch's senior producer and Chris Takami, Flinch's president (left to right). All photos and images © Flinch Studio.

In the Beginning...
The Flinch story may have its beginnings as far back as the ancient, Atari-waning years of 1985. A young up-start kid, Chris Takami, had just gotten a job in the mailroom of DIC. But by 1990, Takami was already producing his own shows, and running his own boutique animation studio, Lil' Gangster Entertainment. Soon after merging with a programming group called Strategic Vision, the two companies became Vortex Media Arts -- which was the original fire out of which Flinch's future founders would be forged. Vortex was unique among the companies of its time for creating animation-based and graphically-driven CD-ROM games, churning out such titles as the million-unit seller Tonka Construction for Hasbro, Madeleine's European Adventures for Electronic Arts and Virtual Springfield for Fox's The Simpsons. In 1996, Vortex was tapped by Disney Online to create a Winnie-the-Pooh book for the fledgling World Wide Web, and Tony Grillo, an Atlanta-bred animator working on the project, was using FutureSplash to build it. At the time, even in its infancy, Grillo realized the latent promise and potential of the software. In four or five years, he insisted, "This program is going to be huge," and he thought it would behoove him to learn it.

Interestingly, during their work for Disney, the artists and programmers of Vortex consulted directly with the people of FutureWave, providing technical and artistic feedback. Future Splash, of course, was soon to be bought out by a company called Macromedia, and retooled into the Flash program that we all know and love today. During the last few years of the 1990s, with the market for CD-Rom games slowly saturating, Vortex Media Arts closed up shop, and its principal members went on to explore other directions. Grillo, unsurprisingly, continued to delve into the Flash software, learning how to 'reverse engineer' the traditional animation for which he was trained. Grillo became an expert with the program to the point he was teaching it at the university level, at Santa Monica College's Academy of Entertainment and Technology.