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Digital Tap Image Mostly Graphic

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By GEOFF FOX

gfox@tampatrib.com

Published: March 27, 2009

WESLEY CHAPEL - With a few clicks of his mouse, Mert Balta turned Earthquake in a complete 360, showing off the glaring side effects the cartoon superhero suffers when he eats too many calories.

Typically a rail-thin 11-year-old boy named Samuel Samuelson, Earthquake expands to sumo wrestler proportions when he eats junk food.

"In the action sequences, he's almost like a bowling ball," Balta said, his voice rising with excitement. "Plus, we can get him in a kind of wrecking ball mode. He kind of beats down the bad guys and rolls over them, and they get stuck on his backside - they get squished."

With his squeaky Southern accent and happy-go-lucky demeanor, Earthquake is one member of Zap Squad, a "secret club of superkids that protects the world from evil," say his creators at Digital Tap, a Wesley Chapel company that also creates Web sites, graphic designs and marketing materials, among other high-tech functions.

Digital Tap - and Zap Squad - is the brain child of Martin Grebing, a thirtysomething St. Louis native and Ringling College of Art and Design graduate who launched the business in 2008.

The company is housed along with American Consulting Engineers of Florida in a gleaming 45,000-square-foot building on Cypress Creek Boulevard at State Road 56 and Interstate 75. American Consulting, where Grebing worked before launching Digital Tap, is one of the start-up company's major clients.

"We basically do all their graphics needs, companywide," Grebing said. "We help with proposals, business cards and a lot of before-and-after animation, which is one of our biggest services. We also do their Web site and maintain it, which is a major undertaking. They have like 160 pages.

"Our Web side of things has really taken off recently. We're kind of a turnkey company for anything a company needs - anything to do with graphics."

With a staff of seven, Grebing runs an all-hands-on-deck operation. And he's not afraid to do the grunt work. When he isn't dreaming up adventures for Zap Squad, he can be found stuffing envelopes full of marketing materials or other items ordered through Digital Tap's Web site.

Besides Balta, a Turkey native who lines his work area with colorful stuffed animals, Grebing has assembled an accomplished, flexible team with a collective resume that glitters like the monocle favored by Baron Von Vaughn, the Zap Squad's archenemy.

Animator Heather Carpini, for example, has credits that include the 2008 movie "Horton Hears a Who!"

Senior digital artist Rick Mongaya, gifted enough to produce elaborate, detailed drawings of spiral staircases, spaceships and castles with seeming ease, also is versatile enough to create a digital rendering of a proposed bridge that could connect Buffalo, N.Y., to Fort Erie, Ontario.

Tyson Stockglausner, a 3-D graphics specialist, seems to thrive in the laid-back atmosphere. He has installed a small thatch roof over his cubicle, making it look like a miniature Tiki hut. On a recent weekday, he was busy creating Zap Squad sites on YouTube and MySpace.

"This doesn't even feel like work," he said with a grin.

For now, Grebing is content with the strictly word-of-mouth advertising Digital Tap has garnered and is happy to boost Zap Squad's visibility through Internet and grass-roots efforts that include giving away the cartoon's first 30-minute episode during children's nights at the nearby Texas Roadhouse restaurant.

"People seem to like it," Grebing said of the cartoon. "It's family-friendly but there is an edge to it. One of the characters is Bad Breath Lucas. That's Lucas Luigi; he's from Brooklyn. His superpower is his bad breath."

"I've been making cartoons and comics since I was a kid."

Balta has even taken copies to friends and family in Turkey, where, he said, the "general concept and global theme" seemed to resonate.

Grebing wouldn't mind a lucrative distribution offer, but he takes pride in producing and marketing the product himself. He says he can do anything in his suite off I-75 that a Hollywood studio can do - even voice-over work can be phoned in without compromising quality.

For now, the original episode, "Zap Squad and the Sands of Time," is available at www.zapsquad.com.

As he perused some of the show's marketing materials, Grebing stopped on a picture of Baron Von Vaughn's sidekick, Shockwave, an overweight boy from Detroit with a shirt that reads "I'm With Stupid." The accompanying arrow points to Shockwave's face.

"He thinks that's cool," Grebing said with a laugh. "He's a moron."

DIGITAL TAP

For information about Digital Tap's services, visit www.digitaltap.tv or call (813) 435-2552.

Reporter Geoff Fox can be reached at (813) 779-4613.

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