Internet Tv Channel

(Colossal) Pictures Animates Interactive Zoogs For Disney Channel And Disney.com.

SAN FRANCISCO - The Disney Channel and San Francisco-based (Colossal) Pictures have collaborated to create Zoog Disney, a two-hour stretch of interactive programming that was launched simultaneously with a related Zoog Disney component on Disney's Web site, www.disney.com/DisneyChannel/zoogdisney.

"The idea is, you don't watch TV, you do TV," explained (Colossal) Pictures senior creative director George Evelyn, who helped create the animation for both television and the Internet. "It turns television-watching into an active, rather than a passive, experience, and gives children an identity and a voice. Essentially, they become part of what they are watching."

Zoog Disney takes place in an imaginary cyberuniverse called Zeether, which exists somewhere between television and the Internet. For two hours every Saturday and Sunday evening, Disney's programming is hosted by the Zoogs, a collection of cybercharacters animated by (Colossal). Each Zoog represents an aspect of the online experience. Joe Zoog functions as the narrator and guide, Zoogina is the queen of chat and Browser is a dog who digs up information and functions as a canine search engine. Other characters include Gatherer, Airline, MZ, Twitch, Dotcom and Glitches.

Zoog Disney airs live-action shows geared towards children 8-12 years of age, such as Bug Juice: Our Summer At Camp, Flash Forward and Going Wild With Jeff Corwin. Viewers can watch one of these shows and then go online during the week and submit comments, critiques or join a chat room based on the show. The following week, Disney broadcasts a new show on Saturday and the previous week's on Sunday. For a couple of minutes total during each rerun, the screen shrinks and the Zeether Ticker appears - a conveyor belt cranked by Zoogs, which carries viewer comments gathered from the Internet along the bottom of the screen. In other words, if Going Wild features a show about bats one week, a kid might write in that he has bats in his attic at home. His comments would then appear on the Zeether Ticker the following week. By appearing on both the Web site and the television shows, the Zoog characters help kids make the transition between the two mediums (and allows for cross-promotion).

According to Evelyn, one of the biggest challenges was to devise animation that worked both on TV and the Internet. "Everything we did took its cue from what could work in both mediums," said Evelyn. Because the Internet has a limited color palette and a slower frame rate than television, (Colossal) created 10 main characters and a host of "extras" designed to work both on TV and online.

Each character has its own unique movement capabilities, backgrounds and stylized lipsync movements. They were produced with the help of Mondo Media, San Francisco, an interactive-media design shop. Evelyn created the designs on paper, and Mondo modeled them in 3-D, but the final onscreen product looks two-dimensional, a process (Colossal) chief creative officer Drew Takahashi calls "2 1/2-D."

"We essentially gave Disney Channel a modular animation kit where they could mix and match characters' discrete actions, like moving left to right or talking to the camera, and quickly assemble an endless array of scenes," said Evelyn.

Character flexibility was essential, considering that weekly input from the viewers meant that the Zoogs' actions and dialogue would be modified and dictated by information coming from the Web site. To meet this challenge, (Colossal) created a fairly simple environment, in which characters and text can live on the television screen while programming is in progress. While viewer comments scroll by, the Zoogs remain silent, but during show intros and bumpers they become more animated, though still jerky enough to match their movements in the online environment.

Zoog Disney is still in a trial period and is certainly not the only feature offered on Disney's extensive Web site, which provides links to Disney movie reviews, the Disney Vacation Club and Disney magazine, among others. Registration is simple and free, and the section of the site where viewers' comments are collected is password-protected. Children are told to use pseudonyms when giving their input so when their comments appear on the television screen, their identities remain secret.

COPYRIGHT 1998 BPI Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

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