The Internet is the best thing that has happened to independent animators. Just ask Patrick Boivin. The stop-motion animator has used YouTube to catapult his career into the stratosphere. Or you could talk to animator Adam Philips, who has used his personal site and Flash animation portal Newgrounds.com to gain international acclaim.

Both animators are part of a new movement. They're breaking away from the traditional model of studio-backed animation and they're using the Web to do it. Boivin garnered fame for his stop-motion action figure films YouTube Street Fighter and Iron Man vs. Bruce Lee. Then he was approached by Google to animate a stop-motion film for its new phone. Today, producers are beating down his door to offer him work. Philips dropped his job at Walt Disney Animation Studios to create Flash animations. His shorts, Bitey of Brackenwood, Littlefoot, and others won Flashforward, Webby, and The Greatest Story Never Told (TGSNT) awards. Now Philips is making his own full-length feature film.

"Now you don't have to go door to door with your work in a folder," says Philips. "You can just put it online and if it's good enough, work will come to you."

Boivin started with sketching cartoons in his school notebook. Then he and some friends launched a comedy troupe, Alliage, that performed in local bars in Montreal. Boivin grabbed a VHS camera and began filming the performances and started making full-fledged films, complete with special effects. The skits were so good that in 2002 Alliage landed a gig on the comedy TV show Phylactère Cola. From there, Boivin started directing television commercials. It was steady work, but not ideal.

Boivin wanted to create his own films. The plan: Launch a YouTube channel, get some attention, go independent. "On YouTube it's hard to get noticed, so I started doing the stop-motion animation clips to get attention," he says. Boivin got some action figures, set up a green screen studio on his kitchen table, and went to work. Untrained in animation, he based the movements on action movies. His first short films took months to complete. He animated the figures frame by frame, then composited scenes into the background. Using YouTube's annotation feature, he created an interactive fight sequence, YouTube Street Fighter.

It worked. Boivin's film got him 70,000 followers on YouTube and attracted the attention of Google, who commissioned him to create Ninja's Unboxing to promote its phone. In addition, his films have pulled in almost two million views. So what's next? "My real goal is to make live action feature films," he says. "But I will keep on doing short stuff for YouTube. Who knows, in 100 years, those little movies might be there for people to see."

Like Boivin, Philips has used the Internet to launch his independent career, but he's followed a different path. The Australian animator was a natural artist. "My mum reckons that I could hold a pencil before I could walk," he says. When he left grade 10, the last year of primary education in Australia, he had an internship with a local graphics design company and then did some freelance work. Disappointed with the way things were going, he stopped drawing and worked in farms, kitchens and factories until he was 20. "Then I broke my left arm in a factory accident," he says. "I had six months off work, full pay, to recover quietly on the beach. I slept all day and drew all night. It was one of the most amazing times of my life and it improved my drawing skills considerably."

In 1992, he heard that Disney was looking for animators. "Like every kid who loves to draw, I was drawing Disney characters," he says. "I sent in my drawings and, thankfully, they hired me." He started as a “tweener,” drawing the frames between key animation frames. He moved up through the ranks to animator, a hectic job that drained his energy. "The amount of work you do is staggering," he says. "At the end of the day, I barely had anything left."

Still, Philips found the energy to learn Flash animation in his free time. In early 2000, he launched his own website and started posting shorts. Within a few months, he was getting freelance job offers—up to three a week. Eventually he saw that he could break away from Disney. "It was a big decision for me, but I truly wanted to work on my own projects," he says.

Philips created Bitey, a beast that occupies the fictional forest planet of Brackenwood. Bitey's animated adventures earned him Flashforward, Webby, and TGSNT awards. More recently, he helped create the Flash game Dragon Age Journeys for Electronic Arts and made a series of Flash animations for Wizards of the Coast, producers of Dungeons & Dragons. He's currently planning a full-length animated feature about Bitey and hopes to begin the project soon.

Philips was a successful animator before he launched his site, but he was lost in a vast organization. The Web has allowed him to stand on his own and pursue his creative endeavors. "The Internet is the world's biggest free art gallery, with millions of people walking through the doors every day," he says. "If you can do something special, then your name will be remembered and doors will open up. It's an exciting time for animators."

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Dustin Driver is a freelance writer in the Bay Area.