Artist Jennifer Shiman was just puttering around with ideas for Flash cartoons when she struck internet gold: 30-second versions of popular movies. Starring bunnies. She enlisted her pal Douglas McInnes to do some of the voicework, and she soon posted a half-minute bunny edition of The Exorcist. Her website, AngryAlien.com, exceeded its bandwidth almost immediately as word of mouth spread across the web about her hilarious ‘toon. This inspired her to make more titles, like Jaws and Alien. Now she creates these mini-movies for the STARZ! movie channel full-time, and is currently reworking that beloved classic, Highlander. In this interview, Jennifer reveals the method behind her bunny madness.
How did you come up with the 30-second movies concept?
I’m a professional multimedia designer and Flash animator. Early last year, with the intention of fleshing out my online portfolio, I thought it’d be neat to do a cartoon experiment. I would take The Exorcist—which is one of my favorite scary movies—and apply some sets of limitations to reenacting the movie, like the 30-second time limit. And then I thought I’d take it a step further and have some sort of characters do the reenacting. So I enlisted Doug to do the voices with me, because this was just a very low key project—we were just messing around. I put it up on my site, which at the time was getting like 25 hits a day, mostly from accidental keyword searches, and sent the link out to family and friends. A couple of days later, I got a call from the people hosting my site: “What are you doing?” Because it crashed their server.
How has the site grown since then?
Well, people just wanted me to make more of them, so I thought I’d make more and see how it went. And then STARZ! Entertainment Group asked me to do a few for their Hare Raising Halloween Marathon, and now they’ve commissioned me to do 10 additional ones—so it’s grown a lot. Right now, whenever I release a new file, I can get 3-4,000 unique visitors an hour. On average, right now I receive about 20,000 unique visitors a day.
Why did you select bunnies as your actors?
When I was sketching out the characters that would possibly reenact the movies, I drew a bunch of other cute, unassuming characters like kittens, mice, and gophers. But the bunnies had this expression on their faces that was really funny—it was a really stoic expression—so I decided to go with them. It’s also nice because they’ve got the ears, too: you can attach bunny ears to lots of things and it’s funny.
How do you pick which movies to reenact?
For the ones that have been commissioned, they’ll give me a group I can choose from. When I was on my own, making them myself, I’d just pick movies that I loved. I made a list of horror movies I loved and just started from there.
How do you actually make the cartoons?
I do all the drawing and artwork by hand using an animation light box, and then I ink them. Then I scan the drawings in using Photoshop, and then I convert the bitmap art to vector art using Adobe Streamline. Then I import the vector art into Macromedia Flash. I do all the animation, coloring, and layout in Flash.
How do you pick which scenes to include within the 30 seconds?
I watch the movies many times, and take notes. Then it’s just intuitive; each movie has its own specific challenges as far as trying to condense it. The Pulp Fiction one that I’ve just done for Starz was really hard because it was a non-linear narrative. It skipped around so much, to keep it comprehensive was challenging. And there are so many awesome parts of the movie, you don’t want to leave anything out; there are so many awesome lines, but sometimes you can’t say them because there’s just not enough time to do it. But it’s fun, too, because you have to devise all sorts of tricks to explain the logic of the movie.
Have you ever gotten reactions from the actual directors of the original movies?
Not really, but I’ve gotten lots of positive responses from people all over the place. It’s been great. I got a very nice email from the people at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica. That was exciting. They requested The Thing, which is appropriate. That was the furthest request.
Do you ever feel tempted to go beyond 30 seconds and make an epic bunny movie?
The “Director’s Cut” in 45 seconds? Not really—but maybe the Blade Runner Director’s Cut could be 45 seconds. Or if I ever tackle Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, because I don’t know if I could trilogies in 30 seconds—that’s a tall order. But those are some of the most requested ones.
What other requests do you often receive?
All kinds of stuff: Deliverance, The Godfather, Scarface, The Silence of the Lambs, classics like Casablanca and Gone With the Wind. I got a request for Behind the Green Door.
Will you ever be able to amass that many 30-second movies?
Yeah, I suppose I can have the bunnies keep making them until we all get plenty tired of them.
