CRITIQUE ARCHIVE

http://www.mediatrip.com

Media Trip: A Good Ride
By Christa Starr

I often complain about media industry-related sites being too large or too poorly designed to be of any use (see my past reviews of MTV.com's Fear site or the First Look site if you want to witness my annoyance in action). While www.mediatrip.com has its problems, it is one of the more successful sites I've seen, gaining my respect by clearly stating its intentions and remaining true to its purposes.

Media Trip is partnered with Revolution Studios (producers of the upcoming film

Tomcats), referring to itself as "the online outlet for the studio's films [and] an incubator for new projects." It also provides a place where talent can post their resumes and photos for free, and even holds "online casting calls" where website members can try out for parts as featured extras in Revolution Studios' movies (two such members will be featured in the previously mentioned Tomcats).

While the amount of original content available on the site is small (at present count I found 29 short films and four animated series), it makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity. Media

Trip was one of the first sites to exhibit the wildly popular short George Lucas in Love, which eventually went on to outsell Star Wars: The Phantom Menace on Amazon.com. For those who like big names in their Internet shorts, several Media Trip films feature big screen talent such as Pat Morita, Kelsey Grammer, and Hallie Kate Eisenberg (you know, that freaky deep-voiced little girl from the Pepsi commercials). Through Revolution Studios, Media Trip as also created a pipeline to send their online shorts onto the big screen. The animated series L'il Pimp is currently being expanded into a full-length feature by Revolution Studios, who claim that it may be the first feature animation to be done with Macromedia's Flash, the current king of web animation software.

Of course, no site is perfect (especially when I'm doing the reviewing), and my biggest problem with Media Trip is its Community section. While the site does a great service to the film community by allowing filmmakers, actors, and other artists to post their resumes and shorts for free on the site, it gives very few options to users wanting to look through those artists' sites. The principal method involves browsing broad artist categories like "Actor" in alphabetical order, a process that takes one through pages and pages of names with no supplementary information as to the skills or talents of each member. Lacking even a rudimentary search function, it is hard to pick out specific members from the crowd. The second method is modeled after the "Am I Hot or Not" site, presenting the user with random pictures of members which they can rate (according to some unspecified criteria on a 1 to 10 scale) and/or visit the member's home page.

Though the failings of the Community section might bother me more if I were trying to search for hunky actors in the Boston area to star in my upcoming short classic, "The Flowers are Looking at Me… Again," at present it is not enough to dampen my Media Trip experience. The ease of navigation and the quality of the content far more than make up for its drawbacks, and I look forward seeing where this Trip will take us in the future.