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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.10 - JANUARY 2001
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Flinch: The House That Flash Built
Using its work-for-hire model to evolve with the industry, Takami summarizes Flinch's vision: "We believe that the future of online entertainment lies somewhere between the games that we play and the television that we watch." Flinch draws on its strong background in interactive media to produce character-driven, immersive environments, to pull viewers into the world that it creates. The current wisdom is that content online will ultimately be an integration of the old and new paradigms of entertainment, a hybrid of the two styles of media. Content will be interactive when and if you want it to be, without encroaching on your freedom to navigate through an environment as you choose. When Takami demonstrates prototypes of Flinch's Websites to different groups of people, children oftentimes want to play with and to interact with the characters, again and again; whereas sometimes adults don't have the time or patience to deal with them. With a click of the mouse, the characters are gone, and Takami acknowledges it's a balance. Who is the target audience, and what is the experience you're trying to create for them? The application varies for each client. Flinch continues to push its research and development in pursuing novel ways to use the Flash software. Moving more toward intensive database-driven strategies of design, coupled with AI (artificial intelligence) programming, Emil Petrinic, Flinch's inhouse programming and technical genius, explains, "We have basically invented a lot of ways of using the technology and tools: new ways of Flash interacting with a database, different ways of conceptualizing how to interact with the next generation of Websites." He adds, "I know that others are going in that direction, as well, but we're putting it together as a whole, instead of little bits here and there."
Flinch Studio is also positioned to introduce Flash technology to the traditional animation houses as a viable option for them to produce their shows at a lower cost. Not all cartoons, of course, are suited for Flash, but certainly a lot of them could be achieved therein: Johnny Bravo, King of the Hill and South Park are a few that come immediately to mind. With projects in the works for J. Walter Thompson, an advertising firm, and 20th Century Fox's forthcoming stop-motion animated feature Monkeybone (bitemymonkey.com), Flinch Studio takes its work very seriously, in helping to define the model for new media entertainment. Viner expresses his appreciation that companies are taking the risk to explore this new medium, and that they are trusting Flinch with their creative goals: "It's always good to see people be brave enough to say, 'Hey, nobody's done this before, but I think it's a good idea. Let's put some money behind it.'"
Regardless of the industry's present vacillations and hiccups, there will always be a market for animation online. Viner comments, "I don't think in 2 years, 5 years or 10 years from now, people will look back and say, 'I remember that year when there was entertainment on the Web.' It's simply not going to happen. People may look back and remember before broadband was popular, when animation was only three minutes on the Web." Inspired by a lot of the undersung, underground work being done, Amato remarks, "There are a few Flash artists fighting to get interesting work out there before the corporate gates close on the individual spirit." He adds, "Flinch tries to successfully bridge the two — an independent, creative spirit matched with the needs of a client, which often exists in a corporate milieu." Grillo agrees: "Flinch has been able to maintain a healthy balance of creative and corporate clientele, and that's not an accident. After all," he concludes, with his characteristically buoyant humor, "if it stops being fun, I'm the first one to bail." Gregory Singer is an independent animation producer living in a small hut on the edge of the known visible universe. No animals were harmed or consumed in the writing of this article.
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