How best to describe Trapped in the Closet? In fact, why describe it all. The media coverage on the latest installments of R. Kelly's ongoing schizolodeon has been remarkably positive and grossly academic. It can't be denied any longer that there is something more to his musical soap opera than a good laugh at his expense, proven by IFC's incredibly respectful online distribution. While still hilarious, these new chapters entangle the Trapped web to a point of such socio-political hullabaloo that R. Kelly is practically throwing those laughs right back in our face.

Without giving anything away, this season sees Kellz' alter-ego Sylvester finding more sex, violence and arguments, not to mention a bit of old time religion. The music and lyrics may not be as tight as the original installments, but when the songs return to their old chord progressions it feels even more deserved and exciting. As the tension builds throughout the new arc to its provocative and game-changing conclusion, we actually even stop thinking of R. Kelly as a musician and start thinking of him as a storyteller.

Whether or not Trapped in the Closet is a big joke, or an incendiary commentary on dishonesty in black culture is still too tough to call. But that is what precisely makes it worthwhile. In a story where no character is honest and one-faced, we shouldn't expect the teller to be. What you should expect though is one of the most unique meetings of perplexity and entertainment in recent years. Why attempt to describe it when it's so fun to be Trapped?

-Spencer Somers

"Afterworld" survives. First launched in February on Budweiser's online disaster BudTV, the animated post-apocalyptic adventure has gone from YouTube fame to corporate immortality -- picked up by Sony, and now webcasting on News Corp.'s MySpace, with all the marketing firepower they supply.

Even though the series has been around the web for several months, MySpace TV's general manager Jeff Berman told the LA Times, "We're confident this is going to be an enormous success." Starting Monday, new episodes will be released daily over the next several weeks. The series is also being broadcast on television on the Sci-Fi network in Australia.

Created by TV producer Stan Rogow ("Lizzie McGuire," "Nowhere Man") and written by Brent Friedman ("Mortal Kombat," "The Twilight Zone"), the web series – split into 130 3-minute episodes – chronicles the exploits of a Seattle man on a business trip in New York who survives a mysterious catastrophic event that makes 99% of the earth's population disappear and destroys all working technology. He eventually tries to find his way home.

While the static 2.5D style animation may prove too slow for the kids, "Afterworld" is well made, with an ominous mood and a compelling conspiracy-laden storyline that speaks well for the potential of longstanding online entertainment in the mold of "lonelygirl15" or "Prom Queen."

"What we're trying to do is create a unique form of entertainment as well as an original business model," said Rogow, who recently launched the digital studio Electric Farm Entertainment, which is responsible for producing "Afterworld."

While the MySpace page currently has little information beyond a registration page and some stats on the series' protagonist, the Times story reported that the website will allow fans to explore the journey of the series on their own. "Fans also can suggest plot lines, solve puzzles and interact with some of the characters, who will have their own blogs on MySpace," reported the paper.

"The idea was to create a new hybrid medium for entertainment using these different forms of technology, so that fans can get their daily snack of entertainment when and where they want," Friedman said.

In addition to a second season of "Afterworld," Electric Farm will also produce two other Web series that combine live action and animation, one about zombies in L.A. called "Woke up Dead" and "The Gemini Division," starring Rosario Dawson as a New York cop investigating the bizarre murder of her husband.

-Anthony Kaufman

Satacracy 88 is, in this writer's opinion, the best dramatic series to ever appear on the Web. I'm not alone: it's won a Webby, an Emmy, and has gotten the full-length profile treatment in the New York Times. (As usual, we wrote about it months before pretty much anyone else.)

Trying to sum the plot up to this point is futile -- just watch the series and you won't regret it. We will say that surreal tone and note-perfect execution would probably make Lynch and Cronenberg (not to mention Thelma and Louise) proud. And better yet, the audience helps determine the plot, thanks to regular online polls.

In this episode, our two heroines Angela (Baxter) and Susan (Pappas) have stumbled upon a desperate, tattooed, young lass in a wifebeater (D'Amore). Last week, the show's viewers decided that they should pick up the girl, and they do. The reason: Angela's fascination with her mysterious tattoo. Wanna see what happens next? Tune in next week.

-Matthew Ross

A man peers at the moon. The man on the moon waves back. Blink, and the man on the moon is by you at the beach. And he's leading you towards the ocean...

In case you missed last week's coverage of Room 401's increasing bizarre web presence, a brief recap: Room 401 is Ashton Kutcher's Punk'd-esque reality horror series, airing to little notice on MTV this summer. But astute viewers began noticing subliminal clues planted within the episodes by Kutcher himself, and in following the clues uncovered a tangled network of websites leading to a much larger game, full of videos and secrets and clues.

We don't know what is happening here, and we don't know who made it. But there's an eerie quality to this video's beauty. And we're looking forward to getting some answers.

This beautifully crafted montage by Pittsburgh-based 10-person creative agency Carney-Fireman captures the emotional power and poignancy of PostSecret, Frank Warren's mail-in art community project and weblog, which collects the secrets of strangers on postcards. Produced for publisher William Morrow to promote the PostSecret books, the video was posted on YouTube two weeks ago and has already received over half a million hits.

While showing the secrets on the web offers "immediacy," in book form "a narrative" and in art exhibitions "tangibility," Warren explains, "the nice thing about the video was to show the cards in another, more animated way, tapping into the story behind the secret in a more emotional and visceral way. And it was a new way to allow the secrets to touch people."

"The challenge of representing the written word on the web in a compressed video box eliminated some cards, because graphically they'd be too difficult to decipher on the web," he explains.

Both Warren and Fireman also wanted a wide cross-section of secrets. "So that it wasn't just sexual secrets or funny secrets, but touches on all human emotions: the joyful, the confused, the anguished," says Warren. "That's when the project is at its most powerful; it's a full-bodied opera, and you can go from something funny to tragic in a microsecond. It adds something more to have the sum of these secrets."

For the video production which took about three months to complete, Fireman's crew, upon the recommendation of Warren, cut the images to Sia's "Breathe Me" -- and added a human aspect to the material by videotaping people approaching mail boxes and giving the footage an old nostalgic home-movie effect, "because most of the cards are handmade," Fireman says. He also highlights the image and cutting by Jim DiSpirito, former percussionist for the multi-platinum-band Rusted Root, who has a wonderfully rhythmic touch to the edits.

Warren admits he had tried video clips before, but was never satisfied with them. But he's finally warming up to the format. "It's really exciting to work in the field of blogs and internet videos," he says. "What we're seeing on the Internet now is not tapping into the vastness of the potential of the web," he adds. "I hope that people can appreciate the Internet for sincere, soulful purposes, too."

-Anthony Kaufman

If Back to the Future met The Fast and the Furious met Asian Extreme action, it might look something like the wildly inventive, exuberantly nonsensical Overdrift, a crazy concoction from the Duncan Brothers, Los Angeles-based filmmakers who originally hail from Seattle.

With swinging cameras, fast cuts, creative effects and a mashed-up plot involving everything from "drift racing" and paleontology to cross-dimensional travel and the bond of two brothers, Overdrift feels like Hollywood conventions hopped up on acid and made on a shoestring budget.

Overdrift was inspired by a Japanese anime TV series called "Initial D" as well as "Channel 101 and its many creators and our own inability to take anything seriously," Ian and Brant write via email, as well as Sickanimation.com's Marc M., "dinosaurs, beards, Werner Herzog, and Koreans."

"We go over story and major plot points, all the scenes and the general flow of things," the Duncan brothers explain about their improvisational process, "but specific dialogue is kinda hashed out when we are shooting. We certainly value the benefit of a good script, but these kind of things can be done on the fly."

Ian Duncan, 24, graduated from USC film school, while Brant, 22, got a filmmaking degree from San Francisco State University. "We basically spent all of our money at school, so now we can't afford to do anything else," they say. "We're scrappers and would rather pull the trigger on a gun in our mouths then stop making movies."

While the dynamic duo are content working on their own projects (check out previous wacky D.I.Y. wonders such as the sci-fi cyberpunk "Burn/N.E.N.E.R" and the buddy-cop action-thriller "The Deepening"), they have "bigger projects on the horizon," they say. And we'll be watching out for them.

-Anthony Kaufman

A live-action Ratatouille with a romantic twist, Dan Brown's "Pierre: A Hole with a View" is a delightful, narrative short about the unrequited love between a French mouse and his gorgeous new human roommate. The Grand Jury Prize winner at the South by SouthWest Film Festival's recent online "SXSWclick" event, the 35mm film also won an Audience Award for best short at the recent 2007 Seattle International Film Festival.

Inspired by old Warner Bros. "Looney Tunes," Disney animated cartoons and Tex Avery shorts, "Pierre" is set in a nostalgic art-deco Parisian milieu, featuring high-gloss locations shot in Seattle. Brown won a Spotlight Award from the Independent Feature Project based on the screenplay, which amounted to free film, transfer, audio and camera equipment. With $20,000 raised from family and friends, Brown says he was "forced" to make the film.

Brown never went to film school, but he learned After Effects and motion graphics while at Seattle art school; and worked at design house Digital Kitchen for more than three years.

"Pierre" was a true labor of love, taking two years to complete. "Finding someone to do music, make a 3D mouse, and a free or nearly free voice actor to work on it, took some time and put me at their mercy to finish it," he admits. "You can't really enforce a timeline when someone is doing you a favor."

After the success of "Pierre" (two major awards + two free Macs, "no complaints from me," says Brown), he'd like to leap from motion graphics to a directing career. "I have a few scripts I'd love to turn into films," he says. He'd also like to turn a faux-trailer he made for SXSW's Grindhouse Trailer Competition into a feature film; it just so happens that Brown's trailer -- called "Maiden of Death" -- was one of the best of the bunch. The creme really does rise to the top.

-Anthony Kaufman

The wild wild west meets the urban noir jungle in Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman's online debut "The West Side," a slick and stylish black-and-white narrative drama about New York cowboy-gangsters.

Bilsborrow-Koo, 26, went to film school in Vermont, returned to his native Durham (where he produced marketing and training videos for a North Carolina nonprofit), and then started http://nofilmschool.com, which landed him a job in the New York entertainment industry. Lieberman, 23, a recent USC grad (where he received a liberal arts degree), grew up in the Pacific Northwest.

The aspiring filmmakers met while working at MTV last year. While neither are New York natives, they've taken to the city like bees to honey, crafting an expressionistic vision of Harlem they say was inspired by black-and-white westerns, such as High Noon, Dead Man, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. "Certainly Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns also influenced our style," adds Bilsborrow-Koo. "But mostly what drove our high-contrast black-and-white look was the idea of creating an alternate universe; we couldn't have 'The West Side' look like New York City, circa 2007."

"The idea behind the aesthetic was to make 'The West Side' always feel dark, even in broad daylight, and to give the world as harsh a feel as possible," continues Bilsborrow-Koo, who explains they did shot-by-shot color grading in After Effects to elevate the contrast. They also kept the depth of field as narrow as possible, obscuring recognizable background details like street signs and advertisements.

While the duo's DIY production looks impressive, "extreme low-budget productions do carry their inherent risks," he adds. "We just recently lost all our data in a hard drive crash and are spending a chunk of change on rebooting with a more robust data storage system in place." Even with their setbacks, expect episode two in September.

-Anthony Kaufman

Solid dramatic films are hard to find on the Internet, what with so much skit-based humor and animated clips. But web design guru Hillman Curtis's latest, "Embrace," an elegantly constructed and emotionally harrowing scenario, shows how effectively it can be done. It is, quite frankly, one of the best online originals we've seen in a long time.

Part of a series of videos about crisis moments (there's also the similarly apocalyptic, though less effective "Roof"), "Embrace" was inspired by a trip that Curtis took in a single engine aircraft in a storm from Pittsburgh many years ago. "It was the roughest flight I've ever had," he recalls, "and my wife said, 'Just say something' to calm them down.

A top digital designer and the head of the 9-year-old New York firm hillmancurtis.com, Curtis has crafted many high-profile websites, music videos, and online documercials, and also is the author of three books: the seminal tome Flash Web Design (translated into 14 languages), MTIV, Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer and most recently, Creating Short Films for the Web. It's that last book that seems to have helped Curtis create the pitch-perfect "Embrace," whose success is derived from a solid, simple concept, strong acting and creative use of sound.

With all his design work, Curtis admits he barely has time to make these personal shorts, nor does he make an effort to promote them or send them to film festivals. "I squeeze these in every quarter, and just put them on my website," he says. He also has a mailing list of roughly 3,500 people that receive updates when he has a new project. "I like not having any expectations or associations with ambition," he explains. "That might change as they get better, but it's just fun to make them and who ever sees them, sees them." And we're glad we did.

Meet the dark side of Pixar: Two years in the making, Guy Bar'ely's Pratt Institute CG thesis film was inspired by living in the mean, sometimes unforgiving streets of Brooklyn. "I've always been fascinated by the homeless," he says. "These outcasts of society, seen on the subway and in the streets of New York, seemed like they had very sad stories to tell. But no one was interested in hearing them."

Tired of the lack of disturbing subject matter in popular computer generated animation, Bar'ely says "the time was right to finally break out from these conventions." He calls "Cycle" -- the exquisitely rendered story of a homeless man, his daughter, and the subway -- "a cartoon tragedy."

Bar'ely cites influences such as Dark Days, a documentary about the lives of people living under the city in abandoned subway tunnels, and stylistically, he cites computer game designer Tim Schaffer ("Day of the Tentacle"), Tim Burton, and Pixar (specifically Brad Bird). And for helping him through the difficult times of artistic creation ("had to take Prozac at some point to fight off the anxiety attacks," he admits), he says he couldn't have made the film without the support of his friends and family.

You can see more of Bar'ely's work at www.guybarely.com.