Angry Alien

Welcome to my Electronic Publishing blog!  This here's the place where I talk about Electronic Publishing thingies!  And complete assignments for my Electronic Publishing class!  It's fun!  This I command!

This week, I will be writing three entries about web sites that do a particularly good job of presenting a creative narrative and representing a writer and his or her work.  Today's entry is about an old web site that I first discovered years ago, but it was the first thing I thought of when I read the assignment.

Angry Alien Productions gives us 30-second reenactments of movies performed by cartoon bunnies.  I don't know where that idea came from, but it works really well.  30 seconds is a great length for these.  It's fun to see how they cram all the major plot points and classic lines from the movies into that small a time frame, and because it takes so little time to watch one, you feel compelled to watch another one, and pretty soon you've spent quite a while on the site watching a whole bunch of them.  Also, the bunnies are cute and have cute little bunny voices.

There are also a few other features at the bottom of the site, my favorite of which is Amy's Diary, which features animated readings of third-grade diary entries.  I think the voice work is what I like best about it.  There's something really funny about adults doing dramatic readings of a third-grade diary and keeping spelling errors like "dear dairy" and "ect, ect, ect" intact.  Actually it sounds kind of mean when I put it that way, but of course the diary belongs to one of the people involved in making the site, so it's okay.

The creator of the site, Jennifer Shiman, is primarily a cartoonist rather than a writer, but she certainly did a fair amount of writing to script those 30-second reenactments, so hopefully this counts as a writer featuring her work on the web.  It's obviously been a successful piece of promotion for her.  Her work is featured on Starz, and the site has gotten tons of hits and press.  There are also merchandise links at the top and bottom of the page, which seem like pretty good places to put them to me.  They're not annoyingly in your face, but you definitely notice them.  I don't know for sure, but I feel confident in estimating that lots and lots of people have bought shirts with the cute little bunnies on them.  All in all, I think this site is an excellent example of both a creative product and good self-promotion.