Children's Programmer, qubo, to Broadcast User-Generated Animations

Children's programmer, qubo, will this Thursday begin airing user-generated animated short films on its own channel, as well as on its broadcast blocks on ION Television, NBC and Telemundo. The films were developed under the auspices of a promotion called quboPic that invited viewers to log onto qubo.com to create short animations using a storytelling Web application, called "Zimmer Twins," that was developed by zinc Roe design, a company that specializes in Flash development and new media projects for children. qubo has selected 14 viewer-submitted animations from the thousands that it says were submitted, and has prepared them for broadcast by remastering them--converting them to high-resolution video with broadcast-quality color, music and sound effects. It has also hired character actors to record dialog and narration that the animations' creators wrote in the speech bubbles provided by the Zimmer Twins application. This is the second time that qubo has organized the quboPic promotion: the promotion's previous run--from December, 2008 through February, 2009--resulted in the selection of 12 user-generated animations for remastering and broadcast.

The Zimmer Twins application--which in 2007 won an International Interactive Emmy--allows children to create, modify and share animations featuring the eponymous characters, Edgar and Eva, in what is billed as "a rich, safe Web environment." It provides storytelling tools, pre-made animated clips and simple editing instructions. According to qubo, the clips and storytelling prompts "explore classic kid themes like science, animals, magic and adventure" and the application's animation interface is "designed around the basic elements of sentence structure, and reinforces reading, grammar, and writing techniques." Once they have created their animations, users can post and share them, and vote for their favorite submissions.

According to qubo, the latest round of the quboPic promotion had resulted in the creation of 66,000 user-generated animations (the first round resulted in close to 50,000) by the time the 14 winning animations were selected. The company says that there are now nearly 170,000 original Zimmer Twins animations on its site, posted by almost 80,000 registered users. "We were thrilled with the response to our first round of quboPic premieres and can't think of a better way to honor and thank our viewers than by launching a second effort," qubo president and general manager, Rick Rodriguez, said in a prepared statement. "We are proud to showcase the creativity of these talented children on our air. The Zimmer Twins helps reinforce qubo's mission of engaging children's minds while promoting reading and literacy."