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On YouTube: Where Kiwis Beat Penguins for Pageviews
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Happy Feet's dancing penguins topped the box office over the weekend, but another CG-animated bird is just as popular on the web. Since it was posted on YouTube in late June, "Kiwi!" – named for the small flightless New Zealand fowl – has been viewed over three million times on YouTube, "favorited" over 36,000 times and currently ranks as one of the top videos of all time on the site's Arts and Animation section.
The trailer for "Happy Feet" doesn't come close. (And the Kiwi's popularity hasn't slowed: from Saturday to Sunday, the film was viewed another 200,000 times.)
Created by 25-year-old Dony Permedi, as a Masters Thesis project at New York's School of Visual Arts, the video is a simple little story about the extraordinary lengths one little kiwi goes to simulating flight. Made with computer programs Maya and Adobe AfterEffects, the short offers further proof of how far something concise and handcrafted can go in the world of web entertainment. Permedi, who received a fine arts degree at Ohio's Bowling Green State University in 2004, is still looking to break into the computer animation industry, judging from this recently published interview.
But based on the success of "Kiwi!" -– and Permedi's unsuspecting combination of cute and disturbing in an earlier CG-short called "Pony" (which I find even more fresh than "Kiwi!" with its dark unexpected twist) -- he may very well be able to parlay his talents into something big. Happy Feet 2, perhaps? It's not that far-fetched.