Digital Hollywood Panel

Animax Entertainment will be represented on a panel in the upcoming Digital Hollywood conference. The panel is in the Advertising track on Thursday October 22nd and is entitled "Strategizing the Campaign: Selling Movies, TV, and Video on the Web, Social Media, Mobile and TV." Likely we'll touch on some of the efforts underway behind Popzilla, the new TV show we are producing for MTV, as well as some of our other work.

Wiki of TV?

Huge news this week. The future of TV for everyone will be served from one uber DVR. It's as if the Library of Congress held every TV show ever made, no matter how obscure, and you could access it anytime, anywhere, on any platform.

The implications for advertisers and the advertising industry are enormous. If I (as a rabid television consumer) can voluntarily engage with any kind of entertainment content I want, without ever having to see an ad, how do advertisers get their brand stories to foster that same kind of voluntary engagement? It starts with the advertiser's product or service being remarkable enough that an equally remarkable story can be crafted and told by their agency that would compel me to voluntarily engage with it as well. Agencies aren't usually known for being master storytellers so they've got an uphill battle ahead of them.

There will be more coming out on this very subject from Animax Entertainment in the near future.

Press Pours In

Animax is happy to see that Bob & Doug has been getting lots of coverage in consumer and trade press and it's all positive. The McKenzie Brothers were already close to being patron saints of Canada and all this press just backs that up. Bob & Doug airs on Global TV in Canada this Sunday.
· National Post
· Vancouver Sun
· Canada.com
· Channel Canada
· Time Colonist
· Leader-Post
· Montreal Gazette
· Edmonton Journal
· Macleans
· Winnipeg Sun
· The Barrie Examiner
· TV Time
· Radio Interview: Talk 1410AM
· Radio Interview: DBS Podcast
· The Movie Blog

Bob & Doug Premiere!

That's right, it's finally here. The premiere episode of Bob & Doug launches this Sunday night April 19 at 7:30 p.m. ET/PT in Canada on Global TV. Check out the show's website. The animated McKenzie Brothers first starred in a short piece for the DVD release of Strange Brew, and then it all just snowballed from there. Now everyone (well, Canadians at the very least) will be able to see Bob & Doug McKenzie on a weekly basis. Animax is very proud to see all those years of hard work and determination to see the show come to fruition finally pay off. We hope to see the show take off, eh, big time. (Sorry, we just had to drop one of those references in there.)

More Slacker Cats

ABC Family finally launched more episodes of the Flash animated TV show Slacker Cats. You can watch streaming versions of the episodes on ABC Family's website or you can download them from iTunes. In particular check out episodes 6 & 11 to see Animax's animation handiwork.

Catch-up and Fried

These past couple months have been absolutely nutty for Animax - we're kinda fried. We haven't been able to keep up with blogging because of the frenzied pace and a lot of what we've been doing we can't fully talk about because of lots of codes of secrecy, but to help you guys catch-up with us, here's what we can say.

On the broadband front:

• Phase 2 of the Kelloggs Yogos site rolled out for Fox's 4Kids. The third phase will be released soon.
  
• Kodak's InkIsIt.com launched into Phase 2 with a focus on helping consumers understand how their printing habits could be better served by the new product line.
• We're working on few projects for the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation, one of which has us in recording sessions with Bob Saget, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ashley Tisdale, Dominic Scott Kay, and (hopefully) a guy who used to drive around in a 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am.
• We're creating a very kooky mashup activity for a futuristic ice cream company (thankfully there is ice cream in the future!)
  
• We didn't win the Emmy this year for Off-Mikes, but we are going to be producing more episodes for ESPN.com.
• We won a couple Horizon Interactive Awards for our work with Sesame Workshop and the Ad Council, both of whom we have follow on project work with right now.
  
• Michael is running for the PGA New Media Council Board of Delegates so get out and vote.

On the broadcast front:

• We're animating certain episodes for a certain company for a certain TV show.
• We just finished animating other episodes for another company.
• There are some other episodes we worked on awhile ago that are finally, hopefully going to see the light of day but even if they don't we're at least certain we animated them. At least we think we're certain.
  

Animax Got Into MIT!!!

Congratulations Animax! We got into MIT! Actually we got into the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium blog because of one of our transmedia productions. Huh? Not even wikipedia has a listing for "transmedia." We're pretty sure after reading this, that transmedia means how a particular piece of content is handled across various storytelling media - broadcast, broadband, theatrical, retail entertainment, etc. and how each piece of content and it's treatment contributes to a meta-narrative spanning across all media in aggregate. We're not exactly sure that's what it means because our brain started to hurt trying to understand all the MIT-speak (although, reading Geoffrey Long's blog helped.)

Anyways, all the fuss is being made over the highbrow cartoon we produce for WWE called Mr. McMahon's Kiss My Ass. It turns out that KMA is one of the "stranger transmedia products" Sam Ford has ever heard of - now, that's a pull-quote! Ford is a 2007 Masters of Science Candidate in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and is entering his second year as a media analyst for the Convergence Culture Consortium. He's also a fan of wrestling -- he didn't go as far as to say he's a fan of Mr. McMahon's posterior. KMA qualifies as transmedia because McMahon exploits his rump live in the ring (theatrical entertainment), on TV (broadcast entertainment), in print, and now, with our help, online. By the way, the latest episode features Mel Gibson.

Upon further review it seems like we've been involved in a number of transmedia productions not the least of which is the one Animax won an Emmy for - ESPN's animated Off-Mikes which spans many of the same media as WWE including radio.

P.S. Hey MIT, we feel like we deserve an honorary doctorate after trying to figure this transmedia stuff out.