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Teen's Toon To Debut On TV

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By KLINT LOWRY

The Suncoast News

Published: January 29, 2009

PORT RICHEY - It won't quite put him in the same league as Walt Disney, Max Fleischer or Chuck Jones, but 15-year-old Wesley Hernandez is about to achieve something most people will only ever dream of.

About 3:40 p.m. today, a cartoon Wesley created will debut on national television. After being presented within the "Qubo on ION TV" programming block on ION Television, it will run several times every day for a week on the 24-hour Qubo Channel and once each the following weekend on NBC and the Spanish-language network Telemundo.

So how does a home-schooled 10th-grader from Port Richey get a cartoon on national television? Is he a prodigy, animation's answer to Mozart?

Actually, it was just a matter of seeing an opportunity and applying himself.

"I heard about it from watching Qubo," Wesley said.

Formed in 2006 through an alliance of leading distribution partners and content players in children's television, including Scholastic, ION Media Networks, NBC Universal, Corus Entertainment and Classic Media, Qubo produces children's entertainment that focuses on literacy, values and healthy lifestyles while encouraging children's imaginations.
Qubo programming blocks are broadcast on NBC Saturday mornings, ION Television Wednesday though Friday afternoons and Telemundo weekend mornings. There is also a 24-hour Qubo Channel and a Web site www.qubo .com.

A little more than a year ago, the Web site began offering a program through which children could create cartoons featuring The Zimmer Twins. The program, which originated in Canada, includes a number of clips featuring the animated siblings Edgar and Eva Zimmer and their cat. Users can create one-minute stories, piecing the clips together in any order, manipulating the background settings and adding other visual features and creating dialog.

Once completed, the finished cartoons can be posted online, where other visitors can post their critiques.

Neither Wesley nor 11-year-old brother Devon had thought much about being cartoon makers, but it sounded fun and challenging. So they both started playing with the program.

Between the two of them, the brothers have made 32 Zimmer Twins cartoons.

They weren't alone. In the first year after its inception, users have posted 44,000 Zimmer Twins cartoons. A few months ago, Qubo producers selected 12 of the best user-submitted cartoons to be re-mastered and converted into high-resolution videos with broadcast quality color, music and sound effects, producing fully animated mini movies that would each get a weeklong national showcase.

The Hernandez family first got word about four months ago that one of Wesley's entries titled "Between One and a 100" had been selected as one of the best of the best.

As Wesley recalled, the producers didn't explain what it was about this particular entry that set it apart from the cartoons he made before and after that one.

"A bunch of the movies I made, where I didn't have the idea, I just made them," Wesley said. "This particular one is one where I had the idea before I made it."

That could be what made the film work. In the story, the twins are bored and Eva tells Edgar to guess what number she's thinking of. His first guess is wrong, as is his second, and so on.

With each wrong guess, Eva wishes more and more she had never started the game. When Edgar does finally guess right, on the 98th try, he's proud as can be, while Eva vows never to play this game again.

As an added bonus to the thrill of having his project on television, the polished version will also include Wesley's photo and his voice introducing himself and his film.

But even as he and his family and friends anticipate the big moment, Wesley is keeping things in perspective. This could be a long-term hobby, but it hasn't put stars in his eyes. He said he doesn't see himself considering a career as a filmmaker.

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