Geek Gestalt

At Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla., I joined a Segway tour of the park. But before we could head out, we had to undergo about 30 minutes of training to make sure no one endangered themselves or anyone else.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

EPCOT CENTER, Fla.--Ah, lawyers.

I was sitting inside a small dome, antsy to get going on the special Segway tour of this famous theme park that I had arranged. But before they would let me or any of the others on the tour head out and ride around on our gyroscopic human transporters, we had to sit through more than half an hour of tedious, but entirely practical, training.

As our instructors told us how to get on and how to get off, how to speed up and how to slow down and so many other crucial things, I could detect the work of people in suits at a firm somewhere that probably had an ampersand in its name.

After all, when you're Disney, you want to make sure you cover all your bases when it comes to liability.

Well, fair enough. Finally, we finished up, and led by a genial woman named Carole, we headed out into Epcot for a leisurely and decidedly untaxing tour around the World Showcase, the park's collection of small scale model representations of some of the famous buildings, stores, towers and so forth from countries like France, Japan, China, Italy, Morocco, and others.

Truthfully, the tour wasn't that informative. We got maybe 30 seconds of information about each of the countries we stopped in and then we moved quickly on. I think the real point was to give us enough fodder to make us want to return later when we were on our feet.

We were instructed, by the way, not to carry anything in our hands while we rode the Segways. But what is a reporter to do? So I tried to surreptitiously carry my Nokia smartphone in my hand so I could shoot Qik video (see below) of the ride. I only got caught once.

Riding the Segways was one of the suggestions I got from readers when I asked last week what I should do at Disney World when I visited as part of Road Trip 2008, my journey around the South. And I have to say, it was a great idea. I love Segways, first of all, and secondly, how great is it to glide around effortlessly on a hot day when everyone else is working up a sweat just strolling from point A to point B.

After we returned to our starting point--no Epcot patrons were harmed in this experiment--I was met by a member of Disney World's public relations team who kindly escorted me to a van stashed conveniently nearby in staff parking, and we set off for Disney's Hollywood Studios for a whirlwind tour of the not new ride there, "Toy Story Mania."

The ride, which opened last month at Disney World and is set to open later this month at Disneyland, is a super fast-paced cacophony of an adventure based on the story line from Pixar's Toy Story films.

The idea is that you find yourself plopped down into a huge model of the little boy's room from the films and are tasked with battling a whole series of different nemeses.

So you hop into a small car, which races off into a tunnel--very Disney-esque, of course--and one by one, you have to shoot at these villains, who appear on a screen on the wall in front of you.

Being a modern ride, this attraction is full of little tricks. For example, what you see on the screen is in 3D, so you have to wear 3D glasses to see the targets properly. Also, you are firing at them with a gun mounted on your car, and you are shooting digital bullets at them which splat satisfyingly on the screen. Well, at least they seem to. They're digital, after all.

For me, the trick was both to enjoy the ride and to try to take pictures and shoot video. At first, I couldn't figure out why the pictures were coming out fuzzy, but then I realized it was the fact that the camera had no idea what to do with the 3D images.

Until I put the glasses in front of the lens, that is. Both for my camera, and then for the Nokia phone (see video below).

As you fire away, you accumulate points as you hit targets. As I understand it, the ride offers up a lot of "easter eggs," or hidden surprises. But I was too wrapped up in trying to document it to shoot much. I ended up with a rather pathetic score, especially when measured against the impressive total racked up by my escort.

We had taken a back entrance into the ride so that we didn't have to wait in the extremely long line, but after finishing we went back into the main area so that we could see some of the cool details the designers had added.

They included a large set of dominoes and a huge View-Master reel hanging from the ceiling, as well as a giant Tinker-Toy structure that all the cars have to drive through.

There were also little details that only the careful eye would catch, such as some child's books painted on the wall, the author of one of which was named Lasseter. For the Pixar fans among us, that's an obvious reference to Toy Story director and current Disney Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter.

While riding the 'Toy Story Mania' ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios, I figured out that if I put my 3D glasses in front of my camera, I could take pictures of the target screens without them coming out blurry.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Afterward, we got back in my escort's van and zipped back over to Epcot. I still wanted a chance to go on two more of the popular rides there: "Test Track" and "Soarin'." And I figured why wait in hour-plus lines for them if I could take advantage of the secret entrances my escort could lead me to.

Sure enough, we wandered straight to the front of the "Test Track" line. This is a pretty cool ride that puts guests in the front seat of a car that is then rushed through Disney scale representations of 10 different tests that General Motors cars go through before they can hit the road.

These included going uphill fast, braking without and then with antilock brakes, accelerating (up to 65 miles an hour) on a straight-away, going over some rough road and going slowly through both a very hot and a very cold room.

Fun stuff, actually, and another attraction you, my beloved readers, had suggested I try.

Unfortunately, though, we couldn't work out a way to expedite entry to "Soarin'," so I decided to try my luck at getting one of Disney World's FastPasses--which allow you to get a ticket guaranteeing quick entry much later in the day--for the ride.

Sure enough, I was one of the very last people to get one of the tickets, but my time wasn't for about six hours. So I went back to my hotel, did some work, and then finally returned, right on time.

Got a great idea for a TV show but don't want to deal with going through the traditional Hollywood studio system vetting and production process?

Or maybe you don't even want your show on TV at all, what with the Internet offering so many different distribution opportunities?

Then a Los Angeles start-up called 60Frames Entertainment may well be your ticket to the director's chair.

The company, founded with $3.5 million from investors United Talent Agency (UTA) and Spot Runner, is geared toward providing a wide variety of content creators with the financing and resources they need to produce and distribute original programming across the sites of Internet partners like YouTube, MySpace.com, Bebo, and soon, Joost.

To begin with, 60Frames is supporting two projects, Cockpit, a comedy which "explores what really happens inside the cockpit of a commercial airline." The series is by Big Fantastic, the team of Douglas Cheney, Chris Hampel, Chris McCaleb, and Ryan Wise, which produced Prom Queen for Michael Eisner's start-up, Vuguru.

The new series Cockpit, by the producers of the online show Prom Queen, is one of the first series that 60Frames will distribute to partners like YouTube, Bebo, and others.

(Credit: 60Frames)

"It's an incredible opportunity for creators to get their work out there," McCaleb said of 60Frames. "It's a whole new vision of what an entertainment company can be. It puts the power in the hands of the creators. It's an artist's dream."

That's because, McCaleb said, 60Frames is putting the creative power in the hands of the people creating the content. He said that while his team went through some production meetings with 60Frames, he didn't recall having to submit a budget.

Another early 60Frames project is Erik the Librarian Mysteries, which "follows a reclusive librarian who falls in love with a mysterious stranger." It is from Brent Forrester, a consulting producer for The Office.

Another future effort will be an as-yet unspecified project by well-known filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, otherwise known as the Coen Brothers.

60Frames is not talking much about its business model, though it does depend on advertising relationships with its distribution partners. And the company plans to share revenue from the projects with the artists, once they're profitable.

"The basic spirit of the agreement (with artists) is that we're going to spend money and resources getting (projects) to market," said Brent Weinstein, CEO of 60Frames. "And as soon as we're profitable, we become financial partners with our artists and collaborators."

To one Hollywood observer, however, 60Frames' model is a little suspect.

"The problem is monetizing it," said Mark Litvack, an intellectual-property attorney who has worked for Sony, Time Warner, and Disney. "(That's the) difficulty with any project such as this."

Litvack, who has not been briefed by 60Frames, said that while projects such as LonelyGirl15 have managed to be successful financially online, it is extremely rare. More common, he said, are Internet hits that breed large fan bases, but few dollars.

"One of the classic cases is (Eepy Bird), the Diet Coke and Mentos guys," Litvack said. "Those guys were a huge hit. Many, many people saw (their videos) but the people who made them didn't become rich off it."

However, the 60Frames model does afford artists some significant advantages, Litvack allowed.

"For those that think that the studios control all methods of distribution, they don't," he said. "The Internet provides a very low-cost way of distributing content to literally billions of people."

And McCaleb agreed that for him and the Cockpit team, working with 60Frames and having the opportunity to have their work showcased on sites like YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, and others, is extremely valuable.

"As a creator, having all those different distribution platforms, it's so key," McCaleb said. "Having your content be so ubiquitous, it's just awesome for us."

And that's what 60Frames is hoping to leverage. The company is not yet talking in detail about its financial arrangements with its strategic partners, but it does say that in arranging to have its artists' content distributed on sites like YouTube, 60Frames worked with the advertising divisions of each distributor.

To Weinstein, the opportunity such sites offer is massive and wide-spread distribution for content that could bring in money from a variety of different advertising methods. Among them are product placement, as well as placing ads before or after the content.

For his part, Litvack said he is optimistic about product placement deals, but suspicious of putting ads either before or after content.

"It tends to discourage people from watching," Litvack said. "If you have an option of watching something with an ad in it or not an ad in it," you're likely to choose the latter.